Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf Page B

turned round once in the opposite direction before resuming his journey. He rode so slowly that he was soon caught up by his train, which consisted of more than a hundred horses and mules carrying men, women and children and a large number of coffers and objects wrapped up in cloths. The next day it was said that he had disinterred the corpses of his ancestors and had taken them with him to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy.
    It was also claimed that he had not been able to take all his goods with him, and that he had caused an immense fortune to be hidden in the caves of Mount Cholair. How many people vowed to find it! Will anyone believe me when I say that all my life I have met men whose sole dream was this vanished gold? I have even met people who are known everywhere as
kannazin
, who have no other occupation than seeking treasure, particularly that of Boabdil; at Fez they are so numerous that they hold regular meetings, and when I was living in that city they even elected a representative to concern himself with the legal cases constantly brought against them by the owners of the buildings whose foundations they weakened in the course of their excavations. These
kannazin
are convinced that the riches abandoned in the past by princes have been put under a spell to prevent them being discovered; this explains their constant recourse to sorcerers whom they employ to unravel the spell. It is impossible to have a conversation with a
kannaz
without him swearing that he has already seen heaps of gold and silver in an underground passage, but could not lay his hands on them becausehe did not know the correct incantations or because he did not have the proper perfumes on him. And he will show you, without letting you leaf through it, a book which describes the places where treasure is to be found!
    For my part I do not know whether the treasure which the Nasrid rulers had amassed over the centuries is still buried in the land of Andalus, but I do not think so, since Boabdil went into exile with no hope of ever returning, and the Rumis had allowed him to take away all that he desired. He departed into oblivion, rich but miserable, and as he passed over the last ridge from which he could still see Granada, he stood motionless for a long time, with troubled mien and his spirit frozen in torpor; the Castilians called this place ‘The Moor’s last sigh’, because, it was said, the fallen sultan had shed tears there, of shame and remorse. ‘You weep like a woman for the kingdom which you did not defend like man,’ his mother Fatima would have said.
    â€˜In the eyes of this woman,’ my father would tell me later, ‘what had just taken place was not only the victory of Castile; it was also, and perhaps primarily, her rival’s revenge. Sultan’s daughter, sultan’s wife, sultan’s mother, Fatima was steeped in politicking and intrigue, far more than Boabdil, who would have been perfectly content with a life of pleasure without ambition or risk. It was she who had propelled her son to power, in order that he should dethrone her own husband Abu’l-Hasan, who was guilty of having deserted her for the beautiful Christian captive Soraya. It was Fatima who made Boabdil escape from the tower of Comares and organized in minute detail his rebellion against the old monarch. It was she who had ousted the concubine and excluded her young children from power for ever.
    â€˜But destiny is more changeable than the skin of a chameleon, as one of the poets of Denia used to say. Thus while Fatima was escaping from the abandoned city, Soraya promptly resumed her former name, Isabella de Solis, and had her two children Sa‘d and Nasr baptized, becoming Don Fernando and Don Juan, infantes of Granada. They were not the only members of the royal family to abandon the faith of their fathers to become grandees of Spain; Yahya al-Najjar, briefly the hero of the “war party”, had done