* * *
Although, as I have said, Jemberié had an extremely low opinion of Mohammedans, every now and again he came across an Arab of whom he thoroughly approved, and on these occasions he gave me no peace until he was allowed to present the person in question to me – ‘he great man; he heart like milk; he have everything in his head’. Shortly after our arrival in Misurata he met Hajj Ahmed es-Sed and fell a victim to the charm of that Fatimid of ancient race.
Hajj Ahmed es-Sed was a person of importance: not only did he possess houses, land and livestock, but he had also made the pilgrimage to Mecca (as indicated by the title ‘Hajj’). Moreover, he was called ‘Sed’ which means ‘Lion’. He was tall, with a long beard reaching to his chest.
But it was not on account of his imposing appearance, riches or titles – and still less on account of his religion – that Jemberié admired Hajj Ahmed. He was left gaping and amazed at the generosity of this Moslem towards the crowd of poor people which gathered every Friday in front of his door, and was touched by the simplicity with which the noble pilgrim placed himself on the same level as the humble people to whom he gave alms. Although his own innate thrift was outraged by so much liberality, Jemberié was nevertheless shaken by such regal munificence bestowed in the name of God.
Above all, however, Jemberié was moved and fascinated by a great misfortune that had fallen this unhappy man. It seemed that for some time Hajj Ahmed had suffered from atrocious stomach pains. Naturally, a person of his rank could not be afflicted with the ordinary vulgar complaints to which common men are heirs: extraordinary people must have extraordinary diseases. In fact Hajj Ahmed, having had occasion to go to Sirte, had spent a night on the Wadi Soffejin and while he was sleeping a serpent had entered his mouth and curled itself up at the bottom of his stomach. And there it had remained. From that night he had been tormented with disturbances which could obviously be explained only by the presence of this unwelcome guest. Moreover, if any doubt had remained about the matter, it had been dispelled once and for all by his deceased father who, in a dream, told him that not only was there a male serpent in his stomach, but also that it was a particularly malignant and dangerous reptile.
Unfortunately, a native healer had also confirmed point by point this message from beyond the tomb, and had added that unless Hajj Ahmed could somehow succeed in getting rid of the serpent, the latter – which was none other than an evil spirit from the infernal regions – would certainly kill him within a few months.
In the meantime, Hajj Ahmed suffered the tortures of the damned at the hands of quack surgeons, blood letters, composers of amulets and matrons who knew mysterious remedies. He had tried one cure after another, visited all the marabouts and experimented with the whole gamut of peculiar medicaments which compose the Arab pharmacopœia.
From the moment when he first acquainted me with this startling history, Jemberié never ceased talking about it and begging me to give to his noble protégé the medicine ‘who make serpents run’. He was convinced that, just as an extract of male fern frees the intestine from tapeworm, so there must be a medicine capable of ridding the stomach of serpents which have chosen to take up their abode there. At the same time, he pestered the pious Mussulman to try my cures, and the unfortunate man, desperate after so many unsuccessful experiments, finally acquiesced and decided to consult the Christian doctor.
From that moment my life became an absolute hell.
For three months I was at the beck and call of Hajj Ahmed es-Sed’s serpent. He came to the dispensary in the morning and in the evening. If I would not see him, he waited for me in the street and followed me home. Sometimes he got there before me, and when I arrived I would find him installed in the salon with a cup of coffee which Jemberié had hastened to offer him.
The truth of the matter was that Hajj Ahmed was in the period of the male menopause: he was suffering from disorders of the circulation, glandular disturbances and nervous illusions which made him feel that his stomach was swollen like a water-skin and that he had a suffocating stoppage in his gullet.
‘But I have not told you all,’ he confided, ‘you should know also that the serpent will not allow me to touch a woman; perhaps he wants them for himself. When I lie with a woman the accursed thing breaks my back, cuts my nerves, and I am as limp as a eunuch …’
A very painful situation for anyone bearing the name of ‘Lion’.
For two whole months I tried by every means to convince him that there was no serpent in his stomach and that he must follow some serious treatment. He let me speak, listened patiently without taking the least notice of what I said, and then resumed his discourse about the serpent, the accursed serpent which was ‘devouring his life’.
I found it quite easy to demolish the arguments of the Arab blood letters, but I was powerless to dispel the impression made by the dream in which his dead father had pointed to the pit of his stomach, whispering the fatal words: ‘There, there lies the serpent; there is your assassin.’
After months of this persecution, I came to the conclusion that either Hajj Ahmed must succumb or recover, or I would inevitably be placed in a padded cell. It was then that I decided to cross the narrow line that separates the physician from the charlatan.
One evening, Hajj Ahmed was waiting for me at the corner of the piazza as I left the dispensary – waiting for me with his hand on his stomach and the expression of one condemned to death. As soon as he saw me he cried, ‘O tebīb, will you not liberate me from this serpent which is killing me? Do you not believe the words of my dead father?’
I took him home, and as we drank our coffee I talked to him.
A father’s words, I said, are sacred, but very often words heard in a dream are imperfectly remembered and it is often impossible to discern their exact significance. God, however, knows all and I might have been mistaken in my incredulity. How could we find out the truth? Hajj Ahmed could, of course, go to Tripoli where the radiologists would be able to confirm or deny the presence of the serpent. But if this evil spirit were cunning enough to assume the form of a reptile, it would certainly be easy for him, would it not, to make himself invisible to the rays? Hajj Ahmed gravely approved my reasoning and assured me that this demon, if not Eblis, the Prince of Evil himself, must certainly be one of his ablest lieutenants.
There was only one way to find out whether the serpent was there or not: to open the stomach.
‘O Hajj Ahmed, if there is no serpent, I will close the stomach again and will say to you: my brother, I was right. If, on the other hand, I find the serpent, I will drag him out and you shall crush his head so that he shall never again trouble the sons of Adam.’
Hajj Ahmed became so excited that he upset his cup of coffee. ‘You can truly free me from the accursed thing, O tebīb, and give me back my life?’ I left him in transports of expectation.
With a great deal of cautioning I confided my plan to Mohamed ed-Dernàwi, the dispensary nurse who, flattered by my confidence in him and pleased to play a part in the conspiracy, swore to carry the secret to his grave. It could all be done in the evening, he said, when that gossip Aissa and the porter had left; the dispensary would be empty and the city preparing for sleep.
Mohamed ed-Dernàwi had worked for three years in the operating theatre of the Tripoli hospital and had administered chloroform when Testori was operating; the narcosis would only last a few minutes and there was no risk. Mohamed would also provide the absolutely indispensable element for the success of our undertaking: a serpent. He professed to know where serpents were to be found, and in his excitement he promised me serpents of such a size that I was obliged to curb his enthusiasm and to remind him that a human stomach could not contain a python.
Hajj Ahmed arrived punctually, late in the evening, with the negroes who were to carry him home after the operation. His servants remained in the courtyard. With his face towards the Qibla he recited the evening prayer and then, naked, mounted the operating table. Putting on my rubber gloves, I
covered his chest and stomach with three sterilised cloths, leaving uncovered the epigastrum which I duly disinfected with alcohol and tincture of iodine. Mohamed fixed the chloroform mask on his face. The pious man was praying; his voice became muffled under the mask and very soon the words faded away and he was breathing deeply and regularly.
The moment had arrived.
I took up the lancet and cut the skin along the median line from the sternum to two inches above the navel: this seemed to me sufficient for the extraction of even a young crocodile. I stopped the bleeding and with fifteen stitches sewed up the wound. Mohamed executed a most artistic bandage.
Hajj Ahmed was still sleeping. The negroes carried him away on a stretcher. I watched them go, followed by Mohamed ed-Dernàwi who carried under his arm a cardboard box, carefully closed and tied with string, containing an unfortunate and furiously struggling serpent.
On the following day I went to see Hajj Ahmed at his house. I found him extremely well. He was, of course, resigned to remaining in bed for a fortnight, since it would be unwise to take risks after such a serious operation. But he was radiant and sought with great magnanimity to comfort me.
‘We may all make mistakes, tebīb – only God is all-wise. You see, there was a serpent; my father did not lie and I did not misunderstand his words.’
Deeply moved, he embraced me: he did not wish me to take my mistake to heart; it saddened him, he said, to see me confused and mortified.
‘But you have saved me, O wise one!’ He embraced me again, patting me on the back to encourage me. ‘It was you who had the idea of opening my stomach to liberate me from the accursed thing! I had tried all the remedies, all the exorcisms and spells, but the healers shrugged their shoulders; only you were able to cure me. Praise be to God, Who has granted you knowledge and wisdom.’
It had not been possible to keep Jemberié in the dark and I had let him into the secret. At first he did not understand. What need was there, he had asked, to catch another serpent? Wasn’t the one in Hajj Ahmed’s stomach enough? And if there was no serpent in his stomach, why did I want to put one there? When I had explained to him that the serpent was only an illusion of the patient and that in order to cure him it was necessary to remove the illusion, he was first astounded and then advised me to have nothing to do with it: Hajj Ahmed, he said, was certainly too intelligent, too highly educated and too clever to be taken in by such a vulgar trick.
After the miraculous operation, Jemberié visited the convalescent with me and was dumbfounded when he heard the description of the operation based on the fantastic picture painted by the incorrigible Mohamed, and saw the great man weeping on my neck as he eulogised my prodigious performance. In a moment all Jemberié’s admiration for the noble gentleman of Misurata evaporated and he banished him forthwith to the amorphous crowd of Mohammedans whom he despised. After the third visit, as we were leaving the house of the patient who had now almost completely recovered, Jemberié said, ‘He just like all Arabs: only he plenty more ass.’
* * *
For a long time I had been contemplating an excursion to Sliten to visit the sanctuary of Sidi Abdesselām, and I had promised Aissa ben Jahia, my native assistant, that he should accompany me. When at last I was able to make the journey, Mohamed ed-Dernàwi and Mahmud Ferjiani were so anxious to come with us that in the end I consented to take them as well. Jemberié, who did not approve of my pilgrimage to the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, stayed at home very shocked and in a bad temper.
In those days no one had thought of the motor road with which Balbo later linked Tripoli to Cyrenaica. There was only a narrow, dusty track between Misurata and Sliten; Giuseppe Volpi had not yet established his imposing agricultural undertaking along it, and the association for the colonisation of Libya, which was later to build the agricultural village of Garibaldi and the Moslem settlement of en-Namia, was not yet in being.
In our dilapidated truck we crossed the great oasis of Zawiet el Najoub and the smaller oasis of Bu Rêya and staggered down the slope, past the imperial ruins of Ras Ma’agol and the Roman remains at Shifé. The track then became level and wound along the coast. Soon after we had passed Suq et-Tlata, the first houses of Sliten came in sight and we entered the city through the Misurata Gate. We stopped in the Viale del Re, close to the zāwiya of Sidi Abdesselām. This was our goal and we entered.
The building contains two mosques – the tomb of Sidi Abdesselām and the cemetery of the saint’s descendants. Aissa ben Jahia and Mahmud Ferjiani, overawed by the air of sanctity which emanates from the old stones, moved about like somnabulists with their hands on their breasts, and even Mohamed ed-Dernàwi, in spite of his pretersions to sophistication, spoke in a whisper and regarded the votive ornaments on the walls of the saint’s tomb with a certain awe.
It is here that flower-bedecked sheep are sacrificed during the prescribed feasts in the pilgrimage period of Milud, the birthday of the Prophet. Parents who have asked Sidi Abdesselām for children and whose prayer has been granted come here to offer a slaughtered lamb in payment for the child they have received. In this very courtyard the saint performed the ritual ablutions during the last years of his life. There are those who maintain that the water still spurts from the walls of the tomb; it seems that from the jar used for the ablutions – which was buried with its owner – there runs at times a crystal stream which, Mohamed assured me, cures fevers and many skin disorders. A cousin of his, at the third washing, found himself free of an eczema with which he had been afflicted for years.
But Mohamed’s account of the water’s powers was nothing at all: legend has it that when a great-grandchild of the holy marabout – an only son – died at the age of twelve, his mother in desperation prayed to her venerated ancestor for another son to replace the one she had lost. The holy man appeared to her in a dream and commanded her to bathe in the miraculous water. The woman did as she was commanded and nine months later gave birth to a son ‘as beautiful as the archangel Gabriel’.
On the threshold of the Great Mosque we met the Imām who told us how, before the miracle, before sterile men and barren women began coming here in pilgrimage, snow-white rabbits were seen to enter the sepulchre of the marabout and to emerge with their bellies so swollen that they ‘rolled against the ground’. A harlot noticed these prodigious rabbits which by merely crossing the mausoleum became heavy with young, and recognised them as the mischievous jinniyah female spirits who, in order to show human females the way, had taken the form of the animal which symbolises fecundity. The wretched woman, who for a long time had desired a son for her redemption, ran to pray at the tomb and her prayer was answered. Since then, the sanctuary has overflowed with ‘virgins who are becoming embittered by their celibacy, barren women, and mothers whose offspring have been cursed with some affliction’.
The most propitious moment, it seems, is Friday after the mid day prayer, and the pilgrimage must be repeated three Fridays running. The woman visits the tomb and after having craved her particular boon she lights the coloured candle she has brought with her and throws perfumed seeds into a brazier. After praying, she takes a jar and descends into the pool, removes her clothes and, when she is as naked ‘as a child washed by the midwife at the ceremony of the seventh day’, she performs the ritual of the great ablutions.
It is only very rarely that a woman does not become pregnant after this operation. The disappointed ones comfort themselves with the thought that their failure to conceive may be a blessing in disguise, since Allah often imposes a seeming misfortune on those for whom he has a special predilection.
The Imām was loquacious. Perhaps he was a little flattered by the interest of a Christian doctor in his religion. He explained to me that in ancient times the spring flowed not with water, but with blood – the blood of a jinn of the infernal regions – but the evil had entered into a serpent and disappeared, leaving only the benevolent element behind.
When I asked him what had become of the serpent full of maleficent power
he smiled in a gratified manner and told a story which left my companions open-mouthed.
One morning, it seems, the people of the city found at the spring a colossal serpent wound fifty times round upon itself, and asleep. It was as black as night and when it awoke it was seen that fire flashed from its eyes and smoke poured from its nostrils. Every now and again it threw itself a hundred cubits into the air, above the tallest palm trees, and then fell down again into the pool and drank it dry with one draught.
The terrified men and women ran to the saint, invoking his protection.
On the following night, at the head of a procession of unknown persons (who were without doubt saints and inhabitants of the kingdom of the good spirits), Sidi Abdesselām went to the spring. From a distance the listening crowd heard the murmur of the supernatural assembly, at times drowned by the chanting voice of the holy man pronouncing the most terrible exorcisms. In the meantime, the serpent lashed out furiously, tearing up centuries old olive trees with its tail and rending great holes in the ground. From that night the spring became pure and holy, and the serpent was seen no more.
Mahmud Ferjiani paid a very high price for a little of the dust from the wall of the tomb, with the intention of making it into plasters as soon as he returned home, to cure his child of ringworm.
I was beginning to suspect that four-fifths of human ailments responded to Sidi Abdesselām’s influence and I felt that it was rather mean of this four-centuries-dead saint to set himself up as a rival concern.
‘But why – if the holy man can cure all ills,’ I asked, ‘do so many sick people come to be treated at the dispensary?’
‘Ah, but you see,’ Mohamed ed-Dernàwi explained to me, ‘at the dispensary they do not pay.’
A Cure for Serpents Page 8