He would rehearse with his tongue and through the eyes of his memory those lines that once long before he had observed from a great distance. He listened to everything that was repeated of the pyramids, whether it originated with the experts, who had measured their elevations, counted their stones, and tested the angles of their corners, or with the local people, who retained memories, some real, some imagined—of the features of the hidden guardian who wards off all harm and of the talismans that protect the ancient buildings from divers dangers; stories told of creatures that live and die in vast illuminated worlds inside them, breeding, coming and going, and on occasion fighting wars of which the loud reports that sometimes emanated from the pyramids were merely the echo; the fate of any man or woman who indulged in foolishness inside the pyramids, in connection with which they recalled that a young man and woman had been discovered in the Great Pyramid turned entirely into charcoal, of whom it was said that as soon as they had commenced they had been consumed by fires that left nothing of them that could be recognized, and that the same had happened in earlier times; and talk of rivers that gushed out at a certain place inside the pyramids, their banks crowded with every strange and beautiful plant.
He would listen and they would look at him. They had become accustomed to him and, with the passing of the years, he had become a part of the memory of those who were born and lived out their lives in those parts, and who continued to show him the same respect and hope of blessing, tinged with fear, as had their grandfathers and fathers.
He never moved from his place and sought shelter with none but the trunks of the palms that he hewed and worked and manipulated with his own hands. When smitten by disease, he would crawl to an ancient tree, drive into it a thing that resembled a nail, and suckle on its trunk.
He was always looking at the sky, at the pyramids, at the roots arising from the earth, at divers undefined points. Perhaps these indicated the direction from which he had come, or he did so in order to divine the invisible tracks that influenced the motion and the shifting of the shadows, and the places from which these originated.
Days and nights came and went as he sat on that patch of earth. He observed the shifting of the light. He listened to the ceaseless beating of his heart as he rested his head on his arm in search of sleep, scanning the inner workings of his body in an attempt to comprehend what was happening to him. At a certain moment he realized that some change had overtaken the constant succession of beats going back to the distant past, that the surge of blood would sometimes now falter. He was no longer able to walk with the same rhythm, and he took a palm branch as a stick on which to lean so that he could walk around the pyramids directly after sunset. His appearance was a source of excitement for the children and of note for the adults, despite the long period that had elapsed and his acceptance as part of the passing scene.
The closer he drew to the pyramids, the more aware he became of the advance of time and of his life. What had passed was much, very much. What remained was little, very little. Nevertheless, he was as alert as ever, his sharpness of perception undiminished. He was waiting for that moment, recorded and described with precision, and which, despite it’s not yet having occurred, was all that he could now distinguish, when the shadow would deviate from its eternal course and connect with that patch of ground, at which point . . . .
No one knows how the people came to understand the truth of what happened to him, which they transmitted down the ages, but the oldest among them mention his terrible bellow, which shocked the children round about into silence, making them tremble, and left the beasts rooted to the spot.
The awaited moment had passed and he had not noticed.
How?
How, when waiting and alertness had been the very axis of his being?
The moment had come not by day, but at night.
All his expectations and calculations had been based on the assumption that the realization of that rare and impassioning moment would occur by day, for how can shadow be born of anything but light? What had happened was the opposite. The moon and the stars have the capacity to create shadows. It is true that there was no moon that night, but is it not at the edges of the desert that the stars are born, dispersing from there to the furthest points of the universe?
Thus it was that the shadow of the pointed summit, of the end that vanishes into the void, turned aside and slowly made its way toward the tenacious roots of that ancient tree. And thus it was that the moment passed unwitnessed by any but a bird from foreign lands, a solitary migrant, the precursor of flocks that alighted there exhausted at this time every year but which had yet to arrive.
When he recovered, he looked at the pyramid, at the ground, at the roots like rotting teeth, at the sky, at the west, at the east, at the north, at the south, at what was above, at what was below.
How had he understood?
No one knew.
How had he grasped it?
No man could say.
He had stayed in one place all his life and never deviated, and at the moment of realization, the hoped-for goal had been attained by a creature incapable of understanding its significance, that would grasp the reality of what it had witnessed only after all the other birds of the air had become extinct and it alone remained for all eternity, hovering, departing, arriving, taking off, alighting; though it was also true that anyone who caught a feather from its wing would also live for ever and what had become incarnate in it would be passed on to him. But . . . how to enquire of the way that led to that bird? Of whom? And in what language?
And how could the time that remained be long enough?
Hence his cry, his bellow, ferocious in the face of the pyramids, a cry the like of which the people had never heard. Not before, and not since.
A Seventh Text
Luminosity
He recoiled.
He stopped.
What he was seeing was something he had never heard of before, had come across no reference to in his readings. The more surprised he became, the more he felt an obscure ease that could no more be likened to any he had felt before than the moment itself could be compared to any earlier moment.
He was crossing from the east to the west, from below to above, climbing the hill close to the unseen point that lay in the midst of the empty space between the Great and the Middle pyramids.
A fluid winter’s morning, but . . . that flashing incandescent light had nothing to do with the time of day and was in no way connected to the brilliance of the sun. He could not tell its source exactly; it might be that it came from within himself, but it bore no resemblance to that sharp, radiant lightning flash that heralded the painful headaches that he had brought with him into this world and with whose agonies his oldest memories were linked. No, this was a different kind of luminosity, both erupting unawares and holding steady.
Did it issue from any particular direction?
If not, then . . . then how could it be that it was limited to that dividing space, neither extending beyond it nor lessening before its borders nor embracing what lay above those? Soft. Penetrating. Sweeping aside the emptiness itself.
It occurred to him that it might be old, stretch back to some ancient time, just like the breath of air that people had readied themselves to inhale upon the opening of the recently discovered Tomb of the Sun Boat, though this luminosity could not be identified with any place or space or temporality—there were no dimensions, no content, no words to be comprehended.
Unpent.
Ever flowing.
A sense of repose such as he had never known possessed him, along with a mysterious sense of arrival. As he continued to stare, a green appeared, a shade of a verdant fertility that he had never before seen, he the lover of colors and their shades, always so avid to capture their shifts and engrave them on his inconstant memory. This green was rich and ripe, a single shade that did not fade or weaken. He had never seen it in the leaves of the trees or the plants of the countries he had toured or in the roo
ts of the cacti in whose varieties and species he was an expert or in the flooded rice paddies that lay between the villages along the road to his place of birth.
It was a green that radiated light and on which nothing could cast a shade. It did not change at the edges of the pyramids; could this luminosity issue from within them?
The brilliance prevented him from continuing, from moving his feet. Indeed, his astonishment started to fade, his questions to cease, his vitality to be expunged. He found himself submissive in the face of the inpouring stillness, the upwelling repose.
He readied himself to continue, to move, for what was promised was limitless.
He moved.
His foot left itself, his arm separated itself from itself, his chest disengaged itself from itself. It was not within his power to remain thus suspended, half in bodily form, half in a form that he had never before known, occupying a space between the two constructs that followed the outline of the physical shape but was not it, that both affirmed it and denied it. Such was his condition.
He abandoned his attempt to depart. He was incapable of looking backwards to discover what was happening to him. He advanced propelled, borne along, floating in a being without borders, formed of the light and the green, rising to that point at the apex without ascending.
An Eighth Text
Silence
He went out onto the roof on this his first night in the little house near the desert, everything contained in which he had made with his own hands, the way he wanted it, even going so far to as supervise the simple building operations, leaving nothing to others. This was the moment for whose realization he had struggled ever since he had first started coming to this place so steeped in antiquity, whose plantations, palms, water channels, little bridges, and horizon were defined and shaped by three closely grouped pyramids, two almost complete, a third ruined and dilapidated yet still retaining its shape. He had heard the people of the area say that they had been built by three close brothers, and that voices were sometimes heard, indecipherable voices in a language used for discourse by things that to men appear mute and inanimate, and that sometimes one pyramid would take the place of another, and that each contained a hidden talisman to keep its secrets inviolate and prevent the occurrence of abomination. Had any forgotten the story of the youth and the girl who had entered and reached a point at which their desire had ignited and who, as they readied themselves for the act, were turned to charcoal, transformed into cinders? He who could solve the riddle of the inscription, however, would find open to him pathways known to no one before, untrod by any.
He contemplated the stars.
He smelled the scent of the ancient land, strained to hear the sounds of the night, to get to know them so that they would become familiar, so that he might live in harmony with them.
What was there?
He turned his gaze to the west. He stared, fixed, unwavering, incapable of speech or even of manifesting his astonishment.
A Ninth Text
A Dance
A certain point . . .
between east and west.
She appears to him who is patient, who strives, struggles, exhausts himself, and thus becomes empowered. Her appointed hour never changes, her appearance being simultaneous with the sudden swelling of that music that comes from no source, from a place that can be neither identified nor delimited.
None sees her but he to whom has been given the capacity to withstand yearning and grief, to suppress his sighs. And the greater the effort made, the greater the clarity of the vision, so that the empowered can make out her royal features, peer through the opening of her lips, seek shelter in the corners of her eyes, forever trained on the point at which the sun sets.
Melodies arise from her and surround her, melodies hard to analyze, neither of strings nor of wind nor of brass. As their rhythms complete their pattern, the four directions sway, the edges of the universe draw close to one another, the revolution of the upper firmament is ordered.
They cannot be analyzed. These are not Arab modes, nor African nor Persian, but comprehend all those. Above all, they are of a drawn-out, agonizing tenderness.
He who perseveres can see her agile, mighty figure ascending into the void, and observe that universal femininity of hers, a part of which the adoring, love-sick sculptor strove to capture in his statue for all to see.
The pure in heart can see the start of her dance, her ascent, when she casts wide her lines and draws them back, extends them and gathers them, at the moment when her body adjusts the melodies, accentuates the rhythms, and transmits them to the furthest ends of existence. Any walking his road, or dwelling in his home, may see her with his own eyes so long as he turns with his whole being toward her. At that moment when the sunset is drawing to a close, her turning begins, increasing in speed till it becomes difficult for the human gaze to grasp her. She is transformed into a point, into a setting star, too marvelous to ignore and too mysterious to comprehend.
A Tenth Text
They seem as ones by a promise bound to meet
Though long are the ages that pass between their trysts.
An Eleventh Text
The beginning is a point
and the ending is a point.
A Twelfth Text
At the apex,
extinction.
A Thirteenth Text
All things
are from
nothing.
A Fourteenth Text
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Modern Arabic Literature
from the American University in Cairo Press
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid Birds of Amber
No One Sleeps in Alexandria • The Other Place
Yahya Taher Abdullah The Mountain of Green Tea
Leila Abouzeid The Last Chapter
Hamdi Abu Golayyel Thieves in Retirement
Yusuf Abu Rayya Wedding Night
Ahmed Alaidy Being Abbas el Abd
Idris Ali Dongola: A Novel of Nubia
Ibrahim Aslan The Heron • Nile Sparrows
Alaa Al Aswany The Yacoubian Building
Fadhil al-Azzawi The Last of the Angels
Hala El Badry A Certain Woman • Muntaha
Salwa Bakr The Wiles of Men
Hoda Barakat Disciples of Passion • The Tiller of Waters
Mourid Barghouti I Saw Ramallah
Mohamed El-Bisatie Clamor of the Lake • Houses Behind the Trees
A Last Glass of Tea • Over the Bridge
Mansoura Ez Eldin Maryam’s Maze
Fathy Ghanem The Man Who Lost His Shadow
Randa Ghazy Dreaming of Palestine
Gamal al-Ghitani Zayni Barakat • Pyramid Texts
Tawfiq al-Hakim The Prison of Life
Yahya Hakki The Lamp of Umm Hashim
Bensalem Himmich The Polymath • The Theocrat
Taha Hussein The Days • A Man of Letters • The Sufferers
Sonallah Ibrahim Cairo: From Edge to Edge • The Committee • Zaat
Yusuf Idris City of Love and Ashes
Denys Johnson-Davies The AUC Press Book of Modern
Arabic Literature
Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World
Said al-Kafrawi The Hill of Gypsies
Sahar Khalifeh The Inheritance • The Image, the Icon,
and the Covenant
Edwar al-Kharrat Rama and the Dragon • Stones of Bobello
Betool Khedairi Absent
Mohammed Khudayyir Basrayatha: Portrait of a City
Ibrahim al-Koni Anubis
Naguib Mahfouz Adrift on the Nile • Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth
Arabian Nights and Days • Autumn Quail • The Beggar • The
Beginning and the End • The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace
of Desire, Sugar Street • Children of the Alley • The Day the Leader
Was Killed • The Dreams • Dreams of Departure • Echoes of an
Autobiography • The Harafish • The Journey of Ibn Fattouma
Karnak Café • Khufu’s Wisdom • Life’s Wisdom • Midaq Alley
Miramar • Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber
Respected Sir • Rhadopis of Nubia • The Search • The Seventh Heaven
Thebes at War • The Thief and the Dogs • The Time and the Place
Wedding Song • Voices from the Other World
Mohamed Makhzangi Memories of a Meltdown
Alia Mamdouh Naphtalene • The Loved Ones
Selim Matar The Woman of the Flask
Ibrahim al-Mazini Ten Again
Yousef al-Mohaimeed Wolves of the Crescent Moon
Ahlam Mosteghanemi Chaos of the Senses • Memory in the Flesh
Buthaina Al Nasiri Final Night
Haggag Hassan Oddoul Nights of Musk
Pyramid Texts Page 7