FOLLOWING THE PATH OF A MEDIEVAL ARAB WANDERER

SANAA, Yemen - The mildly hypnotic effects of his daily khat chew had
barely kicked in before Tim Mackintosh-Smith made an odd admission for a
travel writer.

"I don't like traveling in itself," he confessed, shredding another
mouthful of the tender, slightly bitter khat leaves from a branch he was
holding. "I would much rather stay here and chew khat. But when I do
travel, I have been blessed with good luck."

The luck Mr. Mackintosh-Smith referred to is not the ordinary kind
associated with travel in these uneasy times. He was talking about his
chance encounters with the myriad saints, rogues and savants - mostly
living - who lend zest to his books.

"A third eye opens when I travel, and it sees a lot," he said during a day
spent eating lunch and chewing khat (pronounced cot), a stimulant whose
ingestion is the afternoon pastime of most men here in Yemen's capital, his
home for two decades. "Things cease to be mundane when you have this third
eye open."

In his latest effort, "Travels With a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes
of Ibn Battutah" (Welcome Rain Publishers), which appeared in the United
States last summer, he endeavors to follow the route of a famous
14th-century Arab traveler, Ibn Battutah. I. B., as he is referred to in
the book, set off from his hometown, Tangier (hence the title), on the
annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in roughly 1325 and returned some 29
years and 75,000 miles later.

He had wandered as far east as China, well into Russia and as far south as
Tanzania, officially marrying at least 10 women along the way - not to
mention entertaining himself with prodigious numbers of slave concubines -
and siring five children.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith, 41, proposed retracing Ibn Battutah's steps. Except
for the marriages, that is, because "travelers never fall in love because
love is connected with stasis," he said. He wanted to unearth what traces
of I. B.'s spiritual and physical world survive.

To his delight, he found men along the way who could quote whole passages
from Ibn Battutah's "Travels" and came upon certain scenes that might have
been lifted from it wholesale. The task proved somewhat too daunting for
one book, however, so this first episode covers Morocco, Egypt, Syria,
Oman, parts of the Crimea and Turkey. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith is writing a
second volume, restricted to India, and finds his editor welcoming even more.

"You end up in the middle of bloody nowhere and you think you could do this
forever," he said.

Walking into an afternoon khat chew at a friend's new house, Mr.
Mackintosh-Smith noted the incorrect grammar in an inscription above the
door. (His first book, "Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land," depicted his
early years learning Arabic and teaching English here.) Although Yemen has
recently earned a rather dim reputation as Osama bin Laden's ancestral
homeland and a possible refuge for fleeing Qaeda veterans, Mr.
Mackintosh-Smith finds his life here unaffected by events since Sept. 11.

His sweeping command of Arabic, which he began acquiring as an Oxford
University undergraduate, gives his meanderings far more texture than most
chronicles about the Middle East. He draws inspiration from the Arabic
literary tradition of springing verbal surprises - nawadir, or rare words -
on the reader.

"The odd one is an ornament, like a mole on a beautiful face," he said, as
if he were quoting an Arabic proverb, as he often does. "I think it's good
for the reader to have a puzzle every so often, though not too many," he said.

Describing a beached whale in Oman, for example, he writes in "Travels With
a Tangerine," "I tried to imagine this inert, axungious blob alive, flexing
and somersaulting through the deep ocean." His editor, unable to find the
adjective axungious in any dictionary, queried him. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith
was able to cite a 17th-century writer who used the word (it's from Latin)
to describe something resembling lard.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith also weaves in descriptions drawn from unusual Arab
writers, especially at times when his main inspiration, Ibn Battutah, fails
to provide flavor. When I. B. gives scant attention to what he did in
Cairo, for example, Mr. Mackintosh-Smith quotes other medieval travelers on
subjects, like hailing a donkey cab, that retain a ring of truth today.
This is from Ibn Sa'id, a poet as well as a wanderer:

The city is sheer hell, alas

For him that hires a taxi-ass.

I, driver, on your donkey sit,

Eyeless in Cairo from the grit.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith often translates Arabic poetry when not traveling, and
for that, too, he gives partial credit to his khat chews.

"It's brilliant for reading; you can plow through some really solid texts
with khat," he said, comparing himself to Albus Dumbledore, the good wizard
and headmaster in the Harry Potter series who stores all his memories in a
bowl. "Khat seems to have a similar sort of effect; it's great for making
connections. Rhythms just come to you when you are chewing."

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith swears the stimulant is not addictive. Although
illegal in the United States, where the Drug Enforcement Agency compares
the effects of heavy consumption to those of amphetamine abuse, khat is
legal in most of Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Mr. Mackintosh-Smith
said the real allure of the plant lay in the ritual: scouring the market
for the right leaves, washing them and gathering with friends in some
rooftop aerie overlooking old Sanaa to chew and sip water or soft drinks.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith, born in England to a father who played the viola and
a mother who worked as a nurse, first came to Yemen in 1982 to continue
studying Arabic after a banking job failed to materialize. "I always felt
that I would like to be here for a good long time, if not for good, and now
I do think it's for good," he said, blue eyes glinting under black hair
well gone to gray.

When not traveling to research his books - "Tangerine" took a year - he
often refurbishes old houses in Sanaa, towers whose tilting mud-brick
construction and white trim make them seem like gingerbread confections run
slightly amok.

His current project is a house for himself that is roughly five stories,
with one room on each floor. The previous tenants are responsible for some
of the holes that he is using for wiring. Just before moving out, the owner
had an apparition of a breed of snake that symbolizes buried treasure in
Yemeni lore, so she returned to bash holes in the wall with a pickax to
look for the lucre.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith's conversation, like his books, overflows with lore.
Driving past a street called Choppy Sea in this landlocked city, he
explained that the name probably stemmed from the blood that used to flow
from the butcher shops there.

Earlier the same afternoon, Mr. Mackintosh-Smith had shown up for lunch
wearing a long white robe and a double-breasted pinstripe blue blazer from
a local secondhand shop, a tattered head scarf thrown around his neck and
his feet in sandals.

He waded into the crowd on the main square, heading for a narrow storefront
where blackened stone pots teetered atop blazing open fires. The largely
outdoor restaurant served a bubbling dish called salta.

He quoted a Yemeni from 1,000 years ago describing the benefits of the
searingly hot dish, made of beef, wheat bread and fenugreek and scooped out
of the pot with delicious chunks of fresh flat bread.

"This is the best place in Sanaa for salta and therefore the best place in
the world," he said, perched on a rickety sidewalk picnic table of welded
aluminum. "All the wicked people who say this came from the Ottomans are a
load of rot."

It was another street meal that launched the "Tangerine" travels. Mr.
Mackintosh-Smith had bought a potato from a vendor when a neighbor, who, as
he put it, "takes gentle pleasure in publicly eroding my bookish
reputation," suggested that the word potato came to English via Arabic from
the name Ibn Battutah.

Mr. Mackintosh-Smith did not take long to discover that it didn't, but the
gleam of inspiration was born.