by Tahir Shah
'We believe that by talking we can change the patient's state,' he said.
'You ask them about their problems?'
'Certainly we do, and they tell us what they are thinking, how they feel. But we believe in reaching something deeper. We try to wake the sleeping mind.'
'How do you do that?'
'We use humour,' he said.
Ilias told me that the most successful way of treating the maladies he encountered was to engage the mind with something stimulating, something that could penetrate deep but not be filtered out.
'Humour cuts through the layers,' he said. 'It has a magical effect. When we have a patient who is fierce, we can change his mood instantly.'
Ilias peered at me, his opal eyes catching the last trace of twilight.
I asked if he had heard of Joha.
'Of course!' he cried. 'We tell Joha tales every day.'
'Do you have a favourite?'
Ilias paused to greet a friend, sipped his tea and said: 'It was the middle of winter and Joha had no money at all. He couldn't afford firewood and so he wrapped himself up in his old blanket and sat on his bed. He was very hungry, but didn't even have enough money to make his usual pot of soup. At least, he thought to himself, the wind is so strong that my greedy neighbours won't come bothering me for food like they usually do. He spent a long time thinking of the delicious soup he could not afford to prepare, tasting the flavours in his imagination. Just then, there was a knock at the door. It was the neighbour's youngest son. He had been sent to ask Joha for some of his soup. "Damn it," shouted Joha, "have my neighbours become so low that they now smell what I'm thinking?"'
As it is customary to tell seven Joha tales in succession, I told the next one.
'Joha was feeling generous. He went to the teahouse and invited everyone inside to come back to his home for a magnificent feast. As the throng of guests neared his house, he realized that his wife would beat him if he didn't warn her of the open invitation. He ran ahead to tell her. When she heard that fifty people were about to descend, she beat Joha's head. "There's no food in the house!" she shouted. "How dare you invite people without telling me first!" Gripped with embarrassment, Joha ran upstairs and hid himself. A few minutes later, the guests arrived and knocked at the door. His wife opened it. "Joha invited us," the guests said. "Well he's not at home," said Joha's wife. "But we saw him come in the front door," said the guests. Joha, who was watching from an upstairs window, shouted down: "You fools, I could have gone out of the back door, couldn't I?"'
A series of vehicles took me closer and closer to the end of the road at M'hamid. There was another white communal taxi, a truck laden with canned fish, a petrol tanker and, after that, a horse-drawn cart, on the back of which were squashed a dozen children on their way home from school. The palm groves of the Draa Valley must be seen to be believed. They extend mile after mile, tens of thousands of them, in an oasis of cypress green that runs the length of the river. But then, suddenly, at M'hamid they stop.
It is there that the desert begins.
As soon as the cart pulled into the town, I felt the change. The road I had followed in fits and starts from Casablanca came to an abrupt end. Beyond it was sand, a stark Wild West Tuareg town, where all the men wore blue robes and the women never stepped out. We had ventured here as children, drawn by my mother's romantic love of Beau Geste, and my father's dream to see where the road was swallowed up by dunes. I can remember the 'Blue Men' vividly, their indigo robes so drenched with sweat that their skin was dyed blue. We drew pictures of them and my mother bought up half the robes in the bazaar to take home and turn into quilts.
My father had chosen the desert to recount a story of a jinn married to a mortal. I have forgotten the twists and turns, but I recall what he said when the tale was at an end.
'These stories are technical documents. They are like maps, or kind of blueprints. What I do is show people how to use the maps, because they have forgotten. You may think it's a strange way to teach – with stories – but long ago this was the way people passed on wisdom. Everyone knew how to take the wisdom from the story. They could see through the layers, in the same way you see a fish frozen in a block of ice. But the world where we are living has lost this skill, a skill they certainly once had. They hear the stories and they like them, because the stories amuse them, make them feel warm. But they can't see past the first layer, into the ice.'
My father would sometimes pause a block of information halfway, as if to let us ruminate, to take in what he had said. He would pretend there was a reason to halt, but the reason was to give us time.
'The stories are like a lovely chessboard,' he said. 'We all know how to play chess and we can be drawn into a game so complicated that our faculties are drained. But imagine if the game was lost from a society for centuries and then the fine chessboard and its pieces were found. Everyone would cluster round to see them and praise them. They might never imagine that such a fine object ever had a purpose other than to entertain the eyes.
'The stories' inner value has been lost in the same way,' he said. 'At one time everyone knew how to play with them, how to decipher them. But now the rules have been forgotten. Tahir Jan,' he stressed, 'it is for us to show people again how the game is played.'
Dr Mehdi had instructed me to take the letter to Hotel Safari and to ask for his nephew Ibrahim. A sandstorm had just blustered through and the people of M'hamid were furled up expertly in their robes, as if the searing wind was an adversary they knew well. There were a few gaudy signs for second-rate tourist lodges, a row of knickknack shops touting Tuareg junk, and the forlorn-looking Hotel Safari.
I had heard of the place before. For it was there in the main salon that the French Foreign Legion used to come to repose, to mingle with the locals and to get blind drunk. Their bar stools were still in position, almost as though they had just stepped out for a pee. At the end of the bar was standing a young Tuareg with a bandana and the prerequisite robes.
'I'm looking for Ibrahim.'
'Hey, brother, you wanna see the desert?'
'You speak very good English.'
'I've been around.'
'Around the world?'
'Around Marrakech.'
'Oh. Seen Ibrahim?'
'You're lookin' at him.'
After such a long journey it felt like a grave moment, a messenger at last dispensing with his duty. I fished out the letter and presented it to Ibrahim. He lit a cigarette, held it in his teeth and opened the envelope.
'Dr Mehdi sent me,' I said. 'I've to bring some salt back to Casablanca to purify a wedding garden.'
Ibrahim scanned the lines of Arabic, wincing as the smoke swirled into his eyes.
'Got a car?' he said.
'No.'
'Then how you gonna get to the salt?'
'I will walk.'
Dr Mehdi's nephew threw his cigarette out of the window.
'The salt lake's fifty miles away.'
'Can I borrow a car?'
Ibrahim lit another cigarette.
'Fouad could help you,' he said.
When I was a university student in Kenya, one of my best friends was a shepherd from the northern Turkana Province. He was tall, wiry, and was called Nathaniel. His front teeth had been pulled out in childhood so that he could be force-fed if he ever got lockjaw. I was in my late teens. Nathaniel was about fifty-five.
One day I asked him why he had waited so long to get higher education.
'Bwana,' he said, smiling, 'in my village we are shepherds. So we never paid much attention to getting educated.'
'So why bother now?'
'Because of the future,' he said. 'We had a meeting of the village elders and decided that one of us must get educated as a way of protecting us all. So everyone gave a little money and they chose me.'
For twenty years I have carried Nathaniel's example in my mind. Long after we graduated, I happened to be in Kenya and had a few days to spare. So I crossed the equator and trave
lled to the blistering desert of Turkana, where Nathaniel lived. He was on a hillside with his sheep. It was so dry that the animals were forced to eat roots. Nathaniel hugged me. He was pleased to see me – and I him – and he didn't seem at all fazed that I had turned up. We stood on that hillside looking into each other's eyes, the scorching wind on our faces.
Real friends can sometimes dispense with talking. They can take comfort in silent companionship. Nathaniel said very little to me that day. He took me to his hut, served me some homemade millet beer and asked me to pray with him.
We prayed that the future would be as quiet as the past.
I had never thought I would ever meet another Nathaniel. But I did at the end of the road, at M'hamid. Ibrahim's half-brother Fouad was a subdued Tuareg with oversized hands and a lazy eye. He spoke in short bursts, like machine-gun fire, and had learned his English in far-off Casablanca thirty years before. Back then M'hamid was a one-horse town. As in Nathaniel's village, the entire community had pooled resources to educate a single man.
'There weren't any tourists until recently,' he said.
'So why are they here now?'
'German television showed the sand dunes.'
'Camel treks?'
'No. No one wants to trek with camels now.'
'So what do they want?'
'Sand boarding,' he said.
Fouad waved an arm at a string of scruffy tourist shops lining the last few feet of road.
'Adventure tours.'
'I can't stand tourism,' I said.
'Neither can I,' replied Fouad. 'But it's like a drug. The more cash people make, the more they want.'
I asked where I might find a car to cross the dunes.
'You can borrow mine,' said Fouad.
I took a room at Hotel Safari, but it was too hot to go inside. So I dragged the mattress up on to the roof and found a burly American already there. He had soaked a pair of trousers in cool water and wrapped them round his head. His arms were bare and tattooed with vivid scenes of a martial artist in training. Across the back of one hand was written LOVE and across the other, FATE.
I flung the mattress down and lay on my back. The stars were like a million grains of salt cast on a black canvas, the moon a sliver of lemon rind.
The American said his name was Fox.
'I'm from Iowa.'
'Hello,' I said.
'Ever been there?'
'Where?'
'Iowa.'
'No, I haven't.'
'Know anything 'bout it?'
I thought for a long time.
'Des Moines,' I said.
'That all?'
'Yup.'
Fox pulled a Moleskine notebook from his breast pocket. He twanged back the band and scribbled something in pencil.
'What are you writing?'
'A note to myself.' He paused, then read: 'Des Moines sucks.'
'I'm sure it's not that bad.'
'Oh, but it is,' said Fox.
'What are you doing here, at the end of the road?'
'I'm a surfer.'
'You're a long way from the waves.'
'Sand. I surf sand.'
'Wow,' I said.
'That's the Sahara desert,' said Fox, 'the greatest sandbox on earth.'
He asked if I surfed sand.
'No. I'm here doing a favour,' I said.
'Like what?'
'I've come to get some salt for a friend.'
'Salt?'
'Salt.'
'Can't you get it where you come from?'
'Yes, you can. But this salt is different.'
'How?'
'Er, it's special?'
'Why?'
'Because it's going to be used to chase away the jinns.'
The American put away his notebook.
'So you believe in the jinns?'
'Not really. Not properly.'
'So you're telling me you've come all the way to the Sahara to get something you could have got at home for someone else's superstition?'
'Er, um . . .'
'Well?' said Fox.
'Yes, I guess that's about it.'
SEVENTEEN
Joha's watchman found his master breaking into his own bedroom in the middle of the night.
'Master, what are you doing?'
'Hush, said Joha. 'My wife says I walk in the night. I'm trying to see if it's true.'
ARIANE AND TIMUR HAVE A SHELF FULL OF BOOKS IN THEIR bedroom. Before they sleep, one of them goes over, pulls down a favourite and begs me to read it. Timur likes Where the Wild Things Are. He stomps around gnashing his teeth, pretending he's a Wild Thing. Ariane likes the book, too, but she won't admit it. She once whispered to me that she thought the Wild Things were sweet but a little bit naughty and not very pretty at all. She prefers her Barbie Princess Book. Whichever book they choose, they ask me to read it again and again, and again. They never tire of the words and really only delight in a book when they know it by heart.
When I was a little older than Ariane, my father said that the more you read a story – the same story – the more it works on your mind. Like a beautiful flowerbud, he said, the story only opens up, and flowers, with time. Seeing my children enjoy the same tales time after time helped me to see that this repetition is a kind of natural setting inside us all. But as adults in our world, and with the strain of reading rather than oral repetition, we choose a new text rather than a known one.
Our competence in reading is something of which we are especially proud. We publish hundreds of miles of books each year and fill cavernous libraries with them. Mass education has, of course, led to the upsurge in writing. The more written text we have in a single room, the more valuable we regard it, and the more knowledgeable we think we are because so much writing is available to us. We cling to the belief that the more we read, the wiser we become.
My father would say that the Western world spends far too much time reading and far too little time understanding. It would infuriate him if someone asked when his next book was due out. He would say: 'I will write another book when you have understood the last thirty books I have published.' On this subject he observed a key difference between Oriental and Occidental minds: Eastern society values that which is tried and tested. Stories that have been in circulation for millennia are regarded as having real value, as being containers of inner wisdom. Whereas Western society constantly demands new material. Much of the time it's the same old stuff packaged in a fresh way. The result is wordage for the sake of wordage. For my father it was almost too much to take.
'This world we are living in, Tahir Jan,' he used to say in bewilderment, 'it's upside-down.'
Fouad said tourism was destroying the desert, but it was bringing in so much money that no one dared speak up. The sand boarding, the rally drivers and the litter left by campers were having a grim effect. The next morning we left Hotel Safari and walked through the empty streets to where the car was parked. I was laden down with blankets and supplies. Once, long ago when I broke down in the Namib desert, I learned the value of preparation.
All the tourist shops were shut up tight. The air was still cool, sounds muffled by a sprinkling of the ubiquitous sand.
As we strolled through the heart of M'hamid, Fouad talked in short staccato bursts.
'There is no respect,' he said.
'From whom?'
'From the Tuareg and from the tourists.'
'Why?'
He tilted his head in thought.
'If aliens came from outer space,' he said, 'and gave money to the Tuareg, they would be happy, but they would not respect them.'
'Who?'
'The aliens.'
'Ah.'
'And the aliens would probably have no respect for us,' he said.
'Do you blame the tourists, though?'
Again, Fouad tilted his head in contemplation.
'No, Monsieur,' he replied. 'I don't blame them.'
'Then who do you blame?'
Fouad smiled.
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'I blame the aliens,' he said.
The car was buried in a sand drift. It looked as if it had been stuck there for weeks.
'When did you last use it?'
'Two days ago.'
'So much sand in two days?'
'It's the wind,' said Fouad. He opened the back, grabbed a shovel and worked on the drift. 'I will tell you something,' he said after five minutes of shovelling.
'What?'
'Just because two people speak the same language, it doesn't mean they understand each other.'
'The tourists and the Tuareg?'
He nodded. 'If I learned the language of cat, I would not think like a cat.'
It was still rather early for philosophy.
Fouad let out a kind of grunting sound. 'A hundred years ago our worlds were separated,' he said.
'By distance?'
'Yes. By distance. Now they are closer.'
'Much closer – a short flight.'
Fouad touched my arm, his lazy eye leering towards me.
'But they are still very far apart,' he said. 'In their minds.'
Fouad's car was one of the reasons I moved to Morocco.
In Europe or the United States, it would have been condemned a generation before. There would be a hundred laws against it. Merely looking at it would get you arrested. But for the proud people of M'hamid, it was in fine roadworthy condition. Just about everything that could be torn out or smashed by human strength had been ravaged.
There were no wing mirrors or windows, dials or carpeting, and the only seat was the one the driver used. Fouad told me he had bought the vehicle cheap on account of the noise. He asked if I knew the way to the salt lake. I shook my head.
'I will drive you,' he said.
We set off.
I huddled in the cavity where the passenger seat had once been. Fouad, cloaked in his long blue robes, sat beside me, the wheel gripped tight in his hands. The engine noise was jarring beyond words, matched only by the smog we left in our trail.
There was something a little disconcerting about heading off into an ocean of sand, especially into the Sahara – the widest desert on earth, which stretches from the Nile Valley all the way to the Atlantic. Most of us are road people. We don't realize it, but we are wedded to the notion of having tarmac beneath the wheels. Driving on sand is rather like driving over snow. You aim the vehicle in the vague direction you want to go and hope that you don't get stuck.