Arabian Sea coast, Oman
“We continued our journey from the roadstead of Hasik for four days, and came to the Hill of Lum’an, in the midst of the sea. On top of it is a hermitage built of stone, with a roofing of fish bones, and with a pool of collected rainwater outside it.”
The accepted opinion about this – nobody has ever identified the Hill of Lum’an - is that it is Hallaniya, one of the Kuria Muria islands. The only major drawback about this explanation is that Ibn B said he had taken 4 days to get there and it is only 20 miles from Hasik. But after speaking with Salem who explained that his parents had once undertaken a boat journey to Sur when the wind dropped and they did not move an inch for days, it became a possible explanation for the puzzle, although I still did not like it – when Ibn B got stuck in the doldrums in the Sea of China he mentioned it, so if it had taken him 4 days to travel to an island 20 miles away, why had he not explained why?
In any event Ibn B’s words proved to be an insurmountable problem for me as I could not get to Hallaniya. I could have rented a basic dhow from Mirbat, and I went to its little harbor to inspect the possibilities. I was not encouraged, the idea of being the only woman on such a boat did not appeal to me for various reasons. The trip might last for 12 hours or if the weather turned nasty for any number of days. I abandoned the idea of even beginning negotiations on the price and looked for another way.
The only other way was by a small fishing boat from Hasik or Ash-shwaymiyah or by military plane from Salalah once a week. The latter option was not on the cards and I was quoted 150-200 OR ($600) for a boat trip of less than an hour to get to an island where there is nowhere to stay to see something that is no longer there……. very few people live on the island and boats do not go regularly.
Typical local fishing boats moored at Hasik
I could have waited until a boat was scheduled (which would have cut the otherwise exorbitant price considerably) but the next problem was that while waiting for that there was nowhere to stay in Hasik. Had a fisherman agreed to take me on the spot, there was no hotel or guesthouse on Hallaniya anyway and in the one place that was made available on occasion, permission had to be requested in advance. I may have been weary at this point – I had been moving every two or three days for months - but somehow I could not muster the energy to do what had to be done if I really wanted to go. I think I was also resistant because I was still not 100% convinced that Hallaniya was in fact the Hill of Lu’man.
Further discussion with the afore-mentioned Salem, who had visited the island, informed me that not only was there no hermitage, but the population was quite different from the people of Ibn B’s day. The people living there now were from the mainland so there was again a break in the collective memory of local knowledge and without it, nobody would be able to tell me about Ibn B’s long-gone hermitage and the strange old hermit with the beautifully modulated voice who had so intimidated him. I decided not to go at this point. If I wanted to I was going to have to find another way.
“We resumed our voyage and after two days reached the Island of Birds, which is uninhabited. We cast anchor and went ashore on it and found it full of birds like blackbirds, except those were bigger. The sailors brought some eggs of those birds, cooked and ate them, and also caught and cooked some of the birds themselves without slitting their throats, and ate them.”
This place has not been irrefutably identified either – the current translation has it as the tiny island of Hamar an-Nafur which is essentially an uninhabited stack of sedimentary rock in the southern Gulf of Masirah. Even its name is controversial with some maps showing it as Hamar an-Nafur and others as Hamar an-Nafun. Since it lies directly opposite the town of Nafun it would seem that would logically be its correct name. But I was informed that ‘nafur’ in the dialect of this part of the peninsula means a small island or islet composed of a hill, thus its name means ‘red hill{in the sea}’. I began to wonder if this could be Ibn B’s ‘Hill of Lum’an. The time frame worked – it would take 4 days to travel there from Hasik. What seemed unworkable about this theory however was Ibn B’s description of the hermitage ‘at the top’. It looked to be quite impossible to climb to the top without technical equipment. 
Hamar an-Nafur from the shore near Nafun.
Just to confuse matters further, in an earlier translation of the ‘Travels of Ibn Battuta’ the scholars determined the island of birds to be the island of Hasikiyah – also one of the Kuria Muria islands. This because it is the nesting places of thousands of black Socotran cormorants – Ibn B’s ‘blackbirds’ and it was known that sailors used to collect and eat their eggs. But of the five islands making up the Kuria Muria, Hasikiyah is the closest to the mainland at Hasik – entirely in the wrong direction for someone going to ‘Oman’ who has already bypassed it en route to Hallaniya, so I like this proposal even less. Hamar an-Nafur is also populated by huge numbers of the same cormorants although it is thought they do not nest there and therefore there would be no eggs, so again discrepancies abound. Nothing was made any clearer when I arrived on Masirah to find another island called the Island of Birds where “the local people go to collect eggs”, according to Rashid, my new guide.
Socotran cormorants on Hamar an-Nafur
“We came next to the island of Masira to which the master of the ship that we were sailing on belonged. It is a large island, whose inhabitants have nothing to eat but fish. We did not land on it, because of the distance of the anchorage from the shore; besides I had taken a dislike to these people when I saw them eating the birds without proper slaughtering.”
I took the ferry to Masirah from Shenah. This can be a bit of an adventure in itself as it only runs at high tide when there are cars that want to cross. 
Locals waiting for the ferry at Shenah.
It took 2 hours of waiting and 2 hours to cross - on arrival we immediately went for a dinner of cuttlefish masala, cuttlefish also being an aphrodisiac if Rashid is to be believed……..I am beginning to wonder if there is a food native to these shores that is not an aphrodisiac – I clearly have to have a chat with some Omani women.
As an aside, almost all restaurants in Oman are run by Indians. Omanis do not work in restaurants, nor do most, if not all, other Gulf nationals – it is simply not done. In contrast to other Gulf countries where taxi drivers are almost always foreigners however, all taxi drivers in Oman are Omani.
The following day we set off to see we did not know what since Ibn Battuta, in high dudgeon, had not alighted on Masirah’s shores. I had read about some old gravestones and I thought we could make a quick tour of the island before setting off back to the mainland. 
Graves estimated to be 300 years old with engraved headstones - something that is no longer found on the island.
We were zooming along the south-west side of the island near Sur Masirah when Rashid pointed out an island saying; “That is the Island of Birds, in the summer months the locals come here and collect bird eggs to eat, the people….“
"STOP!” I commanded, “THS is called the Island of Birds – in which months do they collect eggs?”
He thought about it a moment, “June, July, August”, was his pronouncement. Ibn Battuta was here in July 1329 – could THIS be the island of birds?
Off we went to have a look in a small fishing boat belonging to the amiable Sultan, who had otherwise been minding his own business on the seashore tinkering away with a new engine for his boat. The island is flat and on the east side the water is very shallow for several hundred meters and required wading ashore. Alas, I am not convinced this was Ibn B’s island of birds either. The island is uninhabited certainly and there were thousands of birds but they were not all black, being sooty gulls, shearlings and terns for the most part. If it were not for the fact that cormorant’s eggs are still considered a delicacy, I might be tempted to wonder if Ibn Battuta’s ‘blackbirds’ are even cormorants, since his description of them as being ‘like blackirds except bigger’ is curiously very inexact for a normally much keener observer. 
The island of birds?
While I wish I could say I had indisputably unveiled the mystery of the islands Ibn B describes, I am in fact more confused than before. However I have to remind myself from time to time as I wonder about his occasional lack of information that he was dictating his story from memory a quarter century after he had visited, as all his belongings, including his papers, were lost in a shipwreck. It is amazing that his story ever surfaced at all.
