New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation)

by Ibrahim Al-Koni

  5

  The earth spoke to him.

  The earth spoke to him; so he did not cast an eye toward the sky.

  He had not gazed at the sky since he emerged from inside the tent and crawled across the earth to the distant pastures. On the trail to the pastures, he heard her speak for the first time. She spoke through the stone stelae. She spoke to him through the trunks of acacias enveloped in the evening’s gloom. She spoke to him through retem blossoms that bowl people over with their fragrance, which fills breasts with ecstasy, dizziness, and longing. She spoke to him through the summits of northern mountains that are clad in turbans of celestial fabric threaded with color from dawn’s firebrand. She spoke through grim expanses of the wasteland, which coaxes the wanderer till he yields, gives away everything, and advances when she leads him down the path to the Unknown, from which he never turns back. She spoke to him through the stillness of the nights, the empty expanses of which were dominated by flooding moonlight. She would humble herself, withdraw, and divest herself as if she were chief of all insouciant creatures.

  She spoke to him in many tongues. Then he understood, and the mysterious firebrand overwhelmed him. He wept and prostrated himself, hearing nothing but her whispering and seeing nothing but her body since that day long ago.

  After that, the sky fled from the sky and on earth only the earth remained.

  6

  Who had told him in times forgotten that the earth is the appropriate abode? Was it his father, whom he didn’t remember? Was it the tribe’s leader long ago? Was it the voice of the ancestors? Was it a messenger from the inhabitants of the Spirit World? Or, was it the earth herself who had communicated with a mysterious cry, confiding to him that she is a mother who must never be forsaken?

  In that period—the days of childhood, play, and innocence—the earth was very close. He would crawl outside to play between the tent sites, plunge into her dirt and clay, and smear his face with her sand. He was only inches from her breast and stumbled on all fours across her palm. He would stand only to fall the next instant. When he pushed up even as high as a knuckle, he would be seized by fear—a nameless, noble fear imbued with a sense of danger. Was it the danger of falling? The danger of leaving never to return? The danger of the first step on the path to the labyrinth? Or, was it the enigmatic sensation of being on the verge of losing paradise and the voice of the herald crying that the time is nigh for a migration from which there is no return?

  But the trip does not begin blindly, because the enigmatic desert does not allow its children to depart without instructions. The lesson begins with the first step. Then the little wanderer meets its prophecies in the plasticity of the clay he molds, in the scraggly plants the desert produces bountifully in rainy seasons, in the tiny grains it slips into the bread dough that its sands cook. Afterwards it leads him by the hand on another journey. It takes him on a tour of the grazing lands to teach him the trails that lead out of them. On the naked plains it lashes him with winds that strike the faces of wanderers with grit. Or, it frowns, glowers, and pours down a deluge of rain. Or, it exhales feverish fire in the seasons of the Qibli wind. Or, it unleashes cold in winter seasons. It employs many strategies to inform the young wanderer that the migratory route will be desolate and inescapable if he does not rely on her, if he is not guided by her, and if he does not remain loyal to her. So he realizes and learns from the first day that in this tenebrous, munificent terrain, which extends and renews itself forever, there is a secret he can never dispense with. In it lurks that cryptic amulet the traveler in the labyrinth can never do without.

  7

  When the messenger from the nobles arrived that evening, he was recalling his life story and hiding out in his cellar. He was recalling this amulet, because he—unlike the others—had never forgotten it. He hadn’t forgotten it, because the mother hadn’t shared it with him during that forgotten time of innocence when she had told the others. He hadn’t forgotten it because the earth screamed advice in his ear the way desert mothers normally scream the names of newborn babes in their ears. Perhaps for this reason he hadn’t followed the same path the others had in their migrations. The others had pursued the trail toward the horizon, whereas he had followed the trail leading to the depths. His mates had set out, like those before them, on the path of the extensive wasteland. He, on the other hand, had bowed his head, looked down into the belly, and established his dwelling inside its breast before building his vaults in the dirt, fleeing from the labyrinth of the expanse, while seeking protection with the mother from the ghoul of loss.

  He was reliving his life when the messenger of the elders visited him.

  He normally recalled that story every day—indeed, several times a day, because the mother to whose breast he had come for refuge would repeat her counsels to him, lest he forget, and deliver new instructions on each occasion. He would eavesdrop and hear this female diviner when she mocked her naughty children who had fled and raced into the wasteland, lured by the horizons. They capitulated, darted off, and then rolled around the way tumbleweed does when the wind drives it. They forgot the lower reaches just as quickly as they forgot her counsels. Then they considered vain locomotion to be a homeland, and the search scorched them with fires of longing. So they rushed off, and the fates of the primeval labyrinth changed into genuine and lethal loss.

  Since he was listening carefully, he heard their footsteps from his shelter. They were pounding on the earth as if they wanted to harm it. They exaggerated their boorishness as if they deliberately wanted to cave the earth into the earth, without planning an escape route should the earth sink and flee from the earth. They were wandering aimlessly over her face like the hoi polloi, who don’t know what they are doing, don’t fathom where they are going, and don’t understand what they want.

  He was hunkered down in the earth, hearing, listening, brooding, wondering, and becoming ever more certain that salvation is possible only through proceeding farther down the corridor and digging deeper into the belly of the earth.

  They ridiculed his shelter, but their ridicule only made him more convinced. The female poets satirized him, but he laughed at their verses in his subterranean vaults and smiled from ear to ear. Once he committed an error. He chased after the beauty and had a child by her. But he decided to atone for his sin. So he taught the child the counsels of the lower reaches, of isolation, and of stillness. The baby was only calm when he brought him into the shelter and placed him as a pledge in the hand of the earth.

  8

  In the council he leaned forward over his homeland and read in its skin the dirt’s riddles. They told him they had dug, searched, and torn the body of the earth until they had despaired. They also said that they had finally learned that they would never find a way to water if he did not come to their aid. So would the son of the earth countenance the people of the earth or would he reject them and disappoint their request?

  He leaned further forward. He bowed so low that his bent head touched his chest while his fingers continued to trace a sign in the earth’s book. He dug furrows with his forefinger and with all his fingers punched the tracks of various creatures: the pawing of a camel’s hoof, the imprint of a jackal, the trudging of dung beetles, and the twisting trail of the snake.

  Aggulli said, “The well on the mountain slope destroyed us. We have excavated many summits without even reaching damp soil. What does this mean?”

  He stopped making tracks in the earth and extended the tips of his fingers to gather some pebbles—white, gray, black, and gold ones. He constructed a small pile with them—a mass that was approximately level. Then he began to remove the colored stones from the pile and drew some signs near it.

  Imaswan Wandarran explained, “Had it not been for the prophecy, we would not have needed all this. You know that we haven’t settled on the earth in response to some whim; it is what the leader willed. Since we have resigned ourselves to remaining in this place, we must find water to serve us as a consolation and a p
eg. The presence among us of a man who knows the depths of the earth as well as he knows the ends of his fingers has escaped us throughout our search. So did we err in sending for you?”

  He arranged the golden pebbles in a vertical column, which he traversed with a chain of black stones. Then the beautiful intersection was visible: the sign of the goddess Tanit.

  The hero intervened for the first time, “Our reliance on this earth benefits our venerable companion. From today forward you won’t need to leave your refuge here to dig another one there. Do you take my point?”

  The excavator glanced stealthily at Ahallum. A flash gleamed in his stern eyes, but he bent over the mandala again. He chose white stones from the pile and arranged them around the upper part of the cross. Then he encircled the lower part of the figure with the gray pebbles. The circle around the cross was divided into two colors, and the first figure was split into four triangles. The triangle is also a symbol of the goddess Tanit. Emmamma interjected a comment from another angle. He spoke swaying like those possessed. Before he spoke, he sang that tuneful moan that the people of the wasteland are accustomed to hear from noble elders who have inhabited eternity for long periods till nothing of them remains in this world save their scrawny bodies.

  He said, “Loath as we are to send for a man to teach us to dig pits, the ancients taught us to search for the secret of something before beginning to search for it. All of us know that the desert, like the sky, conceals in its belly a secret bigger than all the treasures that have captivated the minds of greedy people from antiquity. We have also inherited from the first peoples the insight that the earth’s secret is one of the secrets of the desert. If the sages had not hovered around its secret for ages, they would not have been able to discover the Law.”

  He set about buttressing his statement by proof-texting it from provisos of the Law while his meager body swayed right and left. He chanted a moan that almost evolved into the tune of a sorrowful ballad. Then he spoke once more, saying that their companion was the man closest to the earth, because things reveal their secrets only to one who loves them and offers them not only an attentive ear but goes farther and commits his affairs to them. Finally he ended by saying, “We have come to you hoping you will tell us the secret.”

  Silence prevailed. His fingers stopped arranging the pebbles.

  Aggulli repeated, “We have come to you hoping you will tell us the secret.”

  They all repeated this statement in unison. They repeated the statement as if reciting one of the talismans of the first peoples.

  9

  “I must admit there is a secret to this.” He repeated that twice, just as they had twice repeated the venerable elder’s talisman in unison. He looked up at them for the first time, and they noticed traces of a sparkle, ecstasy, and tears in his eyes.

  He declared definitively, “A sacrifice!”

  They exchanged astonished looks before asking, “Sacrifice?”

  He glanced boldly from one to another of them, and the amulet attached to the front of his veil at the top seemed to protrude and move higher. He repeated this prophecy: “A sacrifice!”

  Aggulli protested, “But we slaughtered a sacrificial victim on day one!”

  Then the excavator’s body was seized by the fever of ecstatics, and the tears in his eyes became clearly visible. He released a long moan like those of Emmamma when the venerable elder sang sad songs from the desert of eternity. Trembling overwhelmed him, and he swayed and shook. He tried to calm his longing and returned to his sacred mandala, but his fingers betrayed him. When he picked up a pebble it would fall before he could place it in an empty spot in the figure. He shook the dirt from his hands and ran his right hand over his broad leather girdle. He sighed emotionally and asked, “What do you know about sacrificial victims? What do you know about the earth? If you slaughter a black goat to extract a little gold dust, should you slaughter a black goat when you wish to extract water? Don’t you realize you’re disparaging the earth’s treasure, the truth’s treasure, when you offer the same sacrificial kid for both of these treasures, even though people think it a major sin to compare the two?”

  The elders exchanged questioning glances, and their fingers stopped fiddling in the dirt. Aggulli observed, “The truth is that we’ve never dug a well before. How would we know what blood offering the earth demands as the price for water?”

  “Before we speak of the blood offering, let’s discuss the location. I’ve heard where you’ve dug and know that you missed the right place. Don’t you realize that the earth is a body comparable to that of a slaughtered animal? Haven’t you seen how a skillful butcher will follow the joints when butchering a carcass? Don’t you know that the belly of the earth also has articulations and that water flows through the lower reaches of the earth like blood flowing through bodies?”

  Imaswan Wandarran cried out, “You all see? Didn’t I tell you we didn’t pick the right place even once?”

  The excavator paid him no heed. He cast a look all around the council. Then he said, “Earth’s blood is water; nothing demands a blood offering so much as blood. Nothing on earth seeks the blood of a sacrificial victim as much as blood!”

  He bent over his mandala again and dropped a pebble to fill a gap in the right triangle on the upper edge. He repeated his prophecy as if reading it from a symbol in the sacred mandala: “Nothing on earth seeks the blood of a sacrificial victim as much as blood!”

  Aggulli asked, “Do you want us to slaughter a whole herd? Would the blood of a herd suffice to obtain water?”

  “A herd’s blood is an appropriate offering for evanescent treasures.”

  “Into which group of blood offerings does water fall?” He looked up mournfully at their guest.

  The excavator replied almost in a whisper, “Water bears no relationship to your blood offerings. Water isn’t a transient treasure. Water is another type of being.”

  “Tell us a little about water!”

  “Can a creature like me speak of water? I admit that I have spent long years with it; but I can’t claim to understand water.”

  “Do you want us to believe that a boon companion knows nothing of his friend of many years?”

  “I acknowledge that the earth’s compassion has been greater than I could ever have imagined. Water has come to me as a messenger and kept me company in my solitude.”

  “What does water say? Tell us what water has confided to you.”

  He raised his head high, and the leather amulet attached to the front of his veil shot up. Then he leaned toward Aggulli till the amulet almost touched his companion’s veil. His eyes narrowed to slits. He replied in a mysterious voice, “The earth’s tongue can only be understood by someone who lives in the earth. Only someone who has lost the ability to use people’s language comprehends water’s language.”

  Silence reigned. Eventually Emmamma’s voice rose in a sorrowful moan. Ahallum interjected, “Let’s go back to the blood offering!”

  More than one voice seconded his suggestion. Then the excavator asked, “Remember the blood sacrifice for the sky’s water?”

  They kept still for a long time. Then Aggulli asked suspiciously, “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that the sky took the tribe’s soothsayer as the price for the sky’s water.”

  The nobles exchanged glances again. Aggulli asked even more skeptically, “What are you saying?”

  The excavator dropped more stones into the column dividing the circle. The column was duplicated, leaving the design unbalanced. He lined up other pebbles along the horizontal line to restore the mandala’s balance. Without looking up, he replied, “I’m saying that the earth’s water is just as dear as the sky’s.”

  The elders observed him with suspicious eyes as Aggulli resumed his questioning: “What are you saying?”

  “I mean to say that the earth’s sacrificial victim will be no less significant than the sky’s!”

  A grumbling murmur was audible in the counc
il, and the excavator leapt to his feet.

  10

  Ever since he had learned how to excavate and had discovered his first drop of water inside the earth’s cavity, he had asked this messenger whence it came and where it was heading. At first it oozed from clefts in rocks—viscous, skimpy, and mysterious. He would run his fingers over the smooth slabs to feel the moist viscosity. He would lick the ends of his fingers with the tip of his tongue, savoring the salinity, the array of metals, the mix of soils, and the sweetness of the torrents’ waters in turn. The secret of this unidentified messenger, however, grew increasingly obscure during a migration.