by Salim Bachi
“I continued in this situation for some time until one day I came with him to a place in the island where there was an abundance of gourds, many of which were dry. I selected one that was large and dry, cut it at the neck and cleansed it. Then I went with it to a grapevine and filled it with the juice of the grapes. Then I plugged the gourd, placed it in the sun, and left it there several days until the juice turned into wine, from which I began to drink every day in order to find some relief from the exhausting burden of that obstinate devil, for I felt invigorated whenever I was intoxicated.
“One day he saw me drinking and signed to me with his hand, meaning to say, ‘What is this?’ I said to him, ‘This is an excellent drink that invigorates and delights.’ Then I ran with him and danced among the trees, clapping my hands and singing and enjoying myself, in the exhilaration of intoxication. When he saw me in that state, he motioned to me to give him the gourd, in order that he might drink from it. Being afraid of him, I gave it to him, and he drank all that was in it and threw it to the ground. Then he became enraptured and began to shake on my shoulders, and as he became extremely intoxicated and sank into torpor, all his limbs and muscles relaxed, and he began to sway back and forth on my shoulders. When I realized that he was drunk and that he was unconscious, I held his feet and loosened them from my neck, and stooping with him, I sat down and threw him to the ground, hardly believing that I had delivered myself from him. But, fearing that he might recover from his drunkenness and harm me, I took a huge stone from among the trees, came to him, struck him on the head as he lay asleep, mingling his flesh with his blood, and killed him. May God have no mercy on him!
“Then I walked in the island, feeling relieved, until I came back to the spot on the seashore where I had been before. I remained there for some time, eating of the fruits of the island and drinking of its water and waiting for a ship to pass by, until one day, as I sat thinking about what had happened to me and reflecting on my situation, saying to myself, ‘I wonder whether God will preserve me and I will return to my country and be reunited with my relatives and friends,’ a ship suddenly approached from the middle of the roaring, raging sea and continued until it set anchor at the island, and its passengers landed. I walked toward them, and when they saw me, they all quickly hurried to me and gathered around me, inquiring about my situation and the reason for my coming to that island. I told them about my situation and what had happened to me, and they were amazed and said, ‘The man who rode on your shoulders is called the Old Man of the Sea, and no one was ever beneath his limbs and escaped safely, except yourself. God be praised for your safety.’ Then they brought me some food, and I ate until I had enough, and they gave me some clothes, which I wore to make myself decent. Then they took me with them in the ship, and we journeyed many days and nights until fate drove us to a city of tall buildings, all of which overlooked the sea. This city is called the City of the Apes, and when night comes, the inhabitants come out of the gates overlooking the sea and, embarking in boats and ships, spend the night there, for fear that the apes may descend on them from the mountains.
“I landed, and while I was enjoying the sights of the city, the ship sailed, without my knowledge. I regretted having disembarked in that city, remembering my companions and what had happened to us with the apes the first and the second time, and I sat down, weeping and mourning. Then one of the inhabitants came to me and said, ‘Sir, you seem to be a stranger in this place.’ I replied, ‘Yes, I am a poor stranger. I was in a ship that anchored here, and I landed to see the sights of the city, and when I went back, I could not find the ship.’ He said, ‘Come with us and get into the boat, for if you spend the night here, the apes will destroy you.’ I said, ‘I hear and obey,’ and got up immediately and embarked with them in the boat, and they pushed it off from the shore until we were a mile away. We spent the night in the boat, and when it was morning, they returned to the city, landed, and each of them went to his business. Such has been their habit every night, and whoever remains behind in the city at night, the apes come and destroy him. During the day, the apes go outside the city and eat of the fruits in the orchards and sleep in the mountains until the evening, at which time they return to the city.
“The city is located in the farthest parts of the land of the blacks. One of the strangest things I experienced in the inhabitants’ treatment of me was as follows. One of those with whom I spent the night in the boat said to me, ‘Sir, you are a stranger here. Do you have any craft you can work at?’ I replied, ‘No, by God, my friend, I have no trade and no handicraft, for I was a merchant, a man of property and wealth, and I owned a ship laden with abundant goods, but it was wrecked in the sea, and everything in it sank. I escaped from drowning only by the grace of God, for He provided me with a plank of wood on which I floated and saved myself.’ When he heard my words, he got up and brought me a cotton bag and said, ‘Take this bag, fill it with pebbles from the shore, and go with a group of the inhabitants, whom I will help you join and to whom I will commend you, and do as they do, and perhaps you will gain what will help you return to your country.’
“Then he took me with him until we came outside the city, where I picked small pebbles until the bag was filled. Soon a group of men emerged from the city, and he put me in their charge and commended me to them, saying, ‘This man is a stranger. Take him with you and teach him how to pick, so that he may gain his living and God may reward you.’ They said, ‘We hear and obey,’ and they welcomed me and took me with them, and proceeded, each carrying a cotton bag like mine, filled with pebbles. We walked until we came to a spacious valley, full of trees so tall that no one could climb them. The valley was also full of apes, which, when they saw us, fled and climbed up into the trees. The men began to pelt the apes with the pebbles from the bags, and the apes began to pluck the fruits of those trees and to throw them at the men, and as I looked at the fruits the apes were throwing, I found that they were coconuts.
“When I saw what the men were doing, I chose a huge tree full of apes and, advancing to it, began to pelt them, while they plucked the nuts and threw them at me. I began to collect the nuts as the men did, and before my bag was empty of pebbles, I had collected plenty of nuts. When the men finished the work, they gathered together all the nuts, and each of them carried as many as he could, and we returned to the city, arriving before the end of the day. Then I went to my friend, who had helped me join the group, and gave him all the nuts I had gathered, thanking him for his kindness, but he said to me, ‘Take the nuts, sell them, and use the money.’ Then he gave me a key to a room in his house, saying, ‘Keep there whatever is left of the nuts, and go out every day with the men, as you did today, and of what you bring with you separate the bad and sell them, and use the money, but keep the best in that room, so that you may gather enough to help you with your voyage.’ I said to him, ‘May the Almighty God reward you,’ and did as he told me, going out daily to gather pebbles, join the men, and do as they did, while they commended me to each other and guided me to the trees bearing the most nuts. I continued in this manner for some time, during which I gathered a great store of excellent coconuts and sold a great many, making a good deal of money, with which I bought whatever I saw and liked. So I thrived and felt happy in that city.
“One day, as I was standing on the seashore, a ship arrived, cast anchor, and landed a group of merchants, who proceeded to sell and buy and exchange goods for coconuts and other commodities. I went to my friend and told him about the ship that had arrived and said that I would like to return to my country. He said, ‘It is for you to decide.’ So I thanked him for his kindness and bade him farewell. Then I went to the ship, met the captain, and, booking a passage, loaded my store of coconuts on the ship. We set out and continued to sail from sea to sea and from island to island, and at every island we landed, I sold and traded with coconuts until God compensated me with more than I had possessed before and lost.
“Among other places we visited, we came to an island abou
nding in cinnamon and pepper. Some people told us that they had seen on every cluster of peppers a large leaf that shades it and protects it from the rain, and when the rain stops, the leaf flips over and assumes its place at its side. From that island, I took with me a large quantity of pepper and cinnamon, in exchange for coconuts. Then we passed by the Island of the ‘Usrat, from which comes the Comorin aloewood, and by another island, which is a five-day journey in length and from which comes the Chinese aloewood, which is superior to the Comorin. But the inhabitants of this island are inferior to those of the first, both in their religion and in their way of life, for they are given to lewdness and wine-drinking and know no prayer nor the call to prayer. Then we came to the island of the pearl-fishers, where I gave the divers some coconuts and asked them to dive, and try my luck for me. They dived in the bay and brought up a great number of large and valuable pearls, saying, ‘O master, by God, you are very lucky,’ and I took everything they brought up with me to the ship.
“Then we sailed until we reached Basra, where I stayed for a few days, then headed for Baghdad. I came to my quarter, entered my house, and saluted my relatives and friends, and they congratulated me on my safety. Then I stored all the goods and gear I had brought with me, clothed the widows and the orphans, gave alms, and bestowed gifts on my relatives, friends, and all those dear to me. God had given me fourfold what I had lost, and because of my gains and the great profit I had made, I forgot what had happened to me and the toil I had suffered, and resumed my association with my friends and companions.”
XVI
IN PALMYRA, once the fever had broken and Robinson had taken off for other adventures, I wondered if I’d actually been involved in the bloody dreams that had been haunting me since I’d woken up. Hadn’t I known Queen Zenobia, the Palmyrene princess who had taken a stand against Rome? Hadn’t I been her husband, Odenathus, killed at Emesa on the order of his own wife?
The enigmatic city had risen from the desert. Its colonnade, bisected on both sides by the triumphal way, was far from straight, pivoting surprisingly a second time at the tetrapylon, which gave onto an immense sky and a vast stretch of sand. We were navigating between eras, held captive in a dream where ghosts conversed with each other.
I’d gone out in the morning to admire the dawn over the ruins; an icy wind was blowing between the stones that had not yet turned ochre, slipping under my clothes like a reptile’s tongue; then the blue night had dissolved, warmed by a blood-red light. Caravans of merchants from Palmyra suddenly materialized at the edge of the town: noble lords whom I mistook for the princes of Quraysh, expecting them to be like their distant ancestors who spoke to each other in Aramaic and dedicated the same religion to Bel, Allat and other forgotten idols. Did Mohammed have this past grandeur in mind when he decided to send his troops north? And hadn’t Khalid ibn al-Walid fulfilled that dream by conquering the city in the sand barely two years after the Prophet’s death?
I took refuge inside the temple of Bel. In the darkness, time blurred again and the site seemed to prefigure the Ka’aba. Inside, at the far end of a large courtyard where pilgrims would gather, stood the temple, which looked exactly the same as the one in Mecca. A bas-relief on a stone depicted a camel leading men around the building. Wasn’t that the Prophet’s camel?
In the Holy of Holies, there was a Byzantine fresco depicting Mary, Christ’s mother, near an image of Allat, a pagan goddess. Certain Muslim chronicles said that when Mohammed entered the Ka’aba, after triumphing over his enemies, he destroyed the idols but had kept an icon of Mary. Four centuries before the Prophet’s birth, the annual pilgrimage to Palmyra bore unsettling similarities to that to Mecca. The Arabs had a good memory for rituals.
This faith was also symbolized in Palmyra by those tall tombs erected in the middle of the desert, like sentries guarding an exemplary past. You only had to explore them in the sunshine to appreciate their sense of presence.
Inside the mausoleums, carved sarcophagi depicted dead families, showing the patriarch sitting in majesty and surrounded by his wife and children. These were even more impressive than the images painted over some of the burial compartments depicting the souls being carried by a bird towards a cerulean sky. They were happily letting the dove take them to a rapturous Empyrean, like those stylites in the grip of their visions.
I was glad that Thamara, a strong, dignified woman, came with me on this visit, otherwise I’d have been lost, ensnared by a dream, mixing up beliefs and gathering up all the men and women of the world in the same net. In this poetic order, Mohammed might well be an incarnation of Christ or a Nabataean priest with magic powers.
Palmyra was reborn from the desert like a phoenix, spreading its bright wings.
Zenobia became one with the Queen of Sheba in the same sacred dance. Again the processions circled a temple dedicated to a single God and his daughters, born from a verse inspired by the Devil.
We entered Bosra through the Gate of the Wind. The whole town was a field of ruins. The inhabitants lived in houses built from the stones of the ancient city. We were struck by the villagers’ poverty: the children were badly dressed and miserable. The walls were black, the Roman columns looked like a forest that had burnt down. The town had been covered in charcoal, and yet the place exuded a strange, deadly beauty.
I’d imagined a dazzling town filled with light, but the colours of this place had gradually disappeared, like a badly fixed photograph, and its outlines had blurred, leaving behind nothing but shadows. It had become a Garaguz shadow theatre, like the one we saw in a café in Damascus behind the Great Mosque, a distant reflection of the Ottoman presence. Exhausted by our long journey, during which the power of the things we’d seen was as blinding as the sun on sand, we felt as though we were turning into shadows in a distant town of the past, black as the night which, for all that, was filled with illustrious spectres: the monk Buhayra, Abu Talib and the young Mohammed, who’d been welcomed as the Messiah by those strange monks, one of whom had assumed the name of a small sea which Sinbad, my oriental double, might once have sailed.
I’d been struck by the black hue of the town. I’d imagined it to be red like Palmyra or perhaps ochre. It was dark and volcanic, the stone had burned in the sun and the blackness created disturbing depths.
I visited the huge theatre, which was still a marvel of barbaric magnificence. You could easily lose yourself in the corridors, like catacombs where the gladiators used to lie dying. I became one of those men dazed by the light and the loud shouts of the crowd. I was the martyr devoured by the savage lions of Syria, by the lynxes, their fur sodden with blood; and the panthers’ eyes held me spellbound, before engulfing me in darkness. I was a tableau vivant offered up for the enlightenment of the believer. I’d never see Vitalia again and my youth was lying there, dead on the stage of this amphitheatre. I know you’re expecting to be told about other adventures, other mysteries and other women. There aren’t any more. It’s over. After Bosra, I went to Beirut, but it’s too painful to tell you about that. That was where I experienced war and the death of my last, true love in a bombing raid by the Israeli army. Thamara died in my arms, broken and battered, and I returned to Carthago. End of story. It is this world I’m talking about, my noble lord, and none other. If you want to destroy it, please be my guest. I’m begging you, though, for the love of Allah, don’t come up with anything else in its place.
XVII
SINBAD HAD FINISHED relating his adventures and he was aware that his guest was tired, so he tiptoed out of the room to avoid waking the strange, unfriendly dog. He knew for a fact that the beast never slept. Those animals only feigned sleep to deceive their enemies. Sinbad could sense the wariness of the vile creature that had devoured the taxi driver.
In his mind’s eye, he again saw the wild animal pounce on its prey and consume the man as if there were no better food in the world. No doubt about it, the man had said some terrible things, but had he deserved such a harsh sentence and punishment? Who in Carthago
was innocent or guilty? Who in the world, in fact? No one. The answer made him feel like laughing. No one. Wasn’t that how the Sleeper had introduced himself?
The Sleeper stayed awake after Sinbad left. He’d slept for too long in his Cave for all those centuries. Sleep had deserted him. He waited in vain in the dark, but he lay there with his eyes open, not thinking or dreaming, listening to the breathing of his dog. Then he heard it no more. He never would again.
The door of his room opened. A shadow slipped in and came over to his bed.
“Why have you come back?” she asked him. “I thought you’d forgotten. Or, better still, that you were dead.”
The Sleeper didn’t know how to reply. He didn’t remember.
“You’re older than me! Older than everything here.”
Lalla Fatima made a sweeping gesture with her hand at the walls of the room, from floor to ceiling, as if she actually meant the whole world.