In some places he found no trace of it but would hear its melodies once he had finished digging his shelter and stretched out to sleep. Then he would press against the earth, pulling the encircling blanket’s edge from his lower ear, and listen. At times, while listening, he would hear a distant, unruly roar. At other times he would hear an obscure, insistent chatter. Eventually, he learned something about the modus operandi of this messenger, which would growl when raging and rush away as if falling from an abyss. It hid in aquifers as if fleeing from a jinni afreet. It raced migrating nomads and beat them to an earth that does not exist on earth. It would sing during its eternal journey the hostile rap song that does not so much reveal as conceal a secret. The excavator followed the song and discovered its moist tongue. Torments of longing would overwhelm him, and he would not even be aware of the tears welling up in his eyes. He would not hear himself addressing this nomad with a nomad’s language: “Where do you come from, Water? Where are you heading, Water?” At times when the subterranean currents slowed, as he delighted in this traveler’s murky chatter, he understood his beloved was busy addressing creatures. These addresses were muffled but amiable and eager, and contained in their tunes the angst of lovers.
He would follow these arcane orations till he forgot himself. The tongue would engross him, and the messenger’s prophecies would seize hold of him. The creatures’ replies would also astonish him. The soirée would continue with diverting evening conversation, and he would quit the earth as astonishment at the talisman overcame him. He would repeat it as a mantra for reflection. Then a glow would lead him to the door of riddles. So he would be amazed, laugh out loud, question, explore, or doze off. By keeping tabs on the question, he would find solace and attain the life normally lost through sociability, which he considered a catnap.
He would have liked not to return from this slumber. He hoped he would not be forced to pry his ear from the earth. He would rather not have been obliged to stand on his feet. He hoped he wouldn’t emerge from the subterranean corridor’s dark recesses. He frequently remained beneath the lower levels for entire days, coming out only when the sages worried about his absence and came to intrude on his solitude in the shelter.
But departure also had a set date, and the hour of farewell would inevitably arrive one day. The herald would rush through the wasteland, crying out the day of their departure. Tumult would dominate the campsite, boys would race between tent sites, women would emerge to break down the tents, herdsmen would arrive with the caravans of camels, and slaves, servants, and vassals would start readying the bags and cinching up the luggage. Then he would descend.
He would descend to the lower reaches, pull the corner of the blanket away from his right ear, and prostrate himself. He would press himself against the dirt, stretch out, lie on his belly, and touch his lips to the clay. Then the salty crystals would slide into his mouth and onto his tongue as he sensed the delicious saline taste. He would press more firmly against the body and meld with it till he became the groom uniting with his bride on their wedding night. He would tremble and shudder, overwhelmed by an orgasmic climax. Then the eternal melody would break out from the solid rock. The song would grow louder and flow through the earth’s body before circulating through his whole physique. He would hear the eternal call, and longing would flood out and subdue the world of sorrows. He would mumble impotently, “Master, may I accompany you? Why don’t you take me with you, God of Wanderers?” The call would grow more intense; the leitmotif of sorrow would become more strident in the call, and tears would spring from his eyes while his breast heaved with groans of lamentation. Then the leader’s messengers would arrive to wrench him forcibly away from this feverish tryst.
11
“Master, may I accompany you? Why don’t you take me with you, God of Wanderers?”
He repeated this talisman to himself at first in secret. Then he uttered it in public. Next he sang the call once he found the articulated joint and began to strike the earth with a terrifying stone-headed pickaxe.
At first, boys gathered around him, but the elders soon arrived.
They arrived as if coming for a council meeting. The venerable elder led the way, but bursts of wind buffeted his skinny body, which lurched with the gusts. So he would swerve off the path for some steps. The group behind him veered off course, too, without ever offering to assist him. When he returned to the trail, they returned also, still walking behind him. He brandished his burnished stick in the empty air and emitted the groans of people who have lived for a long time, who have lost their contemporaries, who have lost their loved ones, and who wander through tribes like strangers.
The venerable elder stood above him and gazed at the void, which was flooded with mirage trails. His beady eyes stared at the expanse that everyone knew he couldn’t see, because eyes accustomed to gazing at the homelands of eternity cannot revert to viewing the wasteland of the living.
He emitted his painful moan, the moan of the defenseless, the moan of exiles, the moan of people who have crossed with those who have traveled back into antiquity, leaving behind in the desert only their scrawny bodies. To the excavator’s ears, this moan sounded like another wail of lament.
Emmamma uttered his prophecy from the other shore: “I was sure you would attempt to find the secret. I was certain that water is a treasure only found by a man with a talisman.”
The men removed their flowing garments, rolled up their sleeves, cinched their belts tight, and began to dig.
12
That night he heard the call.
He went to sleep and a little later heard the call. He did not exactly hear the call that night; instead he made the rounds with the wanderer, tasting the pleasure of sliding along, flowing past like the days, and losing spatial limitations once he discovered he was every place. When he awoke from his slumbers, he heard the messenger’s chattering clearly. He heard the messenger dancing with the outcroppings of solid rock, getting cheeky with slabs of stone, dispersing in hollows in the lowlands, complaining for a time, then clamoring, and jabbering in some other language occasionally. The messenger fell, frothed, leveled off, bubbled up, and flowed through the secret articulations, racing against the march of days without the days’ dominion realizing it. The messenger told the creatures of the lower reaches about the pit. It said it came as a messenger from the sky to become the earth’s blood, the earth’s tongue, the earth’s spirit, and the earth’s call. It wasn’t shy about revealing the secret and telling creatures of the lower reaches that it is the call. It addressed its loved ones only allegorically, but the creatures heard the word “call” as clearly as those inhabiting the nugatory realm. Then some factions believed what they heard and others denied it.
13
That night he woke the boy.
He woke him and spoke to him in the darkness—the darkness of his grotto and the darkness outside.
The boy wiped his eyes with his hands and protested audibly.
The man addressed him, saying, “I have frequently spoken to you about migration. Do you remember what I have said?”
The boy continued to rub his eyes, face, and head with his hands, struggling to stay awake. He murmured something indecipherable but did not speak.
The man said to him, “I told you that we don’t come to the desert to rest on the desert. Instead each of us comes to chase after the others in the wasteland like the tails of mirages. The adult outstrips the youth, but the lucky person outstrips everyone else and departs while still a child in the cradle.”
The boy did not respond. So the man continued, “There is a small faction who burden the earth and only emerge when they hear the call.”
The child stopped messing with parts of his body and exclaimed in a weird voice, “The call?”
“The call. The call is a present from the sky. The call is the language of the earth. The call is the gift of the possessed.”
The boy was still. He soon muttered, “Did Amghar refer to the possessed?”11<
br />
“Yes, Amghar is speaking about the possessed, because possessed people are additional conduits. The possessed are another community. For this reason, a possessed person shouldn’t tarry when he hears the call.”
“. …”
“This is why I woke you. This is why I want to tell you that my time has come and that my call is ringing in my ears night and day. So promise me that you’ll be true to the covenant and that you’ll never abandon your mother, the earth.”
The boy mumbled indistinctly. The father made himself clearer with a decisive phrase: “Beware of fleeing the earth. You should know you’ll never get far if you do!”
“. …”
“I bequeath you the pickaxe. Beware of going too far away.”
The son yawned loudly, and so the father fell silent. The boy leaned forward and fell asleep. The father dozed off as the call resounded in his ears.
14
Weeping woke him several hours later that night.
He rose to find his son collapsed in a heap beside him, weeping loudly. He felt like questioning him but decided to refrain and then fell asleep again. The boy wept till morning. Then he went out to the plain, still weeping. He accompanied the herdsmen when they departed to the pastures. Since he was weeping, they asked, “Why are you crying?” But he didn’t reply. He left the herders and returned to wander among the dwellings.
The sages stopped him and asked, “Why are you weeping?” He did not reply. Instead he hid his face in his arms and walked away. The women went to him and also asked about the secret cause of his weeping. He did not answer them either. Then his chums blocked his way and questioned him. They asked persistently, but he crossed the vacant land to the heights to the north and roamed there for a long time.
The tribe grasped the secret behind his weeping some days later.
15
The nobles led their assistants, vassals, and slaves to the well as if they were the tribe’s heroes leading mounted warriors on a raid.
They trailed across the low-lying, vacant land south of the temple. Then they took turns descending down the shaft, their belts lashed securely with palm-fiber ropes. They dug the pit deeper and reached moist earth after penetrating a few cubits farther down.
The excavator struck the blow that cut through to the moisture. He took the hunk of damp clay in his hands and tasted it with his tongue. He closed his eyes and savored the morsel, leaning to the left and right. He emitted a groan of approval. Then he shared the good news with the people: “I bet there’ll be a greater consensus among you about the sweetness of the water than about anything in your lives ever!”
The depths resounded with the call of the depths, but the people above ground did not make out the words clearly. One man shouted a question down the shaft. So the excavator placed a lump of the clay in the container hanging over his head and jerked on the rope that hung there to signal for them to begin pulling it up. They drew the bucket up and struggled with each other for the moist clay. He heard them express their delight, shout to each other, and argue with one another as they exchanged muddy handfuls of the treasure.
He bent over and splintered the hard place with the solid stone of his alarming pickaxe. The earth at the bottom of the pit was astonishing. In its dirt, pebbles and pieces of white stone mixed with thin slabs of stone and promising lumps of clay. He dug at the heart of the pit for a time but found it was less moist there. So he turned his attention to the west side and struck the earth from there. He struck once, twice, three times. Then, after this final blow, the Master flowed out. It trickled from a fissure on the right side. It seeped from the pores of a solid, snowy white slab, which began to sweat. Then this perspiration dripped down, and beads of sweat collected on the august, generous body that darkness had hidden from the human eye forever. These beads increased in circumference, plumpness, and size. He dragged the blade of his pickaxe along the indescribable fissure. Then stone pummeled stone, and the solid rock spoke with a hushed voice. From the talk of the solid rock was born an actual being. The deluge flooded out and gushed down in a succession of large drops. In no time at all, the drops united in a line that continued to bleed, bleed, bleed. It bled and spoke as it fell on the rocks at the bottom. The wanderer saw it for the first time and heard its whisper like the first gasp of a newborn child.
16
He watched the wanderer change and evolve into a truly heavenly stream. He watched the mysterious wanderer emerge from the Unknown as a body. He watched the immortal wanderer collect, take shape, multiply, and appropriate a fluent, running tongue.
He watched the miracle jabber, flood, inundate the rocks, and rise to form a circular pond on which the light of the well’s mouth fell. Then it shone with a glimmering, dreadfully seductive charm.
The pulsing deluge damaged the hastily done work. Then the liquid poured from the groins of the fissure, and the pores of the rocks secreted even more. The creature twisted as it traveled and crossed on its eternal trip to the valley bottoms. So the disciple witnessed in its passage the secret of the Master and the birth of primeval life.
The heartbeat increased, and the anguish of the first people assailed him. Then he wailed, “May I accompany you, Master? Why don’t you carry us along on the journey, God of Wanderers?” Then a tremor struck that patch of ground.
The people above heard the earthquake, and the ground trembled violently beneath their feet. They shoved forward to the chasm. They leaned over its opening and batted away the spray that wet their downturned faces. This spray was thick, viscous, heavy, and mixed with mud, dirt, and gravel. They saw that surging water had risen to the top. They realized that an internal collapse had narrowed the well’s shaft and pushed the water up. They called to one another, fastened palm-fiber belts to their bodies, and were quick to dangle down the well, taking pickaxes and leather containers designed to haul dirt from wells. Three men descended and began filling the containers with lumps of clay, mud, and dirt. They immediately tugged on the rope when they finished filling the leather buckets. The other strongest men collaborated above at the mouth. The men unloaded a lot of dirt and kept drawing out containers of it all day long. But they only reached the buried man shortly before sunset.
Aggulli reached him. He found him tucked beneath an awe-inspiring slab of white stone that was marked on the underside with arcane lines like a sorcerer’s symbols. It was bisected by a network of minute veins that antiquity had traced inside the slab. Perhaps the pranks of some mysterious creature had dug them, one generation after another, till it became an indecipherable legacy like the talismans of the first peoples carved into walls of caves. He cautiously lifted the slab away and raised the excavator’s head. The lower part of his veil was missing, and his gray beard, coated with mud mixed with pebbles, was smeared with clay. There was an enigmatic smile on his lips, and his eyes expressed profound acquiescence. The blood flowing freely from his forehead mixed with lines from the rogue flood. Even after the victim was pulled out, his bleeding continued. Blood flowed from his forehead, deluged his face, eyes, lips, and beard, and fell to mingle with the deluge in the pit of the well.
Aggulli embraced him for a long time. He continued hugging him even after he wrapped the dread rope carefully around both their bodies. He tugged hard on the rope to sanction the start of their ascent.
The strongest men stepped forward to pull them up. When they reached the mouth, the bond was unfastened in dignified silence. Aggulli too was all bloody. Blood covered his face and arms and stained all his clothes. The men noticed his eyes’ redness, gleam, and tears. They shrouded the deceased man near the mouth of the well, and then Aggulli fled to the wasteland.
Emmamma approached.
He stood over the drowned man and stared at the horizon, which was flooded with dusk’s rays. His beady eyes stared, and then he released a distressing moan like a lament. Finally he said, “I knew he would go before us. I knew the verbal secret would not suffice to obtain water. I knew that blood is the price of
blood.”
He began his wailing lament again. Then many people remembered the son’s wails and realized that the boy’s weeping had been a prophecy.
______________
11. Tamasheq for father, grandfather, tribal elder, or leader.
XIV
NEW WAW
There was an ancient city that settlers from Tyre held.
Virgil, The Aeneid, I, 12
1
During the first years, water gushed from the well nonstop.
The tribe was upset that water was going to waste, and the sages tried to prevent the water from flowing away. They built a sturdy cistern at the spring’s outlet and channeled the overflow between chunks of rock and dams of stones. They allowed neighboring tribes to fetch all the water they needed and set fees for herdsmen who preferred to bring their camels and livestock to this well rather than travel to distant wells in the Western and Central Hammada. Even so, the large daily discharge of water—the deluge they had sought for so long and for which they had offered mighty sacrifices—exceeded the tribe’s needs and those of the neighboring tribes. The water rebelled against their dams, overtopped the cisterns and confinement pools, continued to flow in small streams down the slopes, watering the lowlands separating the well from Retem Valley, and flooded tracts covered with a layer of clay in some places and topped with smooth pebbles in others. Then it descended into the valley, down a low shoulder where the valley’s sides spread out. So the watercourse expanded there, the stream’s banks spread far apart, and the water grew shallow.
New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 16