The Western Lands

by William S. Burroughs

  The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces.

  They sit down by a marble pool where humanoid newts live.

  "We had to bring them out of the more remote caverns because of cave-ins. Some died on the trip out through dry tunnels. We carried all the water we could but it was not always enough. Now only three remain. . . ."

  The newts are a shimmering mother-of-pearl color, with huge limpid gray eyes reflecting the last remote, crumbling cavern where they had taken refuge millennia ago, to escape the teeming predators of water, land and air. When they first came to this cavern, there was light from a fissure in the rock. But the fissure slowly closed. Blind for thousands of years, their eyes now serve as breathing mechanisms, the irises contracting and expanding to pass water through the lungs.

  They are so sad it hurts to see them, an age-old ache of hopeless blind alleys.

  "Life is very dangerous and few survive it. . . . I am but a humble messenger. Ancient Egypt is the only period in history when the gates to Immortality were open, the Gates of Anubis. But the gates were occupied and monopolized by unfortunate elements . . . rather low vampires.

  "It is arranged that you will meet the man who will break that monopoly: Hassan i Sabbah . . . HIS."

  9

  June 6, 1985. Friday. I am in Iran someplace, looking at a map to see if the secret place of Djunbara, where Hassan i Sabbah took refuge from his enemies, is on the map. It was somewhere north of the capital. It was not supposed to be on the map, but it was quite clearly marked.

  Now I see a cleft in a block of limestone, and through the cleft I can see an old man of great strength, a stone man, his arms and legs of smooth marble.

  The Stone Man gave HIS a base of power to shut out his enemies and regroup his shattered forces.

  Danger is a biologic necessity for men, like sleep and dreams. If you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are all in danger at all times, since our death exists: Mektoub, it is written, waiting to present the aspect of surprised recognition.

  Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger? Can one reach the Western Lands without physical death? These are the questions that Hassan i Sabbah asked.

  Don Juan says that every man carries his own death with him at all times. The impeccable warrior contacts and confronts his death at all times, and is immortal. So the training at Alamout was directed toward putting the student in contact with his death. Once contact has been made, the physical assassination is a foregone conclusion. His assassins did not even try to escape, though capture meant torture. By the act of assassination they had transcended the body and physical death. The operative has killed his death.

  To modern political operatives, this is romantic hogwash. You gonna throw away an agent you spent years training? Yes, because he was trained for one target, for one kill. The modern operative, then, is doing something very different from the messengers of HIS. Modern agents are protecting and expanding political aggregates. HIS was training individuals for space conditions, for existence without the physical body. This is the logical evolutionary step. The physical body is not designed for space conditions in present form. Too heavy, since it is encumbered with a skeleton to maintain upright position in a gravity field.

  Political structures are increasingly incompatible with space conditions. They are inexorably cutting our lifelines to space, by imposing a uniformity of environment that precludes evolutionary mutations.

  The punctuational theory of evolution is that mutations appear quite quickly when the equilibrium is punctuated. Fish transferred from one environment to a totally new and different context showed a number of biologic alterations in a few generations. But when more fish were brought in, uniformity was reestablished. Alterations occur in response to drastic alteration in equilibrium in small, isolated groups. All isolated groups are inexorably assimilated into an overall uniformity of environment.

  I am the cat who walks alone, and to me all supermarkets are alike. Yes, and the people in them, from Helsinki to San Diego, from Seoul to Sydney.

  What did Hassan i Sabbah find out in Egypt? He found out that the Western Lands exist, and how to find them. This was the Garden he showed his followers. And he found out how to act as Ka for his disciples.

  At death the Ren, the Sekem and the Khu desert the body, soon to be a sinking ship. The Ka is stuck with his boy. He is a front-line officer taking the same chances as his men, day after day, not just once like Jesus. If his boy dies in the Land of the Dead, he dies too. Forever. So your Ka is your only guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands, the most dangerous of all roads since you are facing Death itself. Don't believe the Christian God or Allah or any of that second-rate lot, in their sleazy heavens of pearls and gold with their houris, gods for slaves and servants, with lying promises . . . the Slave Gods.

  I saw HIS many times in parks and squares and teahouses. He met a number of people, but always for a purpose. He was assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a piece here and a piece there, like Iris reconstituting Osiris, who was cut in fourteen pieces and scattered all over Egypt. As I recall, she had a hard time finding his prick.

  Cairo and Alexandria were the cultural centers of the world. Scholars came from China, India and Europe to study there. The official religion was Islam, but there were Jews and Coptic Christians and a variety of Moslem sects.

  HIS had contacts among the academic elite. They did not know what he was planning. He was planning to take over the Western Lands by assassinating the demon guards, through their human representatives. Already he was drawing up lists.

  Demons must possess human hosts to operate. Beneficent beings can live in woods and water and clouds. When they do manifest themselves through human operatives, they do so at the fervent and heartfelt invitation of the host. Demons, like house dicks, need no invitation. Once in, one literally plays Hell getting them out. They have the same desperate need of a host as the addict has need of opium . . . nice, warm cover . . . keeps out the cold.

  Cut off a demon's host connection and you flush him out in the open. But demons keep themselves hid good. He may be a shopkeeper, a postal clerk . . . concierges he digs special, janitors and maintenance people. How do you know the ones who need killing, like the demon needs them? A competent operative . can smell them out. Or one can cast a wide net.

  TV program on a vaccine for hepatitis-B given to gay volunteers. Interview shots:

  "How many sexual contacts have you had in the last six months?"

  "Six months? [giggle] Well, I can't exactly remember, but—"

  There sit the fiends. . . .

  (Overheard in London while passing a Boy Scout troop: "That's where those fiends join in. They're fucking the Boy Scouts.")

  And they don't look very fiendish. The more familiar something becomes, the less it will incite fear and hostility. When "gay" becomes a household word and one mama leans over the fence and confides to another: "My son is gay," the closer we are to a whole parade of parents of gays carrying banners:

  MY SON IS GAY

  AND THAT'S OKAY.

  I'M PROUD OF MY GAY SON.

  But, and it's a big But, a certain percentage of individuals, varying with environment and context, act in the opposite direction: the more gays come out into the open, the more hysterical and frenzied and often violent they become. These are the demon-occupied hosts. By their brutes you shall know them.

  Sticker on his heap: KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST.

  Already HIS was drawing up lists. Many of the operative demons at that time were to be found am
ong the orthodox Moslems. Demons are always found among the orthodox, those who will never round on a demon and say: "What are you doing here? Get your ass out of mine, chop chop."

  However, we have not as yet made the first step to locate the Western Lands and to gain access. Do the Western Lands still exist? Conquerers usually attempt to destroy the old gods. Had the conquerors been Christian, this would have been unnecessary. The Egyptians take to Christianity like vultures to carrion. Both believe in the resurrection of the body. That's what mummies are all about.

  But Islam is another crock of shit altogether. However, the Western Lands cannot have disappeared without leaving a blueprint behind.

  We set out to find that blueprint. Myself and my two guards, HIS and his lover and bodyguard, who is, like Jesus Christ, a carpenter, and four other Ismailians, silent as shadows.

  We go first to Memphis, where a house awaits us at the end of a long, crooked street in the merchant quarter. There are high walls topped with spikes around the garden. Apparently two big snarling dogs come with the house.

  Hassan's face darkens at sight of them, and he says a few words to the guards in a dialect unknown to me. The guards unsheath short swords and dispatch the dogs with a few expert slashes. Barely have the dogs been buried, when a beautiful white cat appears.

  We visit the temples and statues . . . ignorant caretakers looking for baksheesh. The statues are awesome, some fifty feet high, vast arms in polished granite, with fists six feet across the knuckles, larger than life and so more immortal in stone.

  One thing does not change here: the river and the mud and the fellaheen, with mud in their souls and in their dull, blunted yellowish eyes. The fellaheen are the food of Osiris, the mud his excrement, the river a vast urinàl where all the Gods void their urine, and from this stinking mud rose the God Kings and the Gods who conferred the gift of Immortality on the chosen few, the priests and scribes, the viziers and princes so rewarded, to build the Western Lands as their slaves built the pyramids and tombs and temples.

  To harken is good. To obey is best of all.

  The Western Lands are fashioned from mud, from fellaheen death, from the energy released at the moment of death.

  I realize now that the Mugwumps of Naked Lunch were Death Collectors like the Feku, the Shit Collectors. The sign for "to come into being" is the dung beetle, Khepera. From death they built the Western Lands, and from pain, fear and sickness and excrement they built the Duad as a moat around the Western Lands, lest this exclusive country club be overrun by the peasantry.

  These thoughts took shape in hasheesh smoke and mint tea amid the flowers and shrubs of our garden. To maintain my cover as a traveling merchant, I made discreet purchases of rose essence and musk and the rare Pakistani berries that bring visions of exquisite, overripe corruption, of scented corpses and rotten flowers.

  The Feku, the Death Collectors, are specialized beyond any human semblance. Their faces have a smooth copper sheen like a beetle's wing. The mouth is a purple beak, the huge black eyes bright and shiny with insect innocence of human feeling. A long pink proboscis can protrude from the mouth to a distance of two feet, sucking in the energy released in the moment of death. Violent death is the most nutritive, and these creatures gather like vultures at battles and riots and executions.

  The first picture before the Gods . . . 1930s bankrobbers, roadmaps spread out on the kitchen table at the hideout farmhouse.

  "Sure to have blocks up here . . . and here . . . we could just hole up here."

  "Uh-uh . . . they don't rumble us getting out, they will close in house to house."

  "Makes sense . . . let's try it here. . . . let's go."

  As always he felt the cold hollow fear, his throat dry as he croaks, "Yeah, let's go. Up and at 'em." He wonders if they are as scared as he is. Sure they are, but you don't talk about it. Terrible form.

  What was he leading this life for? Where any second could be his last. . . that was why. If you face death all the time, for what time you have you are immortal. It was always like this, the sick hollow fear, when he feels as if he is fainting . . . then the rush of courage, the clean, sweet feeling of being born. He read that somewhere, about an Old West shootist and how he felt after a shootout. But the fear can go on and on until you can't stand it, it's going to break you, and that's when the fear breaks—you hope.

  What was Hassan i Sabbah like? Who was he?

  For the last forty years of his life, HIS occupied the mountain fortress of Alamout in what is now northern Iran. From Alamout the Old Man dispatched his assassins when he decided they were ready and their missions necessary. It is said that he could reach as far as Paris. As for the training that the apprentice assassins received, there is no precise information. What little historical data survives tends to be misleading, such as the notorious account given by Marco Polo of a heaven of houris promised to the martyr, where he would be wafted when his work was done. There were no women in Alamout.

  It is related that HIS had his own son beheaded for smuggling a bottle of wine into his quarters. No doubt this was not the real reason. Obviously the boy was plotting against the Old Man's life. It happens in the best Eastern families.

  Beyond that, there is little. Did he ever tell a joke, or smile, or drink? Some say that in his later years he became an alcoholic, and that the smuggled bottle of wine was intended for him, and poisoned. Rumors . . . but very little of the man emerges and what we do see is not sympathetic. One can't help thinking of these evil old mullahs with their closed, harsh faces. I mean that his personal life, his habits, his eccentricities are completely occluded. This may well have been deliberate on his part.

  Oh, yes, I knew him personally, but I never knew him at all. He was a man with many faces and many characters. Literally, he changed unrecognizably from one day to the next. At times his face was possessed by a dazzling radiance of pure spirit. At other times the harsh gray lineaments of fear and despair gave notice of defeat on some battleground of the spirit. Battles are fought to be won, and this is what happens when you lose. One thing I know: he was a front-line officer who never asked his men to do what he would not do himself. He was ready to fight alongside them, inch by bloody inch.

  For example, he moved in a number of Islamic circles. There were many deviant sects, like the sentimental Sufis, too sweet to be dangerous. And the.whole labyrinthine world of Arab learning and thought, at a time when they led the civilized world, introducing such essential factors as distillation for drunkenness, and the zero for business. What would Burroughs and IBM do without it? Of all these sects, the Ismailians were singled out for special persecution, since they commit the blackest heresy in Islamic books, assuming the prerogatives of the Creator—and in a very literal sense, for his aim was the creation of new beings.

  You can see the vein on the mullah's forehead stand out and pulse like an agitated worm at the thought. Leadership is passed along by direct contact with the Imam, in the course of which the subject becomes the Imam. This cannot be faked. Anyone who can see with the eye of the spirit can see it.

  The human condition is hopeless once you have submitted to it by being born . . . almost. There is one chance in a million, and that is still good biologic odds. Start from where you are looking down the almost barrel. Nine tenths of your activity is purposeless fidgeting around, lighting another cigarette . . . nine tenths deadwood weighing you down . . . house odds.

  Films are supposed to concentrate the few moments of meaningful action, but they still carry sixty percent of dead weight. Take a film like The Godfather . . . cut cut cut. Who wants to see him buy a peach, put on an overcoat, drink a glass of wine? So we have maybe ten minutes that really move and that is a very good film. So you can run through your life script in a week, often a lot less. Some walk-on extra blows his wad in a few seconds.

  Fix yourself on the whole planet moving at that speed. Every encounter is portentous as a comet. The air crackles with danger, fear, grief and ecstasy. Faster faster ro
und and round.

  The Russian delegate tore the Atlantic Proposal into pieces, and to the amazement of the United Nations, wiped his ass with it.

  "For this it is not even good," he grunted.

  Red alert expected at any second . . . into the Centers . . . issued equipment ... stand down . . . President on the hotline . . . Checking their guns and shit in and out faster faster get to the end of the checkout line and join the in-line over here . . . round and round faster shift partners round and round faster faster . . . NATO planes up and down . . . tech sergeant finger reaches for the button . . . President on the hotline . . . round and round hotter and hotter... finger pulls back, moves forward . . . round and round closer and closer . . . RED AL/ . . . President on the hotline . . . three Russian heads have fallen meanwhile . . . heads are rolling round and round . . . they are shooting it out in the Kremlin like old gunfighters. . . .

  The Old Man, Hassan i Sabbah, stands in an ozone reek of purpose, resplendent in his Imam persona. . . .

  "This future may not happen, if you all strike at the right time in the right places. So we have a human lifetime with a few moments of meaning and purpose scattered here and there . . . need not be superb pieces of deadly tradecraft, can just be the night sky over St. Louis, or anywhere. Can be a white cat on a red mud wall looking out over Marakesh . . . that male cat is Ra himself. It is fleeting: if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it; if you see something horrible, don't shrink from it, counsels the Tantric sage. However obtained, the glimpses are rare, so how do we live through the dreary years of dead-wood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there? By knowing that you are my agent, not the doorman, gardener, shopkeeper, carpenter, pharmacist, doctor you seem to be."