Desert

HAPPINESS

THE SUN RISES over the earth, the shadows stretch over the gray sand, over the dust in the paths. The dunes stand motionless before the sea. The small succulent plants quiver in the wind. In the cold, deep blue sky there’s not a bird, not a cloud. There’s the sun. But the morning light wavers a little, as if it weren’t quite sure.

Along the path sheltered by the line of gray dunes, Lalla walks slowly. From time to time she stops, looks at something on the ground. Or she picks a leaf from a fleshy plant, squishes it between her fingers to smell the sweet peppery odor of the sap. The plants are dark green, shiny, they look like seaweed. Sometimes a big golden bumblebee is sitting on a clump of hemlock, and Lalla runs to chase it. But she doesn’t get too close because she’s a little frightened all the same. When the insect flies away, she runs after it, hands outstretched, as if she really did want to catch it. But it’s just for fun.

Out here, that’s all there is: the light in the sky, as far as you can see. The dunes quake with the pounding sea that can’t be seen but can be heard. The little succulent plants are shiny with salt, as if from sweat. There are insects here and there, a pale ladybug, a sort of wasp with such a narrow middle it looks like it is cut in two, a centipede that leaves tiny marks in the dust, and louse flies, the color of metal, that try to land on the little girl’s legs and face to eat the salt.

Lalla knows all the paths, all the dips in the dunes. She could go anywhere with her eyes closed and she’d know where she was right away, just from feeling the ground with her bare feet. At times the wind leaps over the barrier of dunes, throwing handfuls of needles at the child’s skin, tangling her black hair. Lalla’s dress clings to her moist skin, she has to pull at the cloth to make it come loose.

Lalla knows all the paths, the ones that follow the gray dunes through the scrub as far as the eye can see, the ones that curve around and double back, the ones that never go anywhere. Yet every time she walks out here, there is something new. Today it was the golden bumblebee that led her so far away, out beyond the fishermen’s houses and the lagoon of stagnant water. A little later, in the brush, that sudden carcass of rusted metal with its threatening claws and horns uplifted. Then, in the sand on the path, a small tin can with no label and with two holes on either side of the lid.

Lalla keeps walking, very slowly, searching the gray sand so intently that her eyes are a little sore. She looks for things on the ground, without thinking of anything else, without looking up at the sky. Then she stops under a parasol pine, sheltered from the light, and she closes her eyes for a minute.

She clasps her hands around her knees, rocks slightly back and forth, then from side to side, singing a song in French, a song that says only, “Méditerra-né-é-e…”

Lalla doesn’t know what it means. It’s a song she heard on the radio one day, and she only remembers that one word, but it’s a word that pleases her. So every now and again, when she’s feeling good, when she doesn’t have anything else to do, or when on the contrary, she’s a bit sad without really knowing why, she sings the word, sometimes in a whisper just for herself, so faintly that she hardly hears herself, or sometimes very loudly, almost at the top of her lungs, to make echoes and drive the fear away.

Now she’s singing the word in a whisper, because she’s happy. The large red ants with black heads walk over the pine needles, hesitate, scale up twigs. Lalla nudges them away with a dead branch. The smell of the trees drifts over on the wind mixed with the acrid taste of the sea. Sometimes there are spurts of sand that shoot up into the sky, forming wobbly spouts that balance on the crest of the dunes and then suddenly break, sending thousands of sharp needles into the child’s legs and face.

Lalla remains in the shade of the tall pine until the sun is high in the sky. Then she goes leisurely back toward town. She recognizes her own footprints in the sand. They seem smaller and narrower than her feet, but, turning around, Lalla checks to make sure they are really hers. She shrugs her shoulders and starts to run. The thorns on the thistles prick her toes. Sometimes after limping a few steps she has to stop to pick the thorns from her big toe.

There are always ants, wherever you stop. They seem to come out from between the stones and scurry over the gray sand burning with light, as if they were spies. But Lalla is quite fond of them anyway. She also likes the slow centipedes, the golden-brown June bugs, the dung beetles, stag beetles, potato beetles, ladybugs, the crickets — like bits of burnt wood. The large praying mantises scare her, and Lalla waits for them to go away, or else she makes a detour without taking her eyes from them while they pivot, brandishing their pincers.

There are even gray and green lizards. They skitter off toward the dunes, thrashing their tails widely to help them run faster. Sometimes Lalla succeeds in catching one, and she plays at holding it by the tail until it comes loose. She watches the piece of tail twisting around by itself in the dust. One day a boy told her that if you waited long enough, you’d see the legs and head grow back onto the lizard tail, but Lalla doesn’t really believe that.

Mostly there are flies. Lalla likes them too, despite their noise and their bites. She doesn’t really know why she likes them, but she just does. Maybe it’s because of their delicate legs, their transparent wings, or maybe because they know how to fly fast, forwards, backwards, in zigzags, and Lalla thinks it must be great to know how to fly like that.

She lies down on her back in the sand on the dunes, and the louse flies land on her face, her hands, her bare legs, one after another. They don’t all come at once because in the beginning they’re a little afraid of Lalla. But they like to come and eat the salty sweat on her skin, and they soon grow bold. When they walk on her with their light legs, Lalla starts laughing, but not too loudly, so as not to scare them off. Sometimes a louse fly bites Lalla’s cheek and a little angry cry breaks from her lips.

Lalla plays with the flies for a long time. These are louse flies that live in the kelp on the beach. But there are also black flies in the Project houses, on the oilcloths, on the cardboard walls, on the windows. The buildings in Les Glacières have big blue flies that fly over the garbage bins making a noise like bomber planes.

Suddenly Lalla stands up. She runs as fast as she can toward the dunes. She climbs up the slope of sand that slips down and shifts under her bare feet. The thistles prick her toes, but she ignores them. She wants to get to the top of the dunes to see the sea, as quickly as possible.

As soon as you’re at the top of the dunes, the wind hits you hard in the face, and Lalla nearly falls over backward. The cold wind from the sea contracts her nostrils and burns her eyes, the sea is immense, blue-gray, dotted with foam, it rumbles quietly as the short waves fall on the flat expanse of sand where the vast, deep blue, almost black sky is mirrored.

Lalla is leaning forward into the wind. Her dress (in truth it is a boy’s calico shirt that her aunt cut the sleeves off of) is clinging to her stomach and thighs, as if she’d just come out of the water. The sound of the wind and the sea is screaming in her ears, first the left, then the right, mixed with the faint sound made by little twists of her hair snapping against her temples. Sometimes the wind picks up a handful of sand and throws it at Lalla’s face. She has to shut her eyes to keep from being blinded. But the wind ends up making her eyes water anyway, and there are grains of sand in her mouth that grit between her teeth.

So when she is good and giddy from the wind and the sea, Lalla goes back down the rampart of dunes. She squats for a minute at the foot of the dune, just long enough to catch her breath. The wind doesn’t reach the other side of the dunes. It goes over them, heads inland, till it reaches the blue hills hung with mist. The wind doesn’t wait. It does what it wants, and Lalla is happy when it’s there, even if it does burn her eyes and ears, even if it does throw handfuls of sand in her face. She thinks of it often, and of the sea too, when she’s in the dark house in the Project, and the air is so heavy and smells so strong; she thinks of the wind that is huge, transparent, that leaps endlessly over the sea, that crosses the desert in an instant, goes all the way to the cedar forests and then dances over there at the foot of the mountains, amidst the birds and flowers. The wind doesn’t wait. It crosses the mountains, sweeping away dust, sand, ashes, it knocks over boxes, sometimes it comes all the way to the town of planks and tarpaper and plays at ripping off a few roofs and walls. But it doesn’t matter. Lalla thinks it’s beautiful, as transparent as water, quick as lightning, and so powerful it could destroy all the cities in the world if it wanted to, even those that have tall white houses with high glass windows.

Lalla knows how to say its name, she learned it all by herself when she was little, and she used to listen to it coming through the planking of the house at night. It’s called whoooooohhh, just like that, with a whistle.

A little farther on, in amongst the shrubs, Lalla meets back up with it. It draws the yellow grasses aside like a hand passing over them.

A hawk hovers almost motionless above the grassy plain, its copper-colored wings spread in the wind. Lalla looks at it, she admires it, because it knows how to fly in the wind. The hawk barely moves the ends of its quill feathers, slightly fans out its tail, and glides effortlessly along with its cross-shaped shadow rippling over the yellow grass. From time to time it pules, saying only, kaiiiik! kaiiiik! and Lalla answers it.

Then it suddenly dives toward the earth, wings drawn in, skims interminably over the grass, like a fish slipping over seaweed swaying on the ocean floor. That’s how it disappears into the distance between the tousled blades of grass. Even though Lalla calls out many times with the plaintive cry, kaiiiik! kaiiiik! the bird doesn’t come back.

But it remains in her eyes for a long time, a shadow in the shape of an arrow skimming over the yellow grass like a stingray, soundlessly, in its tide of fear.

Lalla stands still now, her head thrown back, eyes opened on the white sky, watching the circles swimming there — cutting into one another, like when you throw stones into a water tank. There are no insects or birds or anything of the kind, and yet thousands of specks can be seen moving in the sky, as if there were ant peoples, weevil peoples, and fly peoples up there. They aren’t flying in the white air; they’re walking around in all directions, animated with a feverish haste, as if they didn’t know how to get away. Maybe they are the faces of all the people who live in the cities, cities so big you can never get out, where there are so many cars, so many people, and where you never see the same face twice. Old Naman talks about all that and at the same time he also says strange words, Algeciras, Madrid (he says: Madris), Marseille, Lyon, Paris, Geneva.

Lalla doesn’t always see those faces. It’s only on certain days, when the wind blows and drives the clouds over toward the mountains, and when the air is very white and quivering with sunlight; that’s when you can see them, the people-insects, the ones that move, walk, and run and dance way up there, barely visible, like very young gnats.

Then the sea calls to her again. Lalla runs through the scrub till she reaches the gray dunes. The dunes are like cows lying down, heads low, spines curved. Lalla likes to climb up on their backs, making a path just for herself with her hands and feet and then roll head over heels down the other side to the sandy beach. The ocean unfurls on the hard sand making a loud ripping sound, the water recedes, and the foam melts in the sun. There is so much light and so much noise here that Lalla has to shut her eyes and mouth. The sea salt burns her eyelids and lips, and the gusting wind makes her breath catch in her throat. Yet Lalla loves being by the sea. She enters the water, the waves knock against her legs and her stomach, making the blue shirt cling to her skin. She feels her feet sinking into the sand like two wooden poles. But she doesn’t go any farther out, because every now and again the sea will catch children up — just like that, without paying attention — and then bring them back a couple of days later, leaving them on the hard beach, their bellies and faces swollen with water, their noses, lips, fingertips, and genitals eaten by crabs.

Lalla walks on the sand along the ruff of foam. Her dress — drenched all the way up to her chest — dries in the wind. The wind braids her jet black hair, but only on one side, and her face is the color of copper in the sunlight.

Scattered about on the sand are beached jellyfish with their tendrils spread out around them like tresses. Lalla watches the holes that form in the sand each time a wave recedes. She also runs after the tiny gray crabs, like spiders, with their pincers raised, and it gives her a good laugh. But she doesn’t try to catch them like the other children do; she lets them run off into the sea, disappear in the sparkling foam.

Lalla walks a little farther down the shore, singing that same song that says only one word, “Méditerra-né-é-e…”

Then she goes over to sit down at the foot of the dunes facing the beach, her arms around her knees and her face hidden in the folds of the blue shirt to avoid breathing in the sand that the wind throws at her.

She always goes to sit in the same place, right where a rotten wooden pole sticks out of the water in the hollows of the waves, and a large fig tree grows in the stones amid the dunes. She waits for Naman the fisherman there.

Naman the fisherman isn’t like everyone else. He’s a fairly tall, thin man, with wide shoulders, a bony face, and brick-colored skin. He always walks around barefoot, wearing blue cotton pants and a white shirt that’s too big for him that flares in the wind. But even like that, Lalla thinks he is very handsome and very elegant, and her heart always beats a little faster when she knows he’s going to come. He has a face with distinct features, leathered from the sea breeze; the skin on his forehead and cheeks is very dark and drawn tight from the sun out at sea. He has thick hair, the same color as his skin. But most of all, his eyes are an extraordinary color — a blue-green mixed with gray, very pale and transparent in that dark face, as if they had captured the light and transparency of the sea. It’s in order to see his eyes that Lalla loves to wait for the fisherman on the beach near the tall fig tree and also to see his smile when he catches sight of her.

She waits a long time for him, sitting in the fine sand of the dune, in the shade of the tall fig tree. She hums a little, holding her arms over her head so she won’t swallow too much sand. She sings the name that she is so fond of, that is long and beautiful, that simply says, “Méditerra-né-é-e…”

She waits, watching the sea that’s beginning to get rough — a grayish-blue, like steel — and a sort of pale mist that masks the line of the horizon. Sometimes she thinks she sees a dark spot dancing amid the reflections between the crests of the waves, and she straightens up a little, because she thinks it’s Naman’s boat coming. But the dark spot disappears. It’s a mirage on the sea, or maybe the back of a dolphin.

Naman was the one who had told her about dolphins. He told her of groups of dark backs leaping joyfully through the waves in front of the boat stems, as if to greet the fishermen, then suddenly they’d be off, disappearing out toward the horizon. Naman likes to tell Lalla stories about dolphins. When he talks, the light of the sea makes his eyes even brighter, and it’s as if Lalla can see the black creatures in the color of his eyes. But as hard as she searches the sea, she never sees any dolphins. They probably don’t like to come too near the coast.

Naman tells the story of a dolphin that led a fisherman’s boat back to the coast one day when he was lost at sea in a storm. Clouds had settled over the sea, covering it like a shroud, and the raging wind had broken the boat’s mast. So the storm had carried the fisherman’s boat far out to sea, so far that he didn’t know where the coast was anymore. The boat drifted for two days through the rough seas that threatened to capsize it at any moment. The fisherman thought he was doomed and was saying his prayers when a large dolphin appeared amidst the waves. It jumped around the boat, playing in the waves as dolphins usually do. But this dolphin was all alone. Then suddenly it started guiding the boat. It was hard to believe, but that’s what the dolphin did: it swam behind the boat and pushed it. Sometimes, the dolphin swam off, disappeared in the waves, and the fisherman thought he’d been abandoned. Then the dolphin came back and started pushing the boat with its head, thrashing the sea with its powerful tail. They continued along in that fashion for one whole day, and at nightfall, during a break in the clouds, the fisherman finally caught sight of the lights on the coast. He shouted and wept with joy because he knew he’d been saved. When the boat neared the harbor, the dolphin turned and swam back toward the open sea, and the fisherman watched it go, the dolphin’s big, black back gleaming in the twilight.

Lalla quite likes that story. She often searches the surface of the sea to find the big black dolphin, but Naman told her that all that happened very long ago, and the dolphin must be very old now.

Lalla is waiting like she does every morning, sitting in the shade of the tall fig tree. She gazes at the gray and blue sea where the pointed crests of the waves bob. The waves break on the beach following a sort of slanted course; first they come rolling in on the eastern side over by the rocky headland, and then from the west, near the river. Last of all they break in the middle. The wind pounces, snatches up piles of foam and flings them out toward the dunes; the foam melts into the sand and dust.

When the sun is very high in the cloudless sky, Lalla goes back to the Project; she doesn’t hurry because she knows she’ll have work waiting for her when she arrives. First she’ll have to go fetch the water at the fountain, carrying an old rusty tin balanced on her head, then wash the clothes in the river, but that — well, that’s rather nice because you can chat with the others and listen to them telling all sorts of incredible stories, especially that girl whose name is Ikikr (which means “chickpea” in Berber) because of the wart on her cheek. But there are two things that Lalla doesn’t like at all: going to gather twigs for the fire and grinding wheat to make flour.

So she goes back very slowly, dragging her feet a little along the path. She doesn’t sing any more then because it’s the time of day when you run into people on the dunes, boys who are going to check the bird traps or men on their way to work. Sometimes the boys make fun of Lalla because she doesn’t know how to walk barefoot very well and because she doesn’t know any curse words. But Lalla can hear them coming from a long way off, and she hides behind a thorn bush near a dune and waits till they’ve passed.

There’s also that scary woman. She’s not old, but she’s very dirty, with tangled black and red hair, clothing torn from the thorns. When she appears on the path in the dunes you have to be very careful because she’s mean and doesn’t like children. People call her Aïsha Kondisha, but that’s not her real name. No one knows her real name. They say that she kidnaps children to hurt them. When Lalla hears Aïsha Kondisha coming along the path, she hides behind a bush and holds her breath. Aïsha Kondisha goes by muttering incomprehensible phrases. She stops a moment, lifts her head because she senses that someone is there. But she’s almost blind and can’t see Lalla. So she strikes out again, hobbling and shouting out insults in her hideous voice.

On certain mornings there is something in the sky that Lalla really loves: it’s a big white cloud, long and stringy, that crosses the sky right in the bluest spot. At the end of the white trail, you can see a little silver cross moving slowly through the sky with its head pointing upward. She loves to watch the cross moving across the huge blue sky, without a sound, leaving behind the long white cloud made of little cottony puffs that blend in with each other and spread out like a road, then the wind brushes over the cloud and washes the sky clean.

Lalla thinks she would love to be up there, in the tiny silver cross, above the sea, above the islands like that, heading out to the most distant of lands. She remains for a long time looking up at the sky after the airplane disappears.

The Project comes into view after a bend in the path when you’re far from the sea and you’ve walked for half an hour in the direction of the river. Lalla doesn’t know why it’s called the Project, because in the beginning there were only about ten plank and tarpaper cabins on the other side of the river and the vacant lots that separate it from the real town. Maybe they called it that to make people forget they were living with dogs and rats in the dust.

This is where Lalla came to live when her mother died, so long ago that she doesn’t remember very well when she came. It was very hot because it was in the summer, and the wind blew clouds of dust up over the plank shacks. She’d walked with her eyes shut behind the form of her aunt until they reached the windowless cabin where her aunt’s sons lived. Then she’d felt like running away, taking off along the road that leads to the high mountains and never coming back.

Every time Lalla comes back from the dunes and sees the roofs of tarpaper and sheet metal, her heart sinks and she remembers the day she came to the Project for the first time. But that was so long ago now, it’s as if everything that had come before didn’t really happen to her, as if it were a story that she’d heard someone tell.

It’s like her birth, in the mountains to the south, where the desert begins. Sometimes in winter, when there’s nothing to do outside and the wind blows hard over the plain of dust and salt, whistling between the poorly fitted planks in Aamma’s house, Lalla sits down on the floor and listens to the story of her birth.

It’s a very long and very strange story, and Aamma doesn’t always tell it the same way. In her slightly singsong voice, her head nodding as if she were going to fall asleep, Aamma says: “When the day you were to be born came, it was just before summer, before the dry season. Hawa could feel you were coming, and since everyone was still asleep, she left the tent silently. She just bound up her belly with a piece of cloth and walked out as best she could until she reached a spot with a tree and a spring, because she knew that when the sun came up she would need shade and water. It’s the custom down there, everyone must always be born near a spring. So she walked there and then she lay down near the tree and waited for the night to end. No one knew that your mother was outside. She could walk without making a sound, without making the dogs bark. Even though I was sleeping right next to her, I hadn’t heard her moan or get up to leave the tent…”

“Then what happened, Aamma?”

“Then it was daybreak, so the women woke up and we saw that your mother wasn’t there and we realized why she’d left. So I went looking for her by the spring and when I arrived she was standing against the tree with her arms hanging onto a branch and she was moaning softly to avoid alarming the men and the children.”

“What happened after that, Aamma?”

“Then you were born, right away, just like that, in the dirt between the roots of the tree, and we washed you in the spring water and wrapped you in a cloak because the night chill had not yet lifted. The sun rose, and your mother went back to the tent to sleep. I remember there was nothing to wrap you in, and you slept in your mother’s blue cloak. Your mother was happy because you came very quickly, but she was sad too, because of your father’s death; she thought she wouldn’t have enough money to raise you, and she was afraid she would have to give you to someone else.”

Sometimes Aamma tells the story differently, as if she doesn’t really remember very well. For example, she says that Hawa wasn’t clinging to the branch of the tree, but she was hanging from the rope of a well, and she was pulling with all her might to fight the pain. Or else she says that a passing shepherd delivered the baby and wrapped it in his woolen cloak. But all of that is veiled in an incomprehensible fog as if it had happened in another world, a world on the other side of the desert, where a diVerent sun shines in a diVerent sky.

“After a few days your mother was able to walk out to the well for the first time to wash herself and comb her hair. She carried you wrapped in the same blue cloak that she tied around her waist. She walked cautiously because she wasn’t yet as strong as before, but she was very happy that you had come and when we asked her your name she said it was the same as hers, Lalla Hawa, because you were the daughter of a sharifa.”

“Please, tell me about the one who was called al-Azraq, the Blue Man.”

But Aamma shakes her head.

“Not now, another day.”

“Please Aamma, tell me about him.”

But Aamma shakes her head without answering. She stands up and goes to knead the bread in the large earthen platter near the door. Aamma’s like that; she never wants to talk for very long, and she never says very much about the Blue Man or Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, who was called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes.

The odd thing here in the Project is that everyone is very poor, but no one ever complains. The Project is mostly this heap of plank and sheet metal shacks with those large sheets of tarpaper held down with stones that serve as roofs. When the wind blows too hard in the valley, you can hear all the planks banging and the sheet metal clanging, and the snapping of the tarpaper tearing in a strong gust. It makes a funny music that rattles and clatters, as if everyone were in a big, old, broken-down bus on a dirt road, or as if there were a bunch of animals and rats galloping over the roofs and through the alleys.

Sometimes the storm is very violent, it whisks everything away. The next day the whole town needs to be rebuilt. But the people laugh as they do it because they are so poor they aren’t afraid of losing what they have. Maybe they’re happy too, because after the storm the sky is even vaster, bluer, and the light even more lovely. In any case, all there is around the Project is very flat land, and the dusty wind, and the sea so huge that you cannot see the whole of it.

Lalla loves to look at the sky. She often goes over by the dunes to the place where the sand path leads away in a straight line. And she flops down on her back right in the middle of the sand and the thistles with her arms outspread. Then the sky opens out over her smooth face, it shines like a mirror — peaceful, so peaceful, not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane.

Lalla opens her eyes very wide, she lets the sky come inside of her. It makes a swaying motion, as if she were on a boat, or as if she’d smoked too much and her head were spinning. It’s because of the sun. It burns down very brightly despite the cold wind from the sea: it burns so brightly that its warmth enters the little girl’s body, fills her belly, her lungs, her arms and legs. It hurts too, hurts her eyes and her head, but Lalla remains motionless, because she so loves the sun and the sky.

When she’s there, sprawled out on the sand, far from other children, far from the Project filled with its noises and smells, and when the sky is very blue like today, Lalla can think about what she loves. She thinks of the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, he whose gaze is like the sunlight that envelops and protects you.

No one here in the Project knows him, but sometimes when the sky is very beautiful and the light sparkles on the sea and on the dunes, it’s as if the name of al-Ser were everywhere, vibrating everywhere, even deep within her. Lalla believes she can hear his voice, hear the faint sound of his footsteps, she feels his burning gaze that sees all, penetrates all, on the skin of her face. It’s a gaze that comes from across the mountains, beyond the Drâa, from the heart of the desert, and it shines like a light that can never die.

No one knows anything about him. When Lalla talks to Naman the fisherman about al-Ser, he shakes his head because he’s never heard the name, and he never mentions him in his stories. Yet Lalla thinks it must surely be his true name, since it was the one she had heard. But maybe it was only a dream. Even Aamma probably doesn’t know anything about him. Nevertheless, it’s a very handsome name, thinks Lalla, a name that makes you feel good when you hear it.

It’s in order to hear his name, to catch a glimpse of the light in his eyes, that Lalla always walks far into the dunes till she reaches the place where there is nothing but the sea, the sand, and the sky. For al-Ser cannot make his name heard, or let the warmth of his gaze be felt when Lalla is in the plank and tarpaper Project. He’s a man who doesn’t like noise or strong smells. He needs to be alone in the wind, alone like a bird hanging in the sky.

The people around here don’t know why she goes off alone. Maybe they think she goes over to the shepherds’ houses on the other side of the rocky hills. They don’t say anything.

People here are waiting. In truth, that’s all anyone ever does in the Project. They’ve come to a halt, not far from the seashore, in their plank and zinc shacks, lying motionless in the thick shadows. When day breaks over the stones and the dust, they come out for a minute, as if something were going to happen. They talk a little, the girls go to the fountain, the boys go to work in the fields, or else they go hang around in the streets of the real town across the river, or they go sit on the side of the road to watch the trucks go by.

Every morning, Lalla crosses the Project. She goes to fetch buckets of water from the fountain. As she walks along, she listens to the music coming from the radio sets, perpetuated from one house to another, always the same interminable Egyptian song that comes and goes through the narrow streets of the Project. Lalla enjoys hearing that music, wailing and rasping in cadence, mingling with the sound of the girls’ footsteps and the sound of the water in the fountain. When she gets to the fountain, she waits her turn, swinging the galvanized bucket at the end of her arm. She watches the girls; some are as black as negresses, like Ikikr, others are very white with green eyes, like Mariem. There are old women with veils who come to fetch water in a black pot and hurry away in silence.

The fountain is a brass faucet at the top of a long lead pipe that shakes and groans every time it is turned on and off. The girls wash their legs and faces in the icy jet. Sometimes they splash one another with the buckets, letting out shrill cries. There are always wasps buzzing about their heads, getting caught in their tangled hair.

Lalla brings the bucket of water back to Aamma’s house on her head, walking nice and straight so she won’t spill a drop. In the morning, the sky is lovely and clear as if everything were still completely new. But when the sun nears its highest point, a haze rises near the horizon, like a dust cloud, and the sky weighs more heavily upon the earth.

THERE IS ONE PLACE Lalla really likes to go. You have to take the paths that lead away from the sea and head eastward, then you go up the bed of the dried torrent. When the rocky hills come into view, you keep walking over the red stones, following the goat tracks. The sun shines bright in the sky, but the wind is cold because it comes from lands in which there are no trees or water; it’s the wind that comes from the depths of space. This is the dwelling place of the one whom Lalla calls al-Ser, the Secret, because no one knows his name.

So she comes up facing the great plateau of white stones that spreads all the way out to the edge of the horizon, all the way out to the sky. The light is dazzling; the cold wind cuts your lips and brings tears to your eyes. Lalla opens her eyes and stares as hard as she can until her heart starts thudding heavily in her throat and in her temples, until a red veil covers the sky, and she can hear the unknown voices in her ears that are all talking and muttering at the same time.

Then she walks out to the middle of the plateau of stones, to the place where only scorpions and snakes live. There are no more paths up on the plateau. There are only large blocks of broken rock, sharp as knives, upon which the light is glittering. There are no trees or grass, only the wind coming from the center of space.

It is here that the man sometimes comes to meet her. She doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from. At times he is frightening, and at other times he is very gentle and very calm, full of celestial beauty. All she sees of him are his eyes because his face is veiled with a blue cloth, like the faces of the desert warriors. He wears a long white cloak that scintillates like salt in the sun. In the shadow of the blue turban, his eyes burn with a strange dim flame, and Lalla can feel the warmth of his gaze moving over her face and body as if she were nearing a fire.

But al-Ser doesn’t always come. The man from the desert only comes when Lalla wants to see him very badly, when she really needs him, when she needs him just as much as she needs to talk, or to cry. But even when he doesn’t come, there is still a trace of him there on the plateau of stones, maybe it’s that searing look of his that lights up the landscape, that reaches from one end of the horizon to the other. So then Lalla can walk down the middle of the vast stretch of broken stones without paying attention to where she’s going, without thinking about it. On certain rocks there are strange signs that she doesn’t understand, crosses, dots, stains in the shape of suns or moons, arrows carved into the stone. They might be magic signs; that’s what the boys from the Project say, and that’s why they don’t like to come up as far as the white plateau. But Lalla isn’t afraid of the signs, or of loneliness. She knows the Blue Man from the desert is protecting her with his gaze and she is no longer afraid of the silence, or the barrenness of the wind.

There’s no one up in that place, not a soul. Only the Blue Man of the desert who is constantly watching her, without talking to her. Lalla doesn’t really know what he wants, what he’s asking for. She needs him, and he comes silently, with his powerful gaze. She is happy when she’s up on the plateau of stones, in the light of that gaze. She knows that she shouldn’t talk to anyone about it, not even to Aamma, because it’s a secret, the most important thing that’s ever happened to her. It’s also a secret because she’s the only one who isn’t afraid to come up to the plateau of stones often, in spite of the silence and the barrenness of the wind. Except maybe the Chleuh shepherd, the one they call the Hartani, he also comes up on the plateau sometimes, but that’s when one of the goats from his herd gets lost running along the ravines. He isn’t afraid of the signs on the stones either, but Lalla never dared to talk to him about her secret.

That’s the name she’s given the man who sometimes appears on the plateau of stones: al-Ser, the Secret, because no one should know his name.

He doesn’t speak. That is to say, he doesn’t speak the same language as humans. But Lalla hears his voice inside her ears, and in his language he says very beautiful things that stir her body inwardly, that make her shudder. Maybe he speaks with the faint sound of the wind that comes from the depths of space, or else with the silence between each gust of wind. Maybe he speaks with the words of light, words that explode in showers of sparks on the razor-edged rocks, with the words of sand, the words of pebbles that crumble into hard powder, and also the words of scorpions and snakes that leave tiny indistinct marks in the dust. He knows how to speak with all of those words, and his gaze leaps, swift as an animal, from one rock to another, shoots all the way out to the horizon in a single move, flies straight up into the sky, soaring higher than the birds.

Lalla loves coming up here, on the plateau of white stones, to hear those secret words. She doesn’t know the man she calls al-Ser; she doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from, but she loves to encounter him up here, because in his eyes and words, he bears the heat of the land of dunes and of sand, of the South, a treeless, waterless land.

Even when al-Ser doesn’t come, it’s as if she could see through his eyes. It’s difficult to understand, because it’s a bit like in a dream, as if Lalla weren’t exactly herself, as if she’d entered the world that lies behind the Blue Man’s eyes.

That’s when beautiful and mysterious things appear. Things that she’d never seen elsewhere, that trouble and worry her. She sees the immense expanse of gold- and sulfur-colored sand, as vast as the sea, with huge still waves. There is no one on the stretch of sand, not a tree, not a wisp of grass, nothing but the shadows of the dunes growing long, touching one another, creating lakes of twilight. Here everything looks the same, and it’s as if she were here and at the same time a little farther away, over where her eyes happen to fall, then still elsewhere, right out on the edge between the earth and the sky. The dunes move under her gaze, slowly, spreading their fingers of sand. There are golden brooks that run along the torrid valley bottoms. There are ripples, cooked hard in the relentless heat of the sun, and huge white beaches with flawless curves standing perfectly still before the sea of red sand. Light glistens and streams down everywhere, light coming from all sides at once, the light of the earth, the sky, and the sun. In the sky, there are no limits. Nothing but the dry haze shimmering out near the horizon, distorting reflections, dancing like wispy grasses of light — and the ochre and pink dust vibrating in the cold wind that rises up toward the very center of the sky.

All of this is strange and remote, and yet it seems familiar. As if Lalla is seeing, directly in front of her, the huge desert with the gleaming light through someone else’s eyes. She can feel the south wind blowing on her skin, the burning sand of the dunes under her bare feet. Most of all she can feel, overhead, the immensity of the blank sky, the sky with not a single shadow in which the pure sun is shining.

Then, for a long time, she stops being herself and becomes someone else, someone far away, forgotten. She sees other shapes, silhouettes of children, men, women, horses, camels, herds of goats; she sees the outline of a city, a stone and clay palace, mud ramparts from which troops of warriors are coming. She sees all of that because it is not a dream, but a remembrance from another’s memory that she has unknowingly entered. She hears the sound of men’s voices, the chanting of women, music, and maybe she even dances too, spinning around, beating the earth with the tips of her bare toes and her heels, making her copper bracelets and heavy necklaces jangle.

Then suddenly, as if in a breath of wind, everything is gone. It’s just that al-Ser’s eyes are no longer upon her, they have glanced away from the plateau of white stone. Then Lalla is looking through her own eyes again, can feel her heart again, her lungs, her skin. She can make out each detail, each stone, each crack, each tiny little pattern in the dust.

She turns back. She climbs down toward the bed of the dry torrent, avoiding the sharp rocks and the thorn bushes. When she gets to the bottom, she is very weary from all of that light, from the barrenness of the incessant wind. Slowly, she walks along the sand paths till she reaches the Project where the shadows of men and women are still moving around. She walks over to the fountain and bathes her face with her hands, kneeling on the ground, as if she were returning from a long journey.

WHAT’S ALSO NICE are the wasps. They’re all over the town with their long yellow bodies with black stripes and their transparent wings. They go everywhere, flying about heavily without paying any attention to people. They’re hunting for food. Lalla really likes them, she often watches them hanging in the sunbeams over heaps of garbage, or around the meat stalls at the butcher’s market. Sometimes they come close to Lalla when she’s eating an orange; they try to land on her face, on her hands. Sometimes too, one of them stings her on the neck or on the arm, and it burns for several hours. But it doesn’t matter, Lalla really likes the wasps anyway.

The flies aren’t as nice. First of all they don’t have that long yellow and black body, or the waist that is so slender when they’re standing on the edge of a table. The flies go fast, they alight suddenly, all flat with their big red-gray eyes goggling on their heads.

In the Project, there’s always a lot of smoke hanging over the plank shacks, along the alleys of tamped earth. There are women cooking meals on clay braziers, there are fires for burning garbage, fires for heating tar to put on the roofs.

When she has time, Lalla likes to stop and look at the fires. Or sometimes she goes over to the dried torrents to gather acacia twigs, she ties them together with a piece of string and brings the bundle back to Aamma’s house. The flames flare up joyfully among the twigs, making the stems and thorns burst open and the sap boil. The flames dance in the cold morning air, making fine music. If you look into the flames, you can see genies, at least that’s what Aamma says. You can also see landscapes, cities, rivers, all sorts of extraordinary things that appear and then hide, sort of like clouds.

Then the wasps come out, because they smell the odor of mutton cooking in the iron pot. The other children are afraid of the wasps, they want to drive them away, they try to kill them by throwing stones. But Lalla lets them fly around her hair and tries to understand what they are singing when they make their wings buzz.

When it’s mealtime, the sun is high in the sky, burning hotly. Whites are so white that you can’t look directly at them, shadows are so dark that they seem like holes in the ground. So first Aamma’s sons come. There are two of them, one who is fourteen, named Ali, and the other who is seventeen, whom everyone calls Bareki, because he was blessed on the day of his birth. Aamma serves them first, and they eat rapidly, greedily, without speaking. They always shoo the wasps away with the backs of their hands as they eat. Then Aamma’s husband comes; he works in the tomato fields, to the south. His name is Selim, but he’s called the Soussi, because he is from the Souss River region. He’s very small and thin, with lovely green eyes, and Lalla really likes him, even though it’s rumored almost everywhere that he’s a little lazy. He doesn’t kill the wasps; on the contrary, he sometimes holds them between his index finger and thumb and plays at making their stingers come out, then he sets them delicately back down and lets them fly away.

There are always people who are far from their homes, and Aamma puts a piece of meat aside for them. Sometimes Naman the fisherman comes to eat at Aamma’s house. Lalla is always very pleased when she knows he’s going to come, because Naman likes her too, and he tells her nice stories. He eats slowly, and from time to time he says something funny just for her. He calls her little Lalla because she’s the descendent of a true sharifa. When she looks into his eyes, Lalla feels as if she were looking at the color of the sea, going across the sea, as if she were on the other side of the horizon, in those big cities where there are white houses, gardens, fountains. Lalla loves to hear the names of the cities, and she often asks Naman to say them for her, just like that, just their names, slowly, to have time to see the things they hide:

“Algeciras.”

“Granada.”

“Sevilla.”

“Madrid.”

Aamma’s boys want to know more. They wait for Old Naman to finish eating, and they ask all sorts of questions about life over there, across the sea. They want to know serious things, not names to dream about. They ask Naman about the money that can be earned, the work to be had, how much clothes cost, food, the price of a car, if there are a lot of movie theaters. Old Naman is too old, he doesn’t know those kinds of things, or maybe he’s forgotten them, and anyway, life must have changed since he lived over there, before the war. So the boys shrug their shoulders, but they don’t say anything because Naman has a brother who still lives in Marseille and who might be useful one day.

On certain days Naman feels like talking about everything he’s seen, and Lalla is the one to whom he tells it all because she’s his favorite and because she doesn’t ask any questions.

Even if they’re not exactly true, Lalla loves the tales he tells. She listens carefully to him when he speaks of large white cities by the sea, with all those rows of palm trees, gardens filled with flowers, with orange and pomegranate trees climbing all the way up to the hilltops, and those towering buildings as high as mountains, those avenues that are so long you can’t see the end. She also likes it when he talks about the black automobiles driving along slowly, especially at night, with their headlights turned on, and the multicolored lights of the shop windows. Or the huge white ships that arrive in Algeciras in the evening, slipping slowly along the damp wharves, while the crowd shouts and waves to welcome the newcomers. Or even the railroad leading northward, from city to city, traveling through the misty countryside, over rivers, mountains, going into long dark tunnels, just like that, with all the passengers and their baggage, all the way to the big city of Paris. Lalla listens to all of that and she feels a little fretful shiver, but at the same time she thinks she’d like to be on that railroad, going from town to town, toward unfamiliar places, toward the lands where everyone has forgotten all about dust and starving dogs, about plank shacks through which the desert wind blows.

“Take me with you when you leave,” says Lalla.

Old Naman shakes his head, “I’m too old now, little Lalla, I won’t be going back again, I’d die on the way.”

To console her, he adds, “You’ll go. You’ll see all those cities, and then you’ll come back here, like I did.”

She simply stares into Naman’s eyes to see what he’d seen, like when you stare into the deep sea. She thinks of the lovely names of the cities for a long time, she hums them in her head as if they were the words to a song.

Sometimes it’s Aamma who asks him to talk about those foreign lands. So then, once again, he tells all about his journey through Spain, the border, then the road along the coast, and the great city of Marseille. He talks about all the houses, the streets, the stairways, the endless wharves, the cranes, boats as big as houses, as big as cities, from which trucks, freight cars, stones, cement are unloaded, and which then glide away on the dark waters of the port, blowing their horns. The two boys don’t listen much to that because they don’t believe Old Naman. When Naman leaves, they say that everyone knows he was a cook in Marseille, and they call him Tayyeb, to make fun of him, because it means “he was a cook.”

But Aamma listens to what he says. It doesn’t matter to her that Naman was a cook over there, and a fisherman here. She asks him diVerent questions each time, in order to hear the story of the journey again, the border, and life in Marseille. Then Naman also talks about street battles in which men attack Arabs and Jews in the dark streets, and you have to defend yourself with a knife, or by throwing stones and running as fast as you can to get away from the police vans that pick people up and take them off to prison. He also talks about the people who cross the borders illegally, in the mountains, walking by night and hiding during the day in caves and in the bushes. But sometimes the police dogs follow their trail and attack them when they come down on the other side of the border.

Naman talks about all of that in a gloomy way, and Lalla can sense a cold shadow pass over the man’s eyes. It’s a strange feeling that she’s not very familiar with, but it’s frightening, threatening, like the passage of death, of malediction. Maybe that was something Old Naman had also brought back from over there, from those cities on the other side of the sea.

When he’s not talking about his travels, Old Naman tells stories he heard long ago. He tells them just for Lalla and for the very young children because they’re the only ones who listen without asking too many questions.

On certain days, he sits down facing the sea in the shade of his fig tree and repairs his nets. That’s when he tells the most beautiful stories, those that take place out on the ocean, on boats, in storms, those in which people are shipwrecked and end up on desert islands. Naman can tell a story about almost anything, that’s what’s so great. For example, Lalla is sitting next to him in the shade of the fig tree and she’s watching him repair his nets. His long brown hands with broken nails work swiftly, know how to tie knots nimbly. At one point there is a big tear in the mesh of the net, and Lalla of course asks, “Did a big fish do that?”

Instead of answering, Naman thinks for a while and says, “I didn’t tell you about the day we caught a shark, did I?”

Lalla shakes her head, and Naman starts a story. As in most of his stories, there is a storm, with lightning flashing from one end of the sky to the other, waves as high as mountains, torrential rain. The net is heavy, so heavy to pull up that the boat is leaning to one side and the men are afraid of capsizing. When the net comes up, they see that a gigantic blue shark is caught in it and is thrashing around and opening its jaws full of terrifying teeth. So the fishermen must fight against the shark that is trying to swim away with the net. They hack at it with gaffs, with hatchets. But the shark bites the edge of the boat and tears it apart as if it were just crate wood. Finally the captain manages to kill the shark with a club, and they hoist the beast onto the deck of the boat.

“Then we cut him open to see what was inside, and we found a golden ring set with a deep-red precious stone that was so beautiful no one could take his eyes from it. Naturally we each wanted the ring for ourselves, and soon everyone was ready to kill one another to possess that cursed ring. That was when I suggested we throw dice for it because the captain had a pair of bone dice. So we played dice on the deck in spite of the raging storm that threatened to turn the boat over at any minute. There were six of us, and we tossed the dice six times, the winner being the one who threw the highest number. After the first round, only the captain and I remained because we had both thrown eleven, six and five. Everyone was pushing close around us to see who would win. I threw, and I got a double six! So I was the one who won the ring, and for a few minutes I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. But I looked at the ring for a long time, and its red stone shone like the fires of hell, with a lurid glimmer, like blood. Then I saw that the eyes of my companions were glowing with that same evil light, and I realized the ring was cursed, as was the person who had worn it and had been eaten by the shark, and I knew that whoever kept the ring would be cursed in turn.

“After I had looked at it well, I took it off my finger and threw it into the sea. The captain and my companions were furious and wanted to throw me into the sea as well. So I asked them, ‘Why are you angry with me? That which came from the sea has returned to the sea, and now it’s as if nothing happened.’ At that same moment the storm suddenly subsided and the sun started shining on the sea. So then the sailors also calmed down, and the captain himself who had so coveted the ring forgot about it at once and told me I had done the right thing in throwing it back into the sea. We threw the body of the shark overboard as well and returned to port to repair the net.”

“Do you really think the ring was cursed?” asks Lalla.

“I don’t know if it was cursed,” answers Naman, “but what I do know is that if I hadn’t thrown it back into the sea, one of my shipmates would have killed me that very day in order to steal it, and we would have all died in the same way, right down to the very last.”

They’re stories that Lalla loves to hear, sitting next to the old fisherman like that, facing out to sea, in the shade of the fig tree, when the wind is blowing and making the leaves rustle. It’s sort of as if she could hear the voice of the sea, and Naman’s words weigh on her eyelids and cause drowsiness to well up in her body. So then she curls up in the sand, her head against the roots of the fig tree, while the fisherman continues repairing his red twine nets, and the wasps hum above drops of salt.

HEY-O HARTANI!”

Lalla shouts very loudly into the wind as she nears some rocky, briar-filled hills. Out here, there are always a fair number of lizards that go skittering off between the stones. Sometimes there are even snakes that dart away with a swish. There are tall grasses as sharp as knives and lots of those dwarf palms that are used for making baskets and mats. You can hear insects chirping everywhere because there are tiny waterholes between the rocks and great deep wells hidden in the sinkholes where cold water sits. In passing, Lalla throws stones into the crevices and listens to the sound echoing deeply into the darkness.

“Harta-a-ni!”

He often hides, to make fun of her, simply stretching himself out at the foot of a thorn bush. He’s always wearing his long homespun robe, frayed at the sleeves and at the hem, and the long white cloth that he wraps around his head and neck. He is long and thin like a vine, with lovely brown hands and ivory-colored fingernails, and feet made for running. But it’s his face that Lalla likes most of all because it doesn’t resemble any of the people who live here in the Project. It’s a very thin, smooth face, a rounded forehead and very straight eyebrows, and large dark eyes that are the color of metal. His hair is short, almost frizzy, and he doesn’t have a mustache or a beard. Yet he seems strong and sure of himself, with a very direct way of looking at you, fearlessly examining you, and he knows how to laugh when he wants to, with a laughter that rings out and makes you happy right away.

Today Lalla finds him easily because he isn’t hiding. He’s simply sitting on a large rock, staring straight ahead in the direction of the herd of goats. He’s not moving. The wind lightly flares his brown tunic away from his body, lifts the end of his white turban. Lalla walks over to him without calling out because she knows he heard her coming. The Hartani has a sharp ear, he can hear the leap of a hare on the far end of a hill and he will point out planes in the sky to Lalla long before she has detected the sound of their motors.

When she’s very near to him, the Hartani stands up and turns around. The sun shines on his black face. He smiles and his teeth also shine in the light. Even though he’s younger than Lalla, he’s just as tall as she is. He’s holding a small blade with no handle in his left hand.

“What are you doing with that knife?” Lalla asks.

Feeling tired from her long walk, she sits down on the rock. He remains standing in front of her, balancing on one leg. Then all of a sudden he leaps backward and starts running over the rocky hill. A few minutes later he brings back a handful of reeds that he cut in the swamps. Smiling, he shows them to Lalla. He’s panting a little, like a dog who has run too fast.

“They’re lovely,” says Lalla. “Are they for making music?”

She doesn’t really ask that. She murmurs the words, making gestures with her hands. Every time she speaks, the Hartani stands still and looks at her intently because he’s trying to understand.

Lalla might be the only person he understands and she the only one who understands him. When she says “music,” the Hartani jumps up and down, holding out his long arms as if he were going to dance. He whistles between his teeth so loudly that the goats and their buck startle on the slope of the hill.

Then he takes a few of the cut reeds and joins them between his hands. He blows into them, and it makes a strange, slightly husky music, like the call of nighthawks in the dark, a sad sort of music, like the chant of Chleuh shepherds.

The Hartani plays for a moment without catching his breath. Then he holds out the reeds to Lalla, and she plays in turn, while the young shepherd stands still, his dark eyes bright with pleasure. They continue playing like that, taking turns blowing into the reed tubes of diVerent lengths, and the sad music seems to be stemming from the land, drenched in white light, from the holes of the underground caves, from the sky itself in which the slow wind is stirring.

From time to time they stop, breathless, and the young boy bursts out with his ringing laughter, and Lalla starts laughing too, without knowing why.

Then they walk across the fields of rocks, and the Hartani takes Lalla’s hand, because there are so many sharp rocks that she doesn’t know about between the tufts of brush. They jump over the little drystone walls, zigzagging through the thorn bushes. The Hartani shows Lalla everything there is in the fields of stones and on the slopes of the hills. He knows all the hiding places better than anyone: those of the praying mantises and of leaf insects. He also knows all the plants, the ones that smell good when you crinkle their leaves between your fingers, the ones with roots filled with water, the ones that taste like anise, like pepper, like mint, like honey. He knows which seeds are crunchy, the tiny berries that dye your fingers and lips blue. He even knows the hiding places where you can find small petrified snails, or tiny star-shaped grains of sand. He leads Lalla far away with him, beyond the drystone walls, along paths she doesn’t know, all the way out to the hills from where you can see the beginning of the desert. His eyes shine brightly; the skin on his face is dark and glistening with sweat when he gets to the top of the hills. Then he shows Lalla the way leading southward, toward the place of his birth.

The Hartani isn’t like the other boys. No one really knows where he comes from. Only that one day, a long time ago, a man came riding in on a camel. He was dressed like the warriors of the desert, in a large sky-blue cloak with his face veiled in blue. He stopped at the well to water his camel, and he also took a long drink of the well water. It was Yasmina, the wife of the goat herder, who saw him when she was going to fetch water. She waited, to let the stranger quench his thirst, and when he left again on his camel, she saw that the man had left a very young infant wrapped in a piece of blue cloth at the edge of the well. Since no one wanted him, Yasmina kept the child. She brought him up, and he lived with her family as if he were her son. That child was the Hartani; he was given that nickname because he had black skin like the slaves from the south.

The Hartani grew up in the very spot where the warrior of the desert had left him, near the hills and the fields of stone, right where the desert begins. He was the one who watched over Yasmina’s goats; he became like the other shepherd boys. He knows how to take care of animals; he knows how to lead them where he wants, without hitting them, just whistling between his fingers, for animals are not afraid of him. He also knows how to speak to swarms of bees, simply by whistling a little tune between his teeth, guiding them with his hands. People are a little frightened of the Hartani, they say he’s mejnoun, that he has special powers that come from demons. They say that he knows how to tame snakes and scorpions, that he can send them out to kill other shepherds’ livestock. But Lalla doesn’t believe that; she’s not afraid of him. Maybe she’s the only person who knows him well, because she speaks to him in a diVerent way than with words. She looks at him and reads the light in his black eyes, and he looks deep into her amber eyes; he doesn’t only look at her face, but really deep down into her eyes, and it’s as if he understands what she wants to say to him.

Aamma doesn’t like Lalla going up into the hills and fields of stone to see the shepherd so often. She tells her he’s an abandoned child, a stranger, that he’s not a boy for her. But as soon as Lalla finishes her work at Aamma’s house she runs along the path leading to the hills, and she whistles between her fingers like the shepherds do and shouts,

“Hey-o! Hartani!”

Sometimes she stays up there with him until nightfall. Then the young boy herds his animals together to lead them to the corral lower down, near Yasmina’s house. Often, since they don’t speak to each other, they remain sitting still on the boulders facing the rocky hills. It’s difficult to understand what they’re doing just then. Maybe they’re looking out into the distance as if they could see across the hills, all the way out to the other side of the horizon. Lalla herself doesn’t really understand how that happens, for time doesn’t seem to exist anymore when she’s sitting next to the Hartani. Words flow freely, go out toward the Hartani and come back to her, full of new meaning, like in certain dreams when you’re two people at once.

The Hartani is the one who taught her how to sit still like that, just looking at the sky, the stones, the bushes, looking at the wasps and the flies flying, listening to the song of hidden insects, feeling the shadows of birds of prey and the trembling of hares in the scrub.

Like Lalla, the Hartani doesn’t really have a family, he doesn’t know how to read or write, he doesn’t even know the prayers, he doesn’t know how to speak, and yet he’s the one who knows all those things. Lalla loves his smooth face, his long hands, his dark metallic eyes, his smile, she loves the way he walks, quick and agile as a hare, and the way he leaps from rock to rock, and disappears in the wink of an eye into one of his hiding places.

He never comes into the city. Maybe he’s afraid of the other boys, because he’s not like them. When he goes away, he always heads southward, toward the desert, to the place where the nomads atop their camels have left their tracks. He goes away for several days like that, without anyone knowing where he is. Then one morning he returns and goes back to his post in the field of stones with the she-goats and their buck as if he’d only been gone a few minutes.

When she’s sitting there on a rock like that next to the Hartani, and they’re both looking out at the vast stretch of stones in the sunlight, with the wind blowing from time to time, with the wasps humming over the little gray plants, and the sound of the goats’ hooves slipping on loose stones, there’s really no need for anything else. Lalla can feel the heat deep down inside of her, as if all the light of the sky and the stones were going straight into the very quick of her body, expanding. The Hartani takes Lalla’s hand in his long, brown, slender fingers, he holds it so tight that it almost hurts. Lalla can feel the current of heat pass through the palm of her hand, like an odd, feeble vibration. She doesn’t want to talk or think. She feels so good sitting there that she could stay all day long, right up until night fills the ravines, without moving. She stares straight out ahead, she can see each detail of the stone landscape, each tuft of grass, can hear each snapping sound, each insect call. She can feel the slow movement of the shepherd’s breathing, she is so close to him that she is seeing through his eyes, feeling things with his skin. It lasts a brief instant, but it seems so long that, head spinning, she forgets everything else.

Then all at once, as if he were afraid of something, the young shepherd jumps to his feet, lets go of Lalla’s hand. Without even looking at her, he starts running fast, like a dog, jumping over the rocks and the dried ravines. He leaps over the drystone walls, and Lalla sees his pale silhouette disappearing between the thorn bushes.

“Hartani! Hartani! Come back!”

Lalla shouts, standing up on the boulder, and her voice cracks because she knows it won’t do any good. The Hartani disappears suddenly, swallowed up by one of those dark hollows in the limestone. He won’t show himself again today. Maybe tomorrow, or some other time? So then Lalla also goes down the hill, slowly, from one rock to another, clumsily, and she looks back from time to time to try to catch a glimpse of the shepherd. She leaves the fields of stone and the drystone walls, makes her way back down toward the valley bottom, not far from the sea, where people live in houses made of planks, sheet metal, and tarpaper.

DAYS ARE THE SAME every day, here in the Project, and sometimes you’re not really sure what day you happen to be living. It’s an already remote time, and it’s as if there were nothing written in the cards, nothing certain. As a matter of fact, no one really thinks about it here, no one really wonders who he is. Yet Lalla thinks about it often, when she goes up to the plateau of stones where the Blue Man dwells, the man she calls al-Ser.

It might be due to the wasps as well. There are so many wasps in the Project, many more than there are men and women. From dawn to dusk they go humming through the air searching for food, dancing in the sunlight.

Yet in one sense, the hours are never the same, like the things Aamma says, like the faces of the girls who gather around the fountain. There are torrid hours, when the sun burns your skin through the clothing, when the light sticks pins in your eyes and makes your lips bleed. That’s when Lalla wraps herself up in blue cloth, ties a large handkerchief behind her head that covers her face up to the eyes, and wraps another thin blue cloth around her head that hangs down to her chest. The burning wind comes in from the desert, blowing hard grains of dust. Outside, the streets of the Project are empty. Even the dogs are hiding in holes in the earth, at the foot of the houses, against empty oil drums.

But Lalla loves being outdoors on days like that, maybe precisely because there is no one around. It’s as if there were nothing left on earth, nothing that belonged to humans. That’s when she feels most divorced from herself, as if nothing she had ever done could count, as if all memory had been erased.

So she goes over toward the sea, to the place where the dunes begin. She sits down in the sand, wrapped in the blue cloths; she looks at the dust rising in the air. Above the earth, at the zenith, the sky is a very deep blue, almost the color of night, and when she looks over at the horizon just above the line of dunes, she can see that pink ashen color, like at dawn. On those days you are free too from flies and wasps because the wind has driven them back into the hollows in the rocks, into their nests of dried mud, or into the dark corners of the houses. There are no men, or women, or children. There are no dogs, no birds. There is only the wind whistling in the branches of the shrubs, in the leaves of the acacias and the wild fig trees. There are only the thousands of stone particles lashing at your face, parting around Lalla, forming long ribbons, snakes, plumes. There is the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, the swishing sound of sand, and Lalla leans forward to breathe, the blue veil plastered against her nostrils and lips.

It’s great because it’s as if you’d sailed away on a boat, like Naman the fisherman and his companions, lost in the middle of a huge storm. The sky is blank, extraordinary. The earth has disappeared, or almost, barely visible through the cracks in the sand, ragged, worn, a few dark patches of reefs surrounded by the sea.

Lalla doesn’t know why she goes out on those days. She just can’t help it, she can’t stay closed up in Aamma’s house, or even go walking through the narrow streets of the Project. The burning wind dries out her lips and her nostrils; she can feel the flame descending inside her. It might be the flame of the light in the sky, the flame that comes from the East and that the wind is forcing into her body. But light doesn’t only burn, it also liberates, and Lalla can feel her body getting lighter, swifter. She resists, clinging to the sand dune with both hands, her chin against her knees. She barely breathes, in short little gasps, so as not to become too light.

She tries to think of the people she loves, because that can keep the wind from blowing her away. She thinks of Aamma, of the Hartani, of Naman most of all. But on those days, nothing really counts, not even any of the people she knows, and her thoughts slip immediately away, escape, as if the wind had torn them from her and carried them out among the dunes.

Then suddenly she feels the eyes of the Blue Man from the desert upon her. It’s the same look that was up there on the plateau of stones at the edge of the desert. It is a blank, imperious gaze that pushes down on her shoulders with all the weight of the wind and the light, a look filled with unbearable dryness that is painful, a look that has been hardened like the particles of stone that are hitting her face and clothing. She doesn’t understand what he wants, what he’s asking for. Maybe he wants nothing of her, he’s just simply passing over the coastline, the river, the Project, and he’s going even farther out, to burn up the cities and the white houses, the gardens, the fountains, the wide avenues in the lands on the other side of the sea.

Now Lalla is frightened. She would like to stop that gaze, to stop it on herself, so that it wouldn’t go out beyond that horizon, so it would cease its revenge, its flames, its violence. She doesn’t understand why the storm of the man from the desert wants to destroy those cities. She closes her eyes to block out the sight of the snakes of sand coiling around her, those dangerous plumes. Then she hears the voice of the desert warrior in her ears, the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret. She’s never heard him so clearly, even when he appeared before her on the plateau of stones wearing his white cloak, his face veiled in blue. It’s a strange voice that she hears inside of her head, mingling with the sound of the wind and the hissing of the sand. It’s a distant voice that is saying words she doesn’t really understand, endlessly repeating the same sounds, the same words.

“Make the wind stop!” says Lalla out loud, without opening her eyes. “Don’t destroy the cities, make the wind stop and the sun stop burning, make everything be at peace!”

Then again, in spite of herself, “What do you want? Why do you come here? I’m nothing to you, why do you talk to me, and only to me?”

But the voice is still murmuring, still fluttering inside of Lalla’s body. It is only the voice of the wind, the voice of the sea, of the sand, the voice of the light that dazzles and numbs people’s willpower. It comes at the same time as the stranger’s gaze, it shatters and uproots everything on earth that resists it. Then it goes farther out, toward the horizon, gets lost out at sea on the mighty waves, it carries the clouds and the sand toward the rocky coasts on the other side of the sea, toward the vast deltas where the smokestacks of refineries are burning.

TELL ME ABOUT the Blue Man,” says Lalla.

But Aamma is busy kneading bread on the large earthenware platter. She shakes her head. “Not now.”

Lalla insists. “Yes, now, Aamma, please.”

“I already told you everything I know about him.”

“It doesn’t matter, I want to hear you talk about him again, and about the man called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes.”

So Aamma stops mashing the dough. She sits on the floor and starts talking, because deep down, she really likes to tell stories.

“I already told you about this, it was long ago, in a time that neither your mother nor I knew, for it was when your mother’s grandmother was a child that the great al-Azraq, he who was called the Blue Man, died, and Ma al-Aïnine was just a young man in those days.”

Lalla knows all of their names well, she’s heard them often since she was a small child, and still, each time she hears them, it gives her a little shiver, as if something deep down inside of her had been stirred.

“Al-Azraq was from the same tribe as your mother’s grandmother, he lived far to the south, beyond the Drâa, even beyond the Saguiet al-Hamra, and in those days, there wasn’t a single foreigner in the land; the Christians weren’t allowed in. In those days, the warriors of the desert were undefeated, and all of the territories south of the Drâa belonged to them, for a very long way, deep into the heart of the desert, all the way down to the holy city of Chinguetti.”

Each time Aamma tells the story of al-Azraq, she adds a new detail, a new sentence, or else she changes something, as if she didn’t want the story to ever finish. Her voice is loud, somewhat singsong, it rings out oddly in the dark house with the sound of the corrugated iron cracking in the sunlight and the humming of wasps.

“He was called al-Azraq because before becoming a saint, he’d been a desert warrior far to the south, in the region of Chinguetti, because he was a nobleman and the son of a sheik. But one day, God called upon him, and he became a saint, he abandoned the blue attire of the desert and dressed himself in a woolen robe like the poor, and he walked barefoot through the land from city to city with a staff as if he were a beggar. But God wanted him to stand out from other beggars, and so God made the skin of his hands and face remain blue, and the color could never be washed away no matter the amount of water he used. The blue color remained on his face and hands, and when the people saw it, despite the worn woolen robe, they understood he wasn’t a beggar, but a true warrior of the desert, a blue man that God had called upon, and that is why they gave him that name. Al-Azraq, the Blue Man…”

As she speaks, Aamma rocks back and forth lightly, as if she were marking the beat to music. Or sometimes she is quiet for a long time, leaning over the large earthenware platter, busily breaking up the dough and bringing it back together again to flatten it out with her closed fists.

Lalla waits, without saying anything, for her to go on.

“No one from back in those days is still alive,” says Aamma. “Everything that is said about him comes from tales, his legend, what can be remembered. But now there are people who don’t want to believe that anymore, who say it’s all lies.”

Aamma hesitates because she’s choosing what she’s going to say carefully.

“Al-Azraq was a great saint,” she says. “He knew how to heal sick people, even those who were sick in their heads, those who had lost their minds. He would live anywhere, in the shacks of shepherds, small sheds of leaves built around the foot of trees, or even in caves high in the mountains. People came from far and wide to see him and ask for his help. One day, an old man brought his son who was blind, and he said, ‘Heal my son, you who have received God’s blessing, heal him and I will give you everything I have.’ And he showed him a bag full of gold that he had brought with him. Al-Azraq said, ‘Of what use can your gold be here?’ and he motioned out toward the desert, without a drop of water, without a piece of fruit. And he took the old man’s gold and threw it on the ground, and the gold turned into scorpions and snakes that fled into the distance, and the old man began to tremble with fear. Then al-Azraq said to the old man, ‘Are you willing to go blind in place of your son?’ The old man answered, ‘I am very old, what use are my eyes to me? Let my son see, and I will be happy.’ Immediately, the young man recovered his sight and was dazzled by the sunlight. But when he saw that his father was blind, he was no longer happy. ‘Give my father his sight back,’ he said, ‘for it was I whom God condemned.’ Then al-Azraq granted them both the gift of sight, because he knew they were good-hearted. And he continued his journey toward the sea and stopped to live in a place just like this, near the dunes by the seaside.”

Aamma remains silent for a moment. Lalla thinks of the dunes, the place where al-Azraq lived, she hears the sound of the wind and the sea.

“The fishermen gave him food every day because they knew that the Blue Man was a saint, and they sought his blessing. Some came from very far away, from the fortified towns in the South; they came to hear him speak. But al-Azraq did not teach the Sunna with words, and when someone came to ask of him, ‘Teach me the Way,’ he simply told his beads for hours without saying anything else. Then he said to the visitor, ‘Go and gather wood for the fire, go and fetch some water,’ as if the visitor were his servant. He would say to him, ‘Fan me,’ and he even spoke to him with harsh words, accusing him of being lazy and lying, as if the visitor were his slave.”

Aamma speaks slowly in the dim house, and Lalla believes she can hear the voice of the Blue Man.

“That’s how he taught the Sunna, not with spoken words, but with gestures and prayers, to force the visitors to become humble in their hearts. But when simple people came, or children, al-Azraq was very kind to them, he said very gentle words to them, he told them marvelous tales, because he knew their hearts were not hardened and that they were truly close to God. They were the ones for whom he sometimes performed miracles, to help them because they had no other recourse.”

Aamma hesitates. “Did I ever tell you about the miracle of the source he made spring up from under a stone?”

“Yes, but tell me again,” says Lalla.

That’s the story she loves most in the whole world. Every time she hears it, she feels something strange, like a feverish chill, moving deep down inside of her, as if she were going to cry. She thinks about how it all happened, very long ago, at the gates to the desert, in a village of mud and palm trees with a large empty square where the wasps hum and the water from the fountain shines in the sun, smooth as a mirror reflecting the clouds in the sky. There’s no one in the village square because the sun is burning down very hard, and all the people have taken shelter in the shade of their homes. From time to time, a slow ruffle of scorched air passes over the still water of the fountain, like an open eye watching the sky, and casts a fine white powder on its surface, forming an imperceptible milky veil that melts quickly away. The water is clear and deep, blue-green, silent, very still in the hollow of red earth in which women’s feet have left glistening prints. Only the wasps come and go over the water, skimming the surface, then turn back toward the houses from which the smoke of the braziers is rising.

“It’s the story of a woman who went to fetch a jug of water at the fountain. No one remembers her name now because it all happened so long ago. But she was a very old woman who had very little strength left, and when she reached the fountain she began to weep and lament because it was such a long way for her to carry the water back home. She remained there, squatting on the ground, weeping and moaning. Then all of a sudden, without her hearing him come, al-Azraq was standing beside her…”

Lalla can see him clearly now. He is tall and thin, wrapped in his sand-colored cloak. His face is hidden behind his veil, but his eyes are shining with a strange light that is both soothing and invigorating, like the flame of a lamp. She recognizes him now. He’s the one who appears up on the plateau of stones, up where the desert begins, the one who envelops Lalla in his gaze so firmly and with such insistence that it makes her dizzy. He appears just like that, as silently as a shadow, he knows how to be there when he’s needed.

“The old woman continued to cry, so al-Azraq asked her gently why she was weeping.”

Yet you can’t be frightened when he appears silently, as though he’s sprung up from the desert. His eyes are filled with kindness, his voice is slow and calm, light even streams from his face.

“The old woman told him of her sorrow, her loneliness, because her house was so far away from the water, and she hadn’t the strength to get home carrying the jug of water…”

His voice and his gaze are one and the same thing, as if he already knew what the future held, as if he knew the secret of people’s destinies.

“‘Don’t weep over that,’ said al-Azraq. ‘I’ll help you get back to your house.’ And he led her back home by the arm, and when they had arrived in front of her house, he simply said to her, ‘Pick up that stone by the side of the path, and you will never again be in need of water.’ And the old woman did as she was bidden, and under the stone, a source of very clear water sprang forth, and the water spread out until it formed a fountain, purer and more beautiful than any other in the land. So then the old woman thanked al-Azraq, and later, people from all parts came to see the fountain and taste its water, and everyone praised al-Azraq who had received such powers from God.”

Lalla thinks about the fountain that sprang up under the stone, she thinks about the very clear, smooth water shining in the sunlight. She thinks about it for a long time in the half-light, while Aamma continues kneading the bread. And the shadow of the Blue Man recedes, silently, just as it had come, but his forceful gaze remains hovering over her, enveloping her like a breath.

Aamma is quiet now, she says nothing more. She continues to punch and knead the dough in the large, wobbling, earthenware platter. Maybe she too is thinking of the lovely fountain of deep water that sprang up under a stone on the path, like the true words of al-Azraq, the true path.

THE LIGHT IS beautiful here every day on the Project. Lalla had never really paid attention to the light until the Hartani taught her how to look at it. It’s a very clear light, especially in the morning, just after sunrise. It shines down on the red rocks and the earth, brings them to life. There are places for seeing the light. One morning, the Hartani takes Lalla to one of those places. It’s a chasm that opens at the bottom of a rocky ravine, and the Hartani is the only one who knows about this hiding place. You have to know where the passageway is. The Hartani takes Lalla’s hand and leads her along the narrow tunnel that descends into the earth. Immediately you can feel the cool dampness of the shadows, and sounds cease, like when you put your head under water. The tunnel burrows deep into the earth. Lalla is a little frightened because it’s the first time she’s ever gone inside of the earth. But the shepherd squeezes her hand tightly and that gives her courage.

All of a sudden, they stop: the long tunnel is bathed in light because it opens right out into the sky. Lalla doesn’t understand how that is possible because they never stopped going down, but it’s true nevertheless: the sky is right there in front of her, immense and weightless. She stands motionless, breathless, wide-eyed. Here, all that’s left is the sky, so clear that you think you’re a bird flying through the air.

The Hartani motions for Lalla to come closer to the opening. Then he sits down on the stones, slowly, so as not to start a rockslide. Lalla sits down a little behind him, trembling with dizziness. Down at the bottom, all the way down at the bottom of the cliff in the haze, she can make out the great barren plain, the dried torrents. Out on the horizon, an ochre mist spreads: it’s the beginning of the desert. That’s where the Hartani goes sometimes, all alone, taking nothing with him but a little bread wrapped in a handkerchief. It’s in the east, where the sunlight is the most beautiful, so beautiful that you’d like to go running barefoot through the sand, leaping over the sharp stones and the ravines, pressing ever onward in the direction of the desert, just like the Hartani does.

“It’s beautiful, Hartani!”

Sometimes Lalla forgets that the shepherd can’t understand. When she speaks to him, he turns his face toward her, and his eyes are bright, his lips try to imitate the movements of language. Then he grimaces, and Lalla starts laughing.

“Oh!”

She points to a still black spot in the middle of the air. The Hartani looks at the spot for a moment and makes the sign of a bird with his hand, crooking the index finger, and spreading the last three fingers out like the feathers of a bird. The spot glides slowly along in the center of the sky, circling back on itself a little, dropping, coming closer. Now Lalla can see its body clearly, its head, its wings with spread quill feathers. It’s a hawk in search of its prey, sailing silently along on the wind, like a shadow.

Lalla watches for a long time, her heart pounding. She’s never seen anything as beautiful as that bird tracing its circles in the sky, so very high up above the red earth, solitary and silent in the wind, in the sunlight, and tipping down toward the desert at times as if it were going to fall. Lalla’s heart beats even harder, because the silence of the tawny bird is making its way inside of her, giving rise to fear. Her eyes are riveted on the hawk, she can’t tear them away. The awful silence in the center of the sky, the chill of the open air, most of all the burning light, daze her, dig out a dizzying void. She steadies herself, leaning her hand on the Hartani’s arm to keep from falling forward into the emptiness. He too is watching the hawk. But it’s as if the bird were his brother and nothing separated them. They both have the same look in their eyes, the same courage; they share the same interminable silence of the sky, the wind, and the desert.

When Lalla realizes that the Hartani and the hawk are one and the same, a shiver runs up her spine, but the dizziness has left her. The sky spreading before her is immense, the earth is a gray- and ochre-colored mist floating out on the horizon. Since all of this is familiar to the Hartani, Lalla is no longer afraid to enter the silence. She closes her eyes and allows herself to glide out on the air, into the center of the sky, holding on to the young shepherd’s arm. Together, they slowly trace large circles up above the earth, so high up that not a single sound can be heard, only the light ruffling of the wind in the quill feathers, so high up that the rocks, the thorn bushes, the houses of planks and tarpaper are hardly visible.

Then, after having flown together for a long time and having become inebriated on the wind, the light, and the blue of the sky, they return to the mouth of the cave at the top of the red cliff; they touch down lightly, without causing a single stone to roll, without moving a grain of sand. Those are the things that the Hartani knows how to do, just like that, without talking, without thinking, with his eyes alone.

He knows of all sorts of places where you can see lights, because there isn’t only one light, but many diVerent lights. At first, when he used to lead Lalla over the rocks, into the hollows, toward the old dried-up crevices, or else high up on a red rock, she thought it was to go and hunt lizards or rob birds’ nests, like the other boys do. But then, his eyes bright with delight, the Hartani would show her with a flourish of his hand — and at the end of his sweeping gesture, there would be nothing but the sky, immense, dazzlingly white, or else the dance of sunlight along the sharp broken rocks, or still yet those sorts of moons that the sun makes through the leaves of the shrubs. Those things were more beautiful when he looked at them, newer, as if no one had ever seen them before him, as in the beginning of the world.

Lalla likes to follow the Hartani. She walks behind him along the path he is opening up. It’s not really a path because there aren’t any traces, and yet when the Hartani moves forward you can tell that this is exactly where the passageway is, and nowhere else. Maybe these are paths for goats and foxes, not for people. But the Hartani, he’s just like one of them, he knows things that people don’t, he sees them with his whole body, not only with his eyes.

It’s the same with smells. Sometimes the Hartani walks a very long way out onto the rocky plain toward the east. The sun burns down on Lalla’s shoulders and face, and she has a hard time keeping up with the shepherd. At times like that, he pays no attention to her. He’s looking for something, almost without stopping, bent slightly toward the ground, leaping from rock to rock. Then all of a sudden he stops and puts his face against the earth, lying flat on his stomach as if he were drinking. Lalla draws quietly near when the Hartani lifts himself up a little. His metallic eyes are brimming with joy, as if he had found the most precious thing in the world. Between the stones, in the powdery dirt, there is a green and gray tuft, a very small shrub with scrawny leaves, like so many others out here, but when Lalla brings her own face closer, she smells the scent, very weak at first, then deeper and deeper, the scent of the most beautiful flowers, the smell of mint and of chiba weed, and that of lemons too, the smell of the sea and the wind, of prairies in summer. There is all of that and a lot more, in that dirty, fragile, minuscule plant growing in the shelter of two stones in the middle of the great arid plateau; and the Hartani is the only one who knows it.

He’s the one who shows Lalla all of the lovely smells, because he knows their hiding places. Smells are like stones and animals, they each have their hiding place. But you have to know how to look for them, like dogs, picking up the tiniest scents on the wind, then pouncing without hesitation on the hiding place.

The Hartani showed Lalla how to do it. Before, she didn’t know how. Before, she could pass right by a shrub, or a root, or a honeycomb, without picking up a thing. The air is so full of smells! They’re constantly moving, like breaths, they rise, they fall, encounter one another, mingle, separate. A strange odor of fear hovers over the trail of a hare; a little farther along, the Hartani motions to Lalla to come closer. At first there is nothing on the red earth, but little by little, the young girl detects something acrid, intent; the smell of urine and sweat, then suddenly she recognizes it: it’s the smell of a wild dog, starving, hair bristling, running over the plateau in pursuit of the hare.

Lalla loves spending her days with the Hartani. He shows all of those things to her alone. He’s wary of the others, because they don’t have time to wait, to seek out smells, to see desert birds fly. He’s not afraid of people. It’s rather they who are afraid of him. They say he’s mejnoun, possessed by demons, that he’s a magician, that he has the evil eye. The Hartani, he’s the one who has no father or mother, because he came out of nowhere; he’s the one a desert warrior left near the well one day, without saying a word. He’s the one who has no name. Sometimes Lalla would really like to know who he is; she’d like to ask him, “Where are you from?”

But the Hartani doesn’t understand the language of human beings; he doesn’t answer questions. Aamma’s eldest son says that the Hartani doesn’t know how to speak because he’s deaf. Anyway that’s what the schoolmaster told him one day, it’s called deaf-mute. But Lalla knows very well that isn’t true, because the Hartani hears better than anyone. He knows how to hear sounds so subtle, so faint, that you can’t even hear them by putting your ear to the ground. He can hear a hare jump on the far side of the plateau of stones, or else a man who is coming along the path at the other end of the valley. He can find the place where the cricket sings or the partridge nests in the tall grasses. But the Hartani doesn’t want to hear the language of human beings because he comes from a land where there are no humans, only the sand dunes and the sky.

Sometimes Lalla speaks to the shepherd, for example she says, “Biluuu-la!” slowly, looking deep into his eyes, and a strange glimmer lights up his dark metallic eyes. He places his hand on Lalla’s lips and follows their movement when she says things like that. But he never utters a word himself.

Then after a while, he’s had enough, and he looks away; he goes to sit a little farther off, on another rock. But that’s not very important, because now Lalla knows that words don’t really count. It’s only what you mean to say, deep down inside, like a secret, like a prayer; that’s the only thing that counts. And the Hartani doesn’t speak in any other way; he knows how to give and receive that kind of message. So many things are conveyed through silence. Lalla didn’t know that either before meeting the Hartani. Other people expect only words, or acts, proof, but the Hartani, he looks at Lalla with his handsome metallic eyes, without saying anything, and it is through the light in his eyes that you hear what he’s saying, what he’s asking.

When he’s worried, or on the contrary, when he’s very happy, he stops, he puts his hands on Lalla’s temples, meaning he holds them out on either side of the young girl’s head, without touching her and he stays like that for a long time, his face filled with light. And Lalla can feel the warmth of his palms on her cheeks and temples as if there were a fire warming her. It’s a strange feeling that fills her with happiness too, that creeps deep down inside of her, that releases and calms her. That’s especially why she likes the Hartani, because he has that power in the palms of his hands. Maybe he really is a magician.

She looks at the shepherd’s hands trying to understand. They are long hands with slender fingers, with pearl-colored nails, with thin skin that is brown, almost black on top, and pink, tinged with yellow underneath, like the leaves of those trees that have two colors.

Lalla likes the Hartani’s hands very much. They’re not like the hands of the other men in the Project, and she thinks there aren’t any others like them in all the land. They are nimble and light, full of strength too, and Lalla thinks that they are the hands of a nobleman, the son of a sheik maybe, or maybe even a warrior from the Orient, from Baghdad.

The Hartani knows how to do everything with his hands, not just pick up a stone or break a piece of wood, but make slip-knots with palm fibers, traps for catching birds, or else whistle, make music, imitate the call of the partridge, the hawk, the fox, and imitate the sound of the wind, the storm, the sea. Most of all his hands know how to talk. That’s what Lalla likes best. Sometimes, tucking his feet under his large homespun robe, the Hartani sits down in the sun on a big flat rock to talk. His clothes are very light-colored, almost white, and you can only see his dark face and hands, and that is how he begins to talk.

It isn’t really stories that he tells Lalla. Rather, it’s images that he makes appear in the air, with only his gestures, his lips, with the light in his eyes. Furtive images that appear in flashes, flickering on and off, but never has Lalla heard anything more beautiful, more true. Even the stories that Naman the fisherman tells, even when Aamma talks about al-Azraq, the Blue Man of the desert, and the fountain of clear water that sprang up from under a stone, it’s not that beautiful. The things that the Hartani says with his hands are preposterous, just like he is, but it’s like a dream, because every image that he makes appear comes at a time when you’re least expecting it, and yet it is just what you were expecting. He talks in that way for a long time, making birds with spread feathers appear, rocks clenched like fists, houses, dogs, storms, airplanes, giant flowers, mountains, wind blowing over sleeping faces. None of that means anything, but when Lalla looks at his face, the play of his black hands, she sees these images appear, so lovely and new, bursting with light and life, as if they actually sprang from the palms of his hands, as if they were coming from his lips, along the beam of his eyes.

The most beautiful thing when the Hartani is talking in this way is that nothing disturbs the silence. The sun burns down on the plateau of stones, on the red cliffs. The wind blows at times, slightly chilly, or you can hear the faint swish of sand running down the grooves in the rocks. With his long hands and agile fingers, the Hartani makes a snake slipping along the bottom of a ravine appear, then it stops, head uplifted. That’s when a large white ibis takes flight, flapping its wings. In the night sky, the moon is round, and with his index finger the Hartani lights up the stars, one, one more, still another… In summer, the rain begins to fall; the water runs into the streams, filling out a round pond where mosquitoes hover. Straight into the center of the blue sky, the Hartani throws a triangular stone that rises, rises, and — whish! — it suddenly opens and turns into a tree with infinite foliage filled with birds.

Sometimes the Hartani uses his face to imitate people or animals. He can do the turtle really well, squinching up his lips, head down between his shoulders, back rounded. It makes Lalla laugh every time. Just like the first time. Or sometimes he does the camel, lips pushed out in front, front teeth bared. He also does a very good job of imitating the heroes he’s seen in the movies. Tarzan, or Maciste, and all of the comic book characters.

Every now and again, Lalla brings him pocket-sized comics that she takes from Aamma’s eldest son or that she buys with her savings. There are the stories of Akim, of Roch Rafal, stories that are set on the moon or on other planets, and small Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck comic books. She can’t read what’s written, but she has Aamma’s son tell her the story two or three times, and she knows them by heart. But at any rate, the Hartani doesn’t feel like hearing the story. He takes the small books, and he has a strange way of looking at them, holding them diagonally and cocking his head a little to one side. Afterwards, when he’s looked at all the pictures closely, he leaps to his feet and imitates Roch Rafal or Akim on the back of an elephant (a rock plays the part of the elephant).

But Lalla never stays with the Hartani for very long, because there always comes a time when his face seems to close up. She doesn’t really understand what happens when the face of the young shepherd turns sullen and stiff, and there is such a faraway look in his eyes. It’s like when a cloud passes in front of the sun, when the night falls very suddenly on the hills in the valley bottoms. It’s terrible, because Lalla really wants to hold on to the moment the Hartani seemed happy, to his smile, the light that gleamed in his eyes. But it’s impossible. All of a sudden the Hartani is gone, like an animal. He jumps up and disappears in the wink of an eye, without Lalla being able to tell where he’s gone. But she doesn’t try to hold him back anymore. There are even certain days, when there’s been so much light up on the plateau of stones, when the Hartani has been talking with his hands and making so many extraordinary things appear, that Lalla prefers to leave first. She stands up and without running, without looking back, makes her way down to the path that leads to the plank and tarpaper Project. Maybe from having spent so much time with the Hartani, she has grown to be like him now.

As a matter of fact, people don’t like it very much that she goes to see the Hartani so often. Perhaps they’re afraid she’ll become mejnoun too, that she’ll catch the evil spirits that are in the shepherd’s body. Aamma’s eldest son says that the Hartani is a thief, because he has gold in a small leather bag that he wears around his neck. But Lalla knows that’s not true. The Hartani found that gold one day in the bed of a dried-up torrent. He took Lalla by the hand and guided her down to the bottom of the crevice and down there, in the gray sand of the torrent, Lalla had seen the gold dust shining.

“He’s not the right kind of boy for you,” says Aamma when Lalla comes back from the plateau of stones.

Lalla’s face is now just as black as the Hartani’s, because the burning sun is stronger up there.

Sometimes Aamma adds, “After all, you don’t want to marry the Hartani, do you?”

“Why not?” Lalla answers. And she shrugs her shoulders.

She doesn’t want to get married; she never even thinks about it. The idea of getting married to the Hartani makes her start laughing.

Nevertheless, whenever she can, once she’s decided she’s finished her work, Lalla leaves the Project and heads toward the hills where the shepherds are. It’s east of the Project, up where the lands without water, the high cliffs of red stone, begin. She enjoys walking along the very white path that snakes through the hills, listening to the shrill music of the crickets, observing the marks left by snakes in the sand.

A little farther along, she hears the whistling of shepherds. They are mostly young children, boys and girls who are scattered about almost everywhere in the hills with herds of goats and sheep. They whistle like that to call to one another, to talk to one another, to scare off the wild dogs.

Lalla enjoys walking through the hills, eyes squinted tight because of the white light, with all of those whistling sounds echoing out on all sides. It makes her shiver a bit, in spite of the heat; it makes her heart beat faster. Sometimes she plays at answering them. The Hartani showed her how to do that, by putting two fingers in her mouth.

When the young shepherds come to see her on the path, they keep their distance from her at first, because they’re rather wary. They have smooth faces, the color of burnt copper, with rounded foreheads and an odd color of hair, almost red. It’s the desert sun and wind that have burnt their skin and hair. They are ragged, dressed only in long cream-colored canvas shirts, or dresses made from flour sacks. They don’t come close because they speak Chleuh, and they don’t understand the language that the people from the valley speak. But Lalla likes them, and they aren’t afraid of her. Sometimes she brings them things to eat, whatever she was able to sneak out of Aamma’s house, a little bread, some biscuits, dried dates.

Hartani is the only one who can keep them company, because he’s a shepherd like them, and because he doesn’t live with the people from the Project. When Lalla is with him, far out in the middle of the plateau of stones, they approach, jumping from one rock to another, without making a sound. But they whistle every now and again just to let you know. When they arrive, they gather round the Hartani, talking very rapidly in their strange language that makes a sound like birds. Then they leave again very quickly, leaping over the plateau of stones, still whistling, and sometimes the Hartani takes off running along with them, and even Lalla tries to follow them, but she can’t jump as fast as they can. They all laugh real hard when they see her, and they start running again, letting out great bursts of joyful laughter.

They share a meal on the white rocks in the middle of the plateau. Under their shirts, they carry a bit of cloth that contains a little black bread, a few dates, figs, some dried cheese. They give a piece to the Hartani, a piece to Lalla, and in exchange she gives them some of her white bread. Sometimes she brings a red apple that she bought at the Cooperative. The Hartani takes out his little knife with no handle and cuts the apple into slivers so everyone can have a piece.

It’s fine up on the plateau of stones in the afternoon. The sunlight is constantly bouncing off the sharp-edged stones; you’re surrounded with sparkles. The sky is deep blue, dark, without that white haze that comes from the sea and the rivers. When the wind blows hard, you have to sink down into the holes in the rocks to protect yourself from the cold, and then you can hear nothing but the sound of the air whistling over the earth, through the bushes. It makes a sound like the sea, but slower, longer. Lalla listens to the shepherds and the distant bleating of the herds. Those are the sounds she loves most in the world, along with the calls of gulls and the crashing of the waves. They’re sounds as if nothing bad could ever happen on earth.

One day, just like that, after having eaten some bread and dates, Lalla followed the Hartani all the way to the foot of the red hills, over where the caves are. That’s where the shepherd sleeps in the dry season when the herd of goats needs to go farther out to find new grazing lands. In the red cliff, there are those black holes, half-hidden by thorn bushes. Some of those holes are hardly as large as a foxhole, but when you go inside, the cave opens out and becomes as large as a house, and so cool.

That’s how Lalla went in, on her belly, following the Hartani. At first she couldn’t see anything at all, and she got frightened. Suddenly, she started shouting, “Hartani! Hartani!”

The shepherd turned back, and took her by the arm and pulled her up into the cave. Then when she recovered her sight, Lalla saw the large room. The walls were so high you couldn’t see the tops of them, covered with gray and blue stains, patches of amber, of copper. The air was gray because of the dim light coming from the holes in the cliff. Lalla heard the sound of wings beating heavily, and she pressed close to the shepherd. But it was only the bats that had been disturbed in their sleep. They went to perch a little farther off, squeaking and screeching.

The Hartani sat down on a large flat rock in the middle of the cave, and Lalla sat next to him. Together they watched the dazzling light coming through the opening of the cave in front of them. The inside of the cave is filled with darkness, with the dampness of everlasting night, but outside the light hurts your eyes. It’s like being in another land, another world. It’s like being at the bottom of the sea.

Lalla isn’t talking now, she doesn’t feel like talking. Like the Hartani, she is on the night side. The look in her eyes is as dark as night, her skin is the color of shadows.

Lalla can feel the warmth of the shepherd’s body very near her, and the light of his eyes slowly creeps inside of her. She would so like to be able to reach him, enter his realm, be with him completely, so that he could hear her at last. She brings her mouth close to his ear, she smells the odor of his hair and his skin, and she says his name very softly, almost silently. The shadows of the cave are all around them, enveloping them like a fine yet sturdy veil. Lalla can hear very clearly the sound of water trickling down the walls of the cave and the small cries the bats are making in their sleep. When her skin touches that of the Hartani, it makes a strange wave of heat run through her body, a dizzy feeling. It’s the heat of the sun that has been sinking into their bodies all day long and that is now flowing out in long feverish waves. Their breaths touch too, mingle, for there is no more need for words, only for what they feel. It’s a dizziness she’s never felt before, that has grown out of the shadows in the cave in just a few seconds, as if the stone walls and the damp shadows had been waiting a long time for them to come in order to release their powers. The dizziness is spinning faster and faster inside of Lalla’s body, and she can distinctly hear the pulsing of her blood mixed with the sounds of drops of water on the walls and the small cries of the bats. As if their bodies were now one with the inside of the cave, or were prisoners in the entrails of a giant.

The Hartani’s odor of goats and sheep mingles with the odor of the young girl. She can feel the warmth of his hands, sweat moistens her forehead and makes her hair stick to it.

Suddenly Lalla can’t understand what’s happening to her anymore. She is afraid, she shakes her head and tries to escape the embrace of the shepherd who is pinning her arms to the rock and knotting his long, hard legs against hers. Lalla wants to scream but, as in a dream, not a sound comes from her throat. The damp shadows are closed tightly around her, veiling her eyes, the weight of the shepherd’s body is preventing her from breathing. Finally, she’s able to wrench out a scream, and her voice echoes like thunder off the walls of the cave. The bats, abruptly awakened, begin whirling around the walls with the rushing sound of their wings and squeaking.

The Hartani is already on his feet atop the rock, he steps back a little. His long arms are flapping around to drive away the clouds of drunken bats swirling about him. Lalla can’t see his face because the shadows in the cave have grown thicker, but she can sense the anxiety in him. A terrible feeling of sadness steals into her, rises steadily. She’s not afraid of the shadows anymore, or of the bats. Now it is she who takes the Hartani’s hand, and she can feel he is trembling dreadfully, that his whole body is jerking with spasms. He’s just standing there. Torso leaning backwards, one arm over his eyes to keep from seeing the bats, he is trembling so hard that his teeth are chattering. Then Lalla guides him over to the opening of the cave, and she’s the one who pulls him outside, until the sun floods down upon their heads and shoulders.

Out in the daylight, the Hartani’s face looks so distraught, so pitiful that Lalla can’t keep from laughing. She wipes the mud stains from her torn dress and from the Hartani’s long shirt. Then they go back down the slope toward the plateau of stones together. The sun shines brightly on the sharp stones, the ground is white and red beneath the nearly black sky.

It’s like diving headfirst into cold water when you are very hot, and swimming a long time to cleanse your whole body. Then they start running across the plateau of stones, as fast as they can, leaping over the rocks until Lalla stops, out of breath, bending over with a pain in her side. The Hartani continues to leap from rock to rock like an animal; then he notices that Lalla is no longer behind him, and he makes a large circle to work his way back. Together they remain sitting in the sun on a rock holding hands tightly. The sun descends toward the horizon, the sky turns yellow. OV in the distant hills, in the hollows of the valleys, the scattered sharp whistles of the shepherds call out to one another, then answer.

LALLA LOVES FIRE. There are all sorts of fires here in the Project. There are the morning fires, when the women and the little girls are cooking the meal in large black pots, and the black smoke swirls along the ground mixing in with the morning mist, just before the sun appears over the red hills. There are fires of grasses and branches that burn for a long time all by themselves, almost smothered, with no flames. There are the fires of the braziers as afternoon draws to an end, in the lovely light of the declining sun, amid coppery reflections. The low smoke slithers around like a long, blurry snake, filling out from house to house, wafting gray rings in the direction of the sea. There are the fires people light under old tin cans to heat tar for plugging up the holes in the roofs and the walls.

Here, everyone loves fire, especially old people and children. Every time a fire is lit, they go and sit around it, squatting on their heels, and they watch the flames dancing with blank looks on their faces. Or else they throw in little dried twigs that flare up all of a sudden, crackling, and handfuls of grass that disappear, making blue swirls.

Lalla goes to sit in the sand by the sea, in the place where Naman the fisherman has lit his big fire of branches to heat up pitch with which to caulk his boat. It’s near evening; the air is very mild, very calm. The sky is an airy color of blue, transparent, without a cloud.

Near the shore, there are always those somewhat scrawny trees, burned by the salt and the sun, whose foliage is made up of thousands of tiny blue-gray needles. As Lalla passes them, she pulls off a handful of needles for Naman the fisherman’s fire, and she also puts a few in her mouth to chew on slowly as she walks. The needles’ taste is salty, bitter, but it mixes in with the smell of smoke and is just right.

Naman builds his fire any old place, wherever he finds large dead branches washed up on the beach, and he stuffs all the holes with dried twigs that he goes to fetch in the flatlands on the other side of the dunes. He also uses dried kelp and dead thistles. That’s when the sun is still high in the sky. Sweat runs down the old man’s forehead and cheeks. The sand burns like fire.

Then he lights the fire with his tinderbox, being very careful to place the flame on the side where there is no wind. Naman is very good at building fires, and Lalla watches his every move closely, to learn. He knows how to find just the right place, neither too exposed, nor too sheltered, in the hollows of the dunes.

The fire starts up and then goes out two or three times, but Naman doesn’t really seem to notice. Every time the flame dies, he roots around in the twigs with his hand, without being afraid of getting burned. That’s the way fire is; it likes people who aren’t afraid of it. So then the flame leaps up again, not very strong at first; you can barely see the tip of it glowing between the branches, then suddenly it blazes up around the whole base of the bonfire, throwing out a bright light and crackling abundantly.

When the fire is going strong, Naman the fisherman sets the tripod up over it and places the pot of pitch on it. Then he sits down in the sand and watches the fire, every once in a while throwing in another twig that the flames devour instantly. Then the children also come to sit down. Having smelled the smoke, they’ve come from afar, running along the beach. They shout, call to one another, burst out laughing, because fire is magic, it makes people want to run and shout and laugh. Right now the flames are very high and bright, they are waving around and crackling, they’re dancing, and you can see all sorts of things in their folds. What Lalla loves most of all is the base of the fire, the very hot brands enveloped in flames, and that incandescent color which has no name and resembles the color of the sun.

She also watches the sparks floating up the column of gray smoke, gleaming bright and then going out, disappearing into the blue sky. At night, the sparks are even more beautiful, like clusters of falling stars.

The sand flies have come out as well, drawn by the odor of burning kelp and hot pitch, irritated by the plumes of smoke. Naman doesn’t pay any attention to them. He’s looking only

at the fire. Every now and again he stands up, dips a stick into the pot of pitch to see if it’s hot enough; then he stirs the thick liquid, blinking his eyes against the whirling smoke. His boat is a few meters away, on the beach, keel pointing skyward, ready for caulking. The sun is descending quickly now, nearing the arid hills on the other side of the dunes. Darkness is spreading. The children are sitting on the beach, huddled close to one another, and their laughter has died down a little. Lalla looks at Naman; she tries to get a glimpse of that clear, water-colored light that shines in his eyes. Naman recognizes her, gives her a friendly little wave, then says immediately, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

“Did I ever tell you about Balaabilou?”

Lalla shakes her head. She’s happy because it’s the perfect time for a story, just like that, sitting out on the beach, watching the fire that is making the pitch popple in the pot, the very blue sea, feeling the warm wind hustling the smoke along, with the flies and the wasps humming, and not far off, the sound of the waves washing all the way up to the old boat overturned on the sand.

“Ah, so I never told you the story of Balaabilou?”

Old Naman stands up to look at the pitch that is boiling very hard. He turns the stick slowly in the pot and seems to think everything is just right. Then he hands an old pot with a burnt handle to Lalla.

“Okay, you’re going to fill this up with pitch and bring it to me over there when I’m near the boat.”

He doesn’t wait for an answer and goes over to set himself up on the beach beside his boat. He prepares all kinds of paintbrushes made out of bits of rags tied to wooden sticks.

“Come on!”

Lalla fills up the pot. The boiling pitch spatters and stings Lalla’s skin, and the smoke burns her eyes. But she runs, holding the pot full of pitch in her outstretched hands. The children follow her, laughing, and sit down around the boat.

“Balaabilou, Balaabilou…”

Slowly Old Naman chants the name of the nightingale as if he were trying to remember all the details of the story. He dips the sticks into the hot pitch and starts painting the hull of the boat between the seams of the boards, where there are oakum plugs.

“It was a very long time ago,” says Naman. “It happened in a day that neither I, nor my father, nor even my grandfather knew, and yet we remember the story very well. In those days people weren’t the same as they are now, and we knew nothing of the Romans or anything that had to do with other countries. That’s why there were still djinns back then, because no one had chased them away. So back in those days, in a large city in the Orient, there lived a powerful emir whose only child was a daughter named Leila, Night. The emir loved his daughter more than anything in the world, and she was the most beautiful, the most gentle, the most obedient young girl in the kingdom; she was destined to live the happiest of lives in the world…”

Evening is settling slowly in the sky, deepening the blue of the sea and making the froth of the waves seem even whiter. At regular intervals, Old Naman dunks his rag brushes into the pot of pitch and, with a twirling motion, runs them along the grooves filled with oakum. The boiling liquid sinks into the chinks and dribbles onto the sand of the beach. Lalla and all the children watch Naman’s hands.

“Then something terrible happened in the kingdom,” Naman goes on. “There was a great drought, God’s curse over the whole kingdom, and there was no more water in the rivers or in the reservoirs, and everyone was dying of thirst, first the trees and the plants, then the herds of animals, the sheep, the horses, the camels, the birds, and finally the humans, who died of thirst in the fields by the side of the road; it was a dreadful sight to see, and that is why we still remember it…”

The louse flies come out; they alight on the children’s lips, buzz about their ears. They are inebriated by the sharp smell of the pitch and the thick plumes of smoke swirling up between the dunes. There are wasps too, but no one tries to bat them away because when Old Naman tells a story, it’s as if they too become a little magic, sort of like djinns.

“The emir of the kingdom was very sad, and he summoned the wise men to ask their advice, but no one knew what to do to stop the drought. It was then that a stranger appeared, an Egyptian traveler who was well-versed in magic. The emir summoned him as well, and asked him to break the curse upon the kingdom. The Egyptian gazed at an ink spot, and he became suddenly frightened, began to tremble and refused to speak. ‘Speak!’ said the emir. ‘Speak and I will make you the richest man in the kingdom.’ But the stranger refused to speak. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘allow me to go on my way, don’t ask me to reveal this secret.’”

When Naman stops talking to dip his brushes in the pot, Lalla and the children are almost afraid to breathe. They listen to the fire crackling and the sound of the pitch boiling in the pot.

“Then the emir grew angry and said to the Egyptian, ‘Speak or you are doomed.’ And the executioners seized him and were already unsheathing their sabers to cut off his head. So the stranger cried out, ‘Stop! I will tell you the secret of the curse, but know that you are damned!’”

Old Naman has a very particular, long, drawn-out way of saying Mlaaoune — damned by God — that makes the children shudder. He stops for a moment to use up the rest of the pitch in the pot. Then he hands it to Lalla without saying a word, and she has to run over to the fire to fill it with boiling pitch. Thankfully, he waits for her to come back before continuing the story.

“Then the Egyptian said to the emir, ‘Did you not once punish a man for stealing gold from a merchant?’

“‘Yes, I did,’ said the emir, ‘because he was a thief.’

“‘Know that the man was innocent,’ said the Egyptian, ‘and falsely accused, and that he has put a curse on you. It is he who sent the drought, for he is the ally of spirits and demons.’”

When evening comes like this out on the beach, while you’re listening to Old Naman’s deep voice, it’s sort of as if time no longer existed, or as if it had been turned back, to another very long and very gentle time, and Lalla wishes Naman’s story would never end, even if it had to last for days and nights, and she and the other children would fall asleep, and when they awakened, they would still be there listening to Naman’s voice.

“‘What must be done to stop this curse?’ asked the emir. The Egyptian looked him straight in the eyes: ‘You must realize there is but one remedy, and I will tell you what it is since you have asked me to reveal it to you. You must sacrifice your only daughter, she whom you love more than anything in the world. Go, leave her to be eaten by the wild beasts of the forest, and the drought which has stricken your land will cease.’

“Then the emir began to weep and to cry out in pain and anger, but as he was a good man, he allowed the Egyptian to leave freely. When the people of the land learned all of this, they also wept, for they dearly loved Leila, the daughter of their king. But the sacrifice had to be made, and the emir decided to take his daughter into the forest to allow her to be eaten by the wild beasts. However, there was one young man in the kingdom who loved Leila more than any of the others, and he was determined to save her. He had inherited from one of his relatives, a magician, a ring that gave the one who possessed it the power to be transformed into an animal. However, once transformed he could never return to his original form, and he would be immortal. The night of the sacrifice came, and the emir went into the forest along with his daughter…”

The air is smooth and pure, the line of the horizon is infinite. Lalla looks out as far as she can see, as if she had been turned into a gull and were flying straight out over the sea.

“The emir reached the middle of the forest; he had his daughter dismount from the horse and tied her to a tree. Then he left her, weeping in sorrow, for the cries of the ferocious beasts could already be heard as they approached their victim…”

At times, the sound of the waves on the beach is more distinct, as if the sea were drawing nearer. But it’s just the wind blowing, and when it coils round in the hollows of the dunes, it sends spurts of sand that shoot up and mix with the smoke.

“In the forest, tied to the tree, poor Leila was trembling with fright, and calling out to her father to save her because she couldn’t bear to die like that, devoured by the wild beasts… Already a large wolf was moving toward her, and she could see his eyes glowing like flames in the night. Then all of a sudden a sweet music broke forth in the forest. It was such beautiful, pure music that Leila was no longer afraid, and all the ferocious beasts of the forest stopped to listen…”

Old Naman’s hands take the brushes, one after the other, and with a slow twirling motion, run them along the hull of the boat. Lalla and the children watch them too, as if the brushes were telling a story.

“The celestial music resounded throughout the forest, and as they listened, the wild beasts lay down on the ground and became as gentle as lambs, for the song that came from the heavens bewildered them, troubled their souls. Leila also listened to the music with delight, and soon her bonds came loose on their own, and she began to walk through the forest, and wherever she went, the invisible musician was above her, hidden in the leaves of the trees. And the wild beasts were lying along the path, and they licked the princess’s hands without causing her the slightest harm….”

The air is so transparent now, the light so soft, that you think you’re in another world.

“Thus Leila came back to her father’s house in the morning, after having walked all night long, and the music followed her all the way to the gates of the palace. When the people saw this, they were very happy because they loved the princess dearly. And no one noticed a little bird flying discreetly from branch to branch. And that very same morning the rain began to fall upon the earth…”

Naman stops painting for a minute; Lalla and the children stare at his copper face in which his green eyes are shining. But no one asks any questions, no one utters a word.

“And the bird Balaabilou sang on in the rain, because he was the one who had saved the life of the princess he loved. And since he could not return to his original form, he came every night to perch on the branch of a tree next to Leila’s window and sing his sweet music to her. It is even said that after her death, the princess was also turned into a bird, and she joined Balaabilou to sing in the forests and gardens with him forevermore.”

When the story is finished, Naman says nothing more; he continues working on his boat, running his pitch paintbrushes with a twirling motion along the hull. The light wanes because the sun is slipping over to the other side of the horizon. The sky becomes very yellow, with a hint of green, the hills seem to be cut out of tarpaper. The smoke from the bonfire is thin, light, it can barely be seen against the sunlight, like the smoke of a single cigarette.

The children drift off, one after another. Lalla remains alone with Old Naman. He finishes his work without saying anything. Then he goes off as well, walking slowly along the beach, carrying his paintbrushes and his pot of pitch. Then the only thing left next to Lalla is the dying fire. Darkness quickly reaches deep into the sky, all of the intense blue of day is gradually turning into the black of night. The sea grows calm at this particular time, no one knows why. The waves fall very lazily on the sandy beach, extending their skirts of purple foam. The first bats begin to zigzag over the sea in search of insects. There are a few mosquitoes, a few gray moths that have lost their way. Lalla listens to the muffled cry of the nighthawk in the distance. All that is left of the fire are a few red embers still burning with no flame or smoke, like strange throbbing beasts hidden amidst the ashes. When the last ember goes out, after having flared for just a few seconds, like a dying star, Lalla rises to her feet and walks away.

THERE ARE TRACKS almost everywhere in the dust of the old paths, and Lalla plays at following them. Sometimes they don’t lead anywhere, when they’re bird or insect tracks. Sometimes they lead you to a hole in the ground, or else to the door of a house. It was the Hartani who had shown her how to follow the tracks without getting thrown off by the surroundings, the grass, the flowers, or the shiny stones. When the Hartani is following a track, he’s exactly like a dog. His eyes gleam, his nostrils flare, his whole body tenses and leans forward. Sometimes he even lies down on the ground to better smell the trail.

Lalla really likes the paths around the dunes. She remembers the first few days after arriving in the Project, after her mother had died from the fevers. She remembers her journey in the tarp-covered truck, and her father’s sister, the one named Aamma, being wrapped up in the large, gray, woolen cloak, with her face covered because of the desert dust. The journey had lasted several days, and every day Lalla had sat at the back of the truck under the stifling tarp, amidst dusty bags and bundles. Then one day, through the opening in the tarp, she had seen the deep blue sea stretching down the length of foam-fringed beach, and she’d started to cry, without knowing if it was from joy or fatigue.

Every time Lalla walks out on the path by the seaside, she thinks of the deep blue sea in the midst of all the dust from the truck and of those long silent waves unfurling sideways, way off in the distance along the beach. She thinks of everything she saw all at once, just like that, through the slit in the tarp of the truck, and she can feel tears in her eyes, because it’s sort of like her mother’s eyes falling upon her, enveloping her, making her shudder.

That’s what she’s looking for along the path of the dunes, heart pounding, her whole body straining forward, like the Hartani when he’s on a trail. She’s looking for the places she came to afterwards, so long ago that she can’t remember by herself.

Sometimes she says, “Oummi,” just like that, softly, in a murmur. Sometimes she talks to her all by herself, very quietly, in a whisper, gazing out at the deep blue sea between the dunes. She doesn’t really know what she should say, because it was so long ago that she’s even forgotten what her mother was like. Could she have even forgotten the sound of her voice, even the words that she used to like to hear back then?

“Where did you go, Oummi? I’d like you to come to see me here, I’d really like that…”

Lalla sits down in the sand facing the sea, and she watches the slow movements of the waves. But it’s not really the same as the day she saw the sea for the first time, after the stifling dust of the truck on the red roads coming from the desert.

“Oummi, don’t you want to come back to see me? See, I haven’t forgotten you.”

Lalla searches her memory for traces of words that her mother used to say, words she used to sing. But it’s difficult to find them. You have to close your eyes and throw yourself back as far as you can, as if you were falling into a bottomless well. Lalla opens her eyes again, because there’s nothing left in her memory.

She gets to her feet, walks down the beach watching the water pushing the froth farther up on the sand. The sun burns her shoulders and the back of her neck; the light blinds her. Lalla likes that. She also likes the salt that the wind leaves on her lips. She examines the seashells abandoned on the sand, straw-colored or pink mother-of-pearl, the old, worn, empty snail shells, and the long ribbons of greenish-black, gray, or purple seaweed. She’s careful not to step on a jellyfish, or a ray. Every now and again there is a strange, frantic churning in the sand when the water recedes in the place where a flatfish has been. Lalla walks a very long way down the shore, spurred on by the sound of the waves. Sometimes she stops, stands still, looking at her shadow puddled at her feet, or the bright sparkling of the foam.

“Oummi,” Lalla says again. “Can’t you come back, just for a minute? I want to see you, because I’m all alone. When you died and Aamma came to get me, I didn’t want to go with her, because I knew I would never be able to see you again. Come back, just for a minute, come back!”

By half-closing her eyes and staring at the light reverberating off the white sand, Lalla can see the large fields of sand that were all around the house, back there, in Oummi’s country. She even startles suddenly, because for a second she thinks she sees the shriveled tree.

Her heart is beating faster, and she begins to run toward the dunes, up where the wind from the sea is cut off. She throws herself down on her stomach in the hot sand; the small thistles tear her dress a little and stick their tiny needles in her belly and thighs, but she doesn’t notice. There is an excruciating pain deep in her body, such a sharp jab that she thinks she’s going to faint. Her hands sink into the sand, her breath stops. She becomes very stiff, like a wooden board. Finally she’s able to open her eyes, very slowly, as if she were really going to see the outline of the shriveled tree awaiting her. But there’s nothing there, the sky is very vast, very blue, and she can hear the long, drawn-out sound of the waves behind the dunes.

“Oummi, oh, Oummi,” Lalla says again, moaning.

But now she can see it all very clearly: there is a large field of red stones and dust, right there in front of the shriveled tree, a field so immense it seems to stretch out to the ends of the earth. The field is empty, and the little girl runs toward the shriveled tree in the dust, and she’s so small that she is suddenly lost in the middle of the field near the black tree, unable to see which way to go. So then she screams as hard as she can, but her voice bounces off the red stones, trails away in the sunlight. She screams, and a terrible silence surrounds her, a vicelike, aching silence. Then the lost little girl walks straight ahead, falls, gets back on her feet; she scrapes her bare feet on the sharp stones, and her voice is all broken with sobs, and she can’t breathe.

“Oummi! Oummi!” That’s what she’s screaming; Lalla can hear the voice distinctly now, the broken voice that cannot leave the field of stones and dust, that bounces back on itself and is muffled. But those are the words Lalla hears, from the other end of time, the words that hurt her so, because they mean that Oummi will not come back.

Then suddenly, standing in front of the lost little girl, in the very middle of the field of stones and dust, is that tree, the shriveled tree. It’s a tree that has died of thirst or old age, or maybe it was struck by lightning. It is not very tall, but it is extraordinary because it is twisted every which way with several old branches bristling up like fish bones and a black trunk with twining bark, with long roots knotted around rocks. The little girl walks toward the tree, slowly, without knowing why, she goes up to the calcified trunk, touches it with her hands. And suddenly she is seized with fear: from the top of the shriveled tree, in a very long, slow movement, a snake uncoils and slips down. As it slithers interminably along the branches, its scales swish over the dead wood with a metallic sound. The snake comes down leisurely, moving its blue-gray body toward the little girl’s face. She watches it without blinking, without moving, almost without breathing, and now not a cry can escape from her throat. Suddenly, the snake stops, looks at her. Then she leaps backward and starts running with all her might across the field of stones, she’s running so hard it looks as if she’ll go all the way around the world, her mouth dry, blinded with the light, wheezing, she runs over to a house, over to the shape of Oummi who holds her very tight and strokes her face; and she can smell the sweet smell of Oummi’s hair, and she can hear her gentle words.

But today there is no one, no one at the other end of the stretch of white sand, and the sky is even vaster, emptier. Lalla is sitting doubled over in the hollow of a dune, her head pushed down between her knees. She can feel the sun burning on the back of her neck, in the place where her hair parts, and on her shoulders, through the stiff cloth of her dress.

She thinks about al-Ser, the one she calls the Secret, whom she met on the plateau of stones near the desert. Maybe he wanted to tell her something, tell her she wasn’t alone, show her the path that leads to Oummi. Maybe it is his gaze once again that is burning her shoulders and neck right now.

But when she opens her eyes again, there is no one on the shore. Her fear has vanished. The shriveled tree, the snake, the vast field of red stones and dust have faded away, as if they’d never existed. Lalla goes back toward the sea. It is almost as beautiful as on the day she saw it for the first time through the opening in the tarp of the truck and started to cry. The sun has swept the air over the sea clean. There are sparkles dancing above the waves and huge, frothy rollers. The wind is mild, heavy with the scents of the ocean depths, seaweed, shellfish, salt, foam.

Lalla begins to walk slowly along the shore again, and she feels a sort of giddiness deep inside of her, as if a gaze really were coming from the sea, from the light in the sky, from the white beach. She doesn’t quite understand what it is, but she knows there is someone all around who is watching her, who lights her way with his gaze. It worries her a little, yet at the same time it gives her a warm feeling, a wave radiating inside her body, going from the pit of her stomach all the way out to the ends of her limbs.

She stops, looks around: no one is there, no human form. Only the great motionless dunes scattered with thistles, and the waves rolling in, one by one, toward the shore. Maybe it is the sea that is always looking on in that way, the deep gaze of the waves of water, the dazzling gaze of the waves of salt and sand. Naman the fisherman says that the sea is like a woman, but he never explains it. The gaze comes from all sides at once.

Just then, a large flock of gulls and terns passes along the shore, covering the beach in its shadow. Lalla stops, her feet sunk deep in sand mixed with water, her head thrown back: she watches the sea birds pass.

They pass slowly overhead, flying against the warm wind, their long tapered wings plying the air. Their heads are craned out to the side a little, and odd wailing, squawking sounds are coming from their slightly open beaks.

In the center of the flock is a gull that Lalla knows well because it is entirely white, without a single black spot. It flies slowly over Lalla, stroking steadily against the wind, its wing feathers slightly spread, beak open; and as it is flying over like that, it looks at Lalla, its little head tilted toward the beach, its round eye gleaming like a droplet.

“Who are you? Where are you going?” asks Lalla.

The white gull looks at her and doesn’t answer. It goes off to join the others, flies for a long time along the shore looking for something to eat. Lalla thinks that the white gull knows her but doesn’t dare fly right up to her because gulls aren’t made for living with humans.

Old Naman sometimes says that sea birds are the souls of men who died at sea in a storm, and Lalla thinks that the white seagull is the soul of a very tall and slim fisherman, with light skin and hair the color of sunlight, whose eyes shine like a flame. Maybe he was a prince of the sea.

Then she sits down on the beach, between the dunes, and watches the group of gulls flying along the shore. They fly easily, with little effort, their long curved wings leaning on the wind, heads craned out a little to the side. They’re looking for food, because not far from there is the huge city dump where the trucks unload. They continue crying out, making their funny, uninterrupted wailing sounds, mixed with sudden, inexplicable shrill outbursts, yelps, laughs.

And then from time to time, the white gull, the one that is like a prince of the sea, comes over and flies around Lalla; it traces wide circles above the dunes, as if it has recognized her. Lalla makes waving motions at it with her arm; she attempts to call it, trying out diVerent names in hopes of saying the right one, the one that might give it back its original form, cause the prince of the sea to appear amid the foam with his hair streaming light and his eyes as bright as flames.

“Souleïman!”

“Moumine!”

“Daniel!”

But the large white gull continues circling in the sky, out by the sea, grazing the waves with the tip of its wing, its sharp eye riveted on Lalla’s silhouette, without answering. Sometimes, because she feels a little spiteful, Lalla runs after the gulls, waving her arms and shouting out names randomly, to annoy the one that is the prince of the sea.

“Chickens! Sparrows! Little pigeons!”

And even: “Hawks! Vultures!” Because those are birds the gulls don’t like. But the white bird that has no name continues its very slow, indifferent flight, it sails away down the shoreline, gliding on the east wind, and run as she might over the sandy beach, Lalla can’t catch up with it.

Off it flies, slipping in amongst the other birds strung out along the foam, off it flies; soon they are nothing but imperceptible dots melting into the blue of the sea and the sky.

THE WATER IS beautiful too. When it starts to rain in the middle of summer, the water streams over the metal and tarpaper roofs, making its sweet music in the large drums under the drainpipes. The rain comes at night, and Lalla listens to the sound of thunder building and rolling around in the valley or over the sea. Through the cracks between the planks, she watches the lovely white light constantly flashing on and off, making everything in the house shake. Aamma doesn’t move on her pallet, she goes on sleeping with her head under the sheet, without hearing the sounds of the thunderstorm. But at the other end of the room, the two boys are awake, and Lalla can hear them speaking in hushed tones, laughing quietly. They are sitting up on their mattresses, and they too are trying to see outside through the cracks between the planks.

Lalla gets up, walks silently over to the door to see the patterns the lightning is making. But the wind has risen, and big cold drops are falling on the dirt and spattering on the roof; so Lalla goes back to lie in her blankets, because that’s the way she loves to hear the sound of the rain: eyes opened wide in the dark, seeing the roof light up from time to time, and listening to all the drops pelting down violently on the earth and on the sheet metal, as if small stones were falling from the sky.

After a moment, Lalla hears the gush of water pouring out of the drainpipes and hitting the bottom of the empty kerosene drums; she’s as happy as if she were the one drinking the water. At first it makes a crashing metallic sound, and then gradually the drums fill up and the sound becomes deeper. And water is gushing everywhere at once, over the ground, into the puddles, into the old pots left strewn around outside. The dry dust of winter rises into the air when the rain beats down on the earth, and it makes a strange smell of wet dirt, straw, and smoke, which is pleasant to breathe in. Children are running around in the night. They’ve taken off all of their clothing, and they’re running naked along the streets in the rain, laughing and shouting. Lalla would like to do the same, but she’s too old now, and girls of her age can’t go out naked. So she goes back to sleep, still listening to the patter of the water on the sheet metal, still thinking of the two lovely gushes of water spurting out on either side of the house and making the kerosene drums overflow with clear water.

What is really fine, when water has fallen from the sky like that for days and nights on end, is that you can go take hot baths in the bathhouse across the river, in town. Aamma has decided to take Lalla to the bathhouse near the end of the afternoon, when the heat of the sun lets up a little, and the big white clouds start gathering in the sky.

It’s women’s day at the bathhouse, and everyone is walking in that direction along the narrow path that follows the river upstream. Three or four kilometers upstream there’s the bridge, with the truck road, but before reaching that, there’s the ford. That’s where the women cross the river.

Aamma is walking ahead, with Zubida, and her cousin whose name is Zora, and other women that Lalla knows by sight but whose names she’s forgotten. They hitch up their skirts to ford the river; they’re laughing and talking very loudly. Lalla is walking a little behind, and she’s very pleased because on afternoons like this, there aren’t any chores to do at the house or any wood to gather for the fire. And also, she really likes the big white clouds, so low in the sky, and the green of the grass by the side of the river. The river water is icy, earth-colored; it ripples between her legs when Lalla is crossing the ford. When she reaches the canal, in the center of the river, there is a ledge, and Lalla falls into the water up to her waist; she hurries to get out, her dress clinging to her belly and thighs. There are boys on the other bank, whom the women bombard with stones for watching them pull up their skirts to cross the river.

The bathhouse is a large brick hangar built right beside the river. This is where Aamma brought Lalla when she first arrived in the Project, and Lalla had never seen anything like it. There is but one large room with tubs of hot water and ovens where the stones are heated. It’s open one day for women, the next day for men. Lalla really likes this room because a lot of light comes through the windows set up high in the walls under the corrugated iron roof. The bathhouse is only open in summer because water is scarce here. The water comes from a large tank, built on a rise, and it runs down an open-air conduit to the bathhouse, where it cascades into a large cement pool that looks like a washtub. That’s where Aamma and Lalla go to bathe later, after the hot tub, pouring large jugs of cold water over their bodies and letting out little gasps because it makes them shiver.

There is something else that Lalla also really likes about this place. It’s the steam that fills up the whole room like white fog, piling up in layers all the way to the ceiling and escaping through the windows, making the light fluctuate. When you first walk into the room, you feel as if you’re suffocating for a minute, because of the steam. Then you take off your clothes and leave them folded on a chair, at the back of the hangar. The first few times, Lalla was embarrassed; she didn’t want to undress herself in front of the other women, because she wasn’t used to baths. She thought the others were making fun of her because she didn’t have any breasts and her skin was very white. But Aamma scolded her and made her take off all of her clothes; then she tied her long hair up in a bun, wrapping a strip of canvas around it. Now she doesn’t mind getting undressed. She doesn’t even pay any attention to the others anymore. At first, she thought it was horrid because there were very ugly and very old women, with skin wrinkled up like dead trees, or else fat fleshy ones, with breasts dangling down like waterskins, or still others who were sick, their legs covered with ulcers and varicose veins. But now Lalla doesn’t see them in the same way any longer. She pities the ugly and sick women; she’s not afraid of them anymore. And also, the water is so beautiful, so pure, the water that has fallen straight from the sky into the large tank, the water is so new that it must certainly heal the ill.

That’s the way it is when Lalla enters the tub water for the first time after the long months of the dry season: it envelops her body all at once, closing so tightly over her skin, over her legs, over her belly, over her chest, that Lalla momentarily loses her breath.

The water is very hot, very heavy; it brings the blood to the surface of the skin, dilates the pores, sends its waves of heat deep into the body, as if it had taken on the force of the sun and the sky. Lalla slides down into the bathtub until the scalding water comes up over her chin and touches her lips, then stops just under her nostrils. Afterward, she remains like that for a long time without moving, gazing up at the corrugated roof that seems to be swaying under the trails of steam.

Then Aamma comes with a handful of soapwort and some pumice powder, and she scrubs Lalla’s body to get the sweat and the dust off, scrubs her on the back, the shoulders, the legs. Lalla docilely submits, because Aamma is very good at soaping and scrubbing down; afterward she goes over to the washtub, and she submerges herself in the cool, almost cold water, and it closes up her pores, smooths her skin, tightens her nerves and muscles. This is the bath she takes with the other women, listening to the sound of the waterfall coming from the tank; this is the water Lalla prefers. It is clear like the water from the mountain springs, it is light, it slips over her clean skin like over a worn stone, it leaps up into the light, splashing back up in thousands of drops. Under the waterspout, the women wash their long heavy hair. Even the ugliest bodies grow beautiful through the crystal-clear water; the cold raises voices, makes shrill laughter ring out. Aamma throws huge armfuls at Lalla’s face, and her extremely white teeth gleam in her copper face. The sparkling drops roll slowly down her dark breasts, her abdomen, her thighs. The water wears and polishes your skin, makes the palms of your hands very soft. It’s cold, despite the steam filling the hangar.

Aamma envelops Lalla in a large towel, she wraps a sort of cloth around herself that she knots on her breast. Together, they walk toward the back of the hangar where their clothes were left folded on chairs. They sit down, and Aamma starts to slowly comb out Lalla’s hair, one strand at a time, preening each of them carefully between the fingers of her left hand, to extract the nits.

That’s great too, like in a dream, because Lalla is gazing straight out ahead, not thinking of anything, exhausted from all the water, drowsy from the heavy steam struggling up to the windows where the sunlight wavers, numbed from the noise of the voices and the laughter of the women, from the splashing water, the humming of the ovens where the stones are heating. So she is sitting on the metal chair, her bare feet resting on the cool cement floor, shivering in her large wet towel, and Aamma’s adroit hands are combing tirelessly through her hair, pulling it out, preening it, while the last drops of water run down her cheeks and along her back.

Then, when everything is finished, and they’ve put their clothes back on, they go and sit down together outside, in the warmth of the setting sun, and they drink mint tea in small glasses decorated with gold designs, almost without speaking to one another, as if they had been on a long journey and had had their fill of the world’s marvels. It’s a long road back to the Project of planks and tarpaper on the other side of the river. The night is already blue-black, and the stars are shimmering between the clouds when they get home.

THERE ARE DAYS that aren’t like all the others — feast days — and those are the days you sort of live for, wait for, hope for. When the day is near, no one speaks of anything else in the streets of the Project, in the houses, over by the fountain. Everyone is impatient and wants the feast day to come faster. Sometimes Lalla wakes up in the morning, her heart thumping, with a strange tingling in her arms and legs, because she thinks that today is the day. She jumps out of bed without even taking the time to run her hands through her hair and goes out into the street to run through the cold morning air, while the sun hasn’t yet appeared and, except for a few birds, everything is gray and silent. But since there isn’t a soul stirring in the Project, she realizes the day hasn’t come yet, and all she can do is go back and get under her blankets again, unless she decides to make the most of it and go sit in the dunes to watch the first rays of sunlight touching the crests of the waves.

One thing that is long, and slow, that makes impatience seethe deep in the bodies of men and women, is fasting. Because throughout the days leading up to the feast, people eat very little, only just before and just after daylight, and they don’t drink anything either. So, as time goes by, there is a kind of emptiness that spreads inside your body, that burns, that makes a buzzing sound in your ears. Even so, Lalla likes to fast, because when you don’t eat or drink for hours on end, days on end, it’s as if the inside of your body is being cleansed. The hours seem longer, and fuller, because you pay attention to the slightest little things. The children stop going to school, the women stop working in the fields, the boys stop going to the town. Everyone sits around in the shade of the shacks and the trees, conversing a little and watching the shadows move with the sun.

When you haven’t eaten for days, the sky seems cleaner too, bluer and smoother over the white earth. Sounds ring out louder, and longer, as if you were inside a cave, and the light seems lovelier, purer.

Even the days are longer, it’s hard to understand, but from the moment the sun rises until dusk, you’d think a whole month had gone by.

Lalla likes fasting in that way, when the sun burns down and dryness sweeps over everything. The gray dust leaves the taste of stone in your mouth, and from time to time you have to suck on the little lemon-flavored herbs or the bitter chiba leaves, being very careful to spit out your saliva.

During the fasting period, Lalla goes to see the Hartani up in the rocky hills every day. He too goes without eating or drinking all day long, but it doesn’t change anything about the way he is, and his face is always the same burnt color. His eyes shine brightly in the shadow of his face, his teeth gleam in his smile. The only difference is that he covers himself up completely in his homespun robe, to prevent water loss from his body. He stands there on one leg like that, motionless in the sun, the other foot resting on his calf just under the knee, and he gazes out into the distance, over where the reflections are dancing in the air, over in the direction of the herd of goats and sheep.

Lalla sits down beside him on a flat stone, she listens to the sounds coming from all sides of the mountain, the insect calls, the whistling of the shepherds, and also the cracking sounds made by the heat dilating the stones and the wind passing. She’s in no hurry, because during the fast, she doesn’t have to go fetch water or dead wood for cooking.

It’s great to be in the midst of all of this dryness when you’re fasting because it is as if an intense feeling of suffering were stretched tight everywhere, like an insistent gaze. At night, the moon appears on the edge of the rocky hills, completely round, dilated. Then Aamma serves the chickpea soup with bread, and everyone eats quickly; even Selim, Aamma’s husband, who is called the Soussi, eats hurriedly, without putting olive oil on his bread like he usually does. No one says a word, there are no stories. Lalla would rather like to talk, she’d have so many things to say, a little feverishly, but she knows that it’s not possible, for one mustn’t break the silence of the fast. That’s the way it is when you fast, you also fast with words and with your whole head. And you walk slowly, dragging your feet a bit, and you don’t point at things or people with your finger, you don’t whistle with your mouth.

Sometimes the children forget that they’re fasting because it’s difficult to control yourself all the time. Then they burst out laughing, or they take off running through the streets, kicking up clouds of dust and making all the dogs start barking. But the old ladies shout after them and throw stones, and they soon stop running, maybe it’s also because they lack strength due to the fast.

It all lasts for so long that Lalla doesn’t really remember anymore what it was like before the fast began. Then one day Aamma goes off toward the hills to buy a sheep, and everyone knows that the day is drawing near. Aamma goes alone, because she says that Selim the Soussi is incapable of buying anything worthwhile. She walks away along the narrow path that snakes up toward the rocky hills, where the shepherds live. Lalla and the children follow her at a distance. When she reaches the hills, Lalla looks around to see if the Hartani is there, but she knows very well it’s no use: the shepherd doesn’t like people, and he flees when inhabitants of the Project come to buy sheep. The Hartani’s adopted parents shear the sheep. They have built a corral of branches stuck into the ground, and they are sitting in the shade waiting.

Other sheep traders are there, and shepherds too. A strange odor of animal fat and urine hangs over the dry earth, and the sharp bleating of imprisoned animals can be heard coming from the pens of branches. A lot of people have come from the Project, even some from the towns; they left their cars at the entrance to the Project where the road ends and followed the path on foot. They’re people from the North, with yellow skin, gentlemen dressed in suits, or else peasants from the South, Soussis, Fassis, people from Mogador. They know there are a lot of shepherds in the area, sometimes they know relatives or friends and hope to get a fine animal for a good price, clinch a good deal. So they are standing by the pens, haggling, making motions with their hands, leaning over the fences to get a better look at the sheep.

Aamma walks deliberately through the market. She doesn’t stop, she just walks around the pens, looking rapidly at the animals, but she sees immediately what they’re worth. When she’s looked in all the pens, it’s obvious she’s chosen the sheep she wants. So then she goes to see the trader and asks his price. And since she wants that particular sheep and no other, she barely even haggles over the price and gives the owner his money right away. She was careful to bring a rope, and one of the shepherds puts it around the sheep’s neck. That’s it, now all that needs to be done is to bring the sheep back home. Aamma’s eldest son, the one who is called Bareki, has the honor of leading the sheep back. It’s a big strong sheep with a dirty yellow fleece that smells strongly of urine, but Lalla feels a little sorry for the sheep when it goes by, head hanging and eyes frightened because the boy is pulling with all his might on the rope and strangling it. Then they tie the sheep up behind Aamma’s house in a shed of old boards made especially for it, and they give the sheep as much food and water as it wants for the last few days of its life.

So then one fine morning when Lalla wakes up, she knows immediately it’s feast day. She knows it without needing anyone to tell her, just opening her eyes and seeing the cast of the light. She is on her feet in a second, out in the street with the other children, and already the rumor of the feast is beginning to run through the air, to rise over the houses of planks and tarpaper, like the sound of birds.

Lalla runs over the cold earth as fast as she can; she crosses fields, runs along the narrow path that leads to the sea. When she arrives at the top of the dunes, the sea wind hits her all at once, so hard that her nostrils close up, and she stumbles backward. The sea is dark and brutal, but the sky is still such a soft, light gray that Lalla isn’t afraid anymore. She undresses quickly and, without hesitating, dives headfirst into the water. The unfurling wave covers her, rushes against her eyelids and eardrums, into her nostrils. The saltwater fills her mouth, runs down her throat. But on this day, Lalla isn’t afraid of the sea; she drinks in large gulps of the saltwater and comes out of the wave staggering, as if drunk, blinded with the salt. Then she goes back into the wave that swells up around her.

Just then, the all-white seagull Lalla likes so much passes slowly overhead, mewing softly. Lalla waves at it, and she shouts out names at random to make it come:

“Hey! Kalla! Illa! Zemzar! Horriya! Habib! Cherara! Haïm…”

When she shouts that last name, the gull cocks its head and looks at her, and starts circling over the young girl.

“Haïm! Haïm!” shouts Lalla again, and now she’s sure it’s the name of the seafarer who was once lost at sea, because it’s a name that means the Wanderer.

“Haïm! Haïm! Come here, please!”

But the white gull circles over once more and then flies away on the wind, down the beach, over to the place the other gulls gather every morning before taking flight for the city dump.

Lalla shivers a little because she’s just this minute felt the chill of the wind and sea. The sun will soon be up. The pink and yellow flush is nascent behind the rocky hills where the Hartani lives. The light makes the drops of water on Lalla’s skin sparkle, because she has goose bumps. The wind is blowing hard, and the sand has almost completely covered Lalla’s blue dress. Without waiting to dry, she gets dressed and goes off half running, half walking, toward the Project.

Squatting in front of the door to her house, Aamma is cooking the flour fritters in the large pot filled with boiling oil. The earthen brazier is a red glow in the night shadows that still linger around the houses.

Now this just might be the very moment of the feast day that Lalla likes best. Still shivering from the cold sea, she sits down in front of the burning brazier and eats the sizzling fritters, savoring the sweet dough and the harsh taste of the seawater that is still in the back of her throat. Aamma notices her wet hair and scolds her a little, but not much, because it’s a feast day. Aamma’s children also come and sit down near the brazier, their eyes still swollen with sleep, and later Selim the Soussi comes. They eat the fritters without saying anything, plunging their hands into the large earthenware platter filled with amber-colored fritters. Aamma’s husband eats slowly, working his jaw as if he were chewing cud, and once in a while he stops eating to lick the drops of oil running down his hands. He does talk a little, saying trivial things that no one listens to.

There’s something like the taste of blood about this day, because it’s the day they have to kill the sheep. It’s a funny feeling, as if there were something hard and tense, like the memory of a bad dream that makes your heart beat faster. The men and women are joyful, everyone is joyful because it’s the end of the fast, and they’re going to be able to keep eating and eating to their heart’s content. But Lalla isn’t able to be completely happy because of the sheep. It’s hard to describe, it’s like something hurried inside of her, a desire to flee. She thinks about that especially on feast days. Maybe she’s like the Hartani, and she doesn’t care much for feasts.

The butcher comes to kill the sheep. Sometimes it’s Naman the fisherman because he’s Jewish and can kill a sheep with no dishonor. Or sometimes it’s a man who comes from far away, an Aissaoua with large muscular arms and a cruel face. Lalla hates him. With Naman it’s diVerent; he only does it when he’s asked, to help out, and he won’t accept anything but a piece of roast meat in return. But the butcher, he’s cruel, and he’ll only kill the sheep if he’s given money. The man takes the animal away, pulling on the rope, and Lalla runs off to the sea, so she won’t hear the wrenching cries of the sheep being dragged over to the square of tamped earth, not far from the fountain, and won’t see the blood gushing out in spurts when the butcher cuts the animal’s throat with his long, pointed knife, the steaming black blood filling up the enameled basins. But Lalla comes back soon, because deep down inside, there is that little tremor of desire, that hunger. When she nears Aamma’s house again she can hear the clear sound of fire crackling, smell the exquisite odor of roasting meat. When roasting the choice pieces of mutton, Aamma doesn’t want anyone to help her. She prefers to be left alone squatting in front of the fire, turning the spits — lengths of wire upon which the pieces of meat are strung. When the legs and chops are well done, she takes them off the fire and puts them on a large earthenware platter set directly on the coals. Then she calls Lalla, because now it’s time for the smoking. This too is one of the moments of the feast day that Lalla prefers. She sits by the fire not far from Aamma. Lalla looks at her face through the flames and smoke. Once in a while, when Aamma casts a handful of moist herbs or green wood onto the fire, wafts of black smoke arise.

Aamma talks a little, at times, as she’s preparing the meat, and Lalla listens to her along with the crackling of the fire, the shouts of children playing around them, and the voices of men; she smells the hot, strong odor soaking into the skin on her face, permeating her hair, her clothing. Lalla cuts the meat into fine strips with a small knife and places them on racks of green wood hanging above the fire, right where the smoke separates from the flames. This is also the moment when Aamma speaks of the old days, of life in the South, on the other side of the mountains, in the place where the desert sands begin and where the freshwater springs are as blue as the sky.

“Tell me about Hawa, please, Aamma,” Lalla says again.

And since the day is a long one, and there is nothing else to do but watch the strips of meat drying in the whirling smoke, using a twig to shift them from time to time, or else licking your fingers to keep from getting burned, Aamma starts talking. Her voice is slow and hesitant at first, as if she were making an effort to remember, and it goes well with the heat of the sun that is moving very slowly across the blue sky, with the crackling of the flames, with the smell of the meat and the smoke.

“Lalla Hawa” (that’s what Aamma calls her) “was older than I, but I remember the first time she came to the house very well, accompanied by your father. She came from the South, from the open desert, and that’s where he had met her, because her tribe was from the South, from the Saguiet al-Hamra, near the holy city of Smara, and her tribe belonged to the family of the great Ma al-Aïnine, the one who was called Water of the Eyes. But the tribe had to leave their lands because the soldiers of the Christians drove them all — men, women, and children — from their home, and they walked for days and months through the desert. That is what your mother told us later. In those days, people in the Souss Valley were poor, but we were happy to be together because your father loved Lalla Hawa very much. She laughed and sang, and she even played the guitar; she used to sit in front of the door to our house and sing songs…”

“What did she use to sing, Aamma?”

“Songs from the South, some of them in the language of the Chleuhs, songs about Assaka, Goulimine, Tan-Tan, but I wouldn’t be able to sing them like she did.”

“That doesn’t matter, Aamma, just sing so I can hear it.”

So then Aamma sings in a low voice, through the sound of the crackling flame. Lalla holds her breath to better hear her mother’s song.

“One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make up a bed of acacia sprays, oh, one day, the snake will spit no more poison, and rifle bullets will bring no more death, but that will be the day I will leave my love…”

Lalla listens to the voice murmuring in the fire without being able to see Aamma’s face, as if her mother’s voice were reaching her ears.

“One day, oh, one day, the wind will cease to blow in the desert, the grains of sand will become as sweet as sugar, under each white stone a spring will be awaiting me, one day, oh, one day, the bees will sing a song for me, for on that day I will have lost my love…”

But now Aamma’s voice has changed, it is louder and more lilting, it goes up high like the voice of the flute, it rings out like copper bells; it isn’t her voice anymore, it’s a perfectly new voice, the voice of some unknown young woman who is singing through the curtain of flames for Lalla, just for Lalla.

“One day, oh, one day, the sun will shine at night, and puddles of moon water will gather in the desert, when the sky is so low I can touch the stars, one day, oh, one day, I’ll see my shadow dancing before me, and that will be the day I will lose my love…”

The distant voice slips over Lalla like a shiver, envelops her, and her eyes get blurry as she watches the flames dance in the sunlight. The silence that follows the words of the song lasts a very long time, and in the background Lalla can hear the sounds of music and drums beating for the feast. Now she is alone, as if Aamma had gone, leaving her there with the strange voice singing the song.

“One day, oh, one day, I will look into the mirror and see your face, and I will hear the sound of your voice in the bottom of the well, and I will recognize your footsteps in the sand, one day, oh, one day, I will learn the day of my death, for that will be the day I will lose my love…”

The voice becomes deeper and more hushed like a sigh, it quivers a little in the flickering flame, is lost in the twirls of blue smoke.

“One day, oh, one day, the sun will be dark, the earth will split open to its very core, the sea will cover the desert, one day, oh, one day, my eyes will see no light, my lips will be unable to say your name, my heart will suffer no more, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

The unknown voice fades away in a murmur, disappears in the blue smoke, and Lalla has to wait a long time without moving before she realizes that the voice won’t come back. Her eyes are filled with tears, and her heart is aching, but she says nothing as Aamma resumes cutting off strips of meat and placing them on the wood lattices in the smoke.

“Tell me more about her, Aamma.”

“She knew a lot of songs, Lalla Hawa did; she had a lovely voice, like you do, and she knew how to play the guitar and the flute and dance. Then when your father had the accident, she suddenly changed, and she never sang or played the guitar again, even when you were born, she never felt like singing again, except for you, when you cried in the night, to rock you and sing you to sleep…”

The wasps are out now. They’re drawn by the smell of grilled meat, and they’ve come by the hundreds. They’re humming around the fire, trying to land on the strips of meat. But the smoke drives them off, chokes them, and they fly drunkenly through the fire. Some fall onto the coals and blaze up with a short yellow flame, others fall to the ground, dazed, half burned. Poor wasps! They’ve come to get their share of the meat, but they don’t know how to go about it. The bitter smoke makes them dizzy and infuriates them, because they can’t land on the wood lattices. So they fly straight ahead, blinded, mindless as moths, and die. Lalla tosses them a piece of meat to stave off their hunger, to keep them away from the fire. But one of them hits Lalla, stings her on the neck. “Ouch!” Lalla shouts as she pulls it off and throws it away from her. She is stinging with pain, but feeling very sorry, because deep down inside she really likes the wasps.

Aamma pays no attention to the wasps. She bats them away with a wave of a rag and keeps turning the strips of meat on the lattices and talking.

“She didn’t much like staying at home…” she said, her voice a little hushed as if she were relating a very old dream. “She would often go off, with you tied on her back with a scarf, and go far away, very far away… No one knew where she was going. She would get on the bus and go all the way to the ocean, or sometimes to the surrounding villages. She would go into the marketplaces, over by the fountains, where there were people she didn’t know, and she would sit down on a stone and observe them. Maybe they thought she was a beggar… But she didn’t want to work around the house because my family was hard on her, but I liked her a lot, she was like my sister.”

“Tell me about her death again, Aamma.”

“It’s not right to speak of that on a feast day.”

“It doesn’t matter, Aamma, tell me about the day she died anyway.”

Separated by the flames, Aamma and Lalla can’t see each other very well. But it’s as if there were other eyes touching them deep inside, right where it hurts.

The blue and gray plumes of smoke dance, swelling and shrinking like clouds, and on the lattices of green wood, the strips of meat have turned dark brown like old leather. In the background, the sun is slowly setting, the tide is rising with the wind, there is the song of crickets, the shouts of children running through the streets of the Project, the voices of men, music. But Lalla hardly hears any of that. She’s totally absorbed in the whispering voice relating the death of her mother, long, long ago.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen, no one knew. One day, Lalla Hawa went to bed because she was very tired, and she felt terribly cold all through her body. She remained in bed like that for several days without eating or moving, but she didn’t complain. When we asked her what was wrong, she just said, nothing, nothing, I’m just tired, that’s all. I was the one who was taking care of you then, feeding you, because Lalla Hawa couldn’t even get out of bed… But there was no doctor in the village, and the dispensary was a long way away, and no one knew what to do. And then one day, it was on the sixth day, I think, Lalla Hawa called me, and her voice was very weak, she motioned to me to come closer and she simply said, ‘I’m going to die,’ that’s all. Her voice was strange, and her face was all gray, and there was a burning look in her eyes. Then I became frightened and went running out of the house, and I took you as far away as I could, through the countryside until I reached a hill, and I stayed there all day long sitting under a tree while you played nearby. And when I came back to the house you were asleep, but I could hear the sounds of my mother and my sisters crying, and I came across my father in front of the house, and he told me that Lalla Hawa was dead…”

Lalla is listening with every fiber of her being, her eyes trained on the flames that are crackling and dancing before the twirls of smoke rising into the blue sky. The wasps continue their drunken flight, darting through the flames like bullets, falling to the ground, wings singed. Lalla is also listening to their music, the only true music of the plank and tarpaper Project.

“No one knew that would happen,” said Aamma. “But when it happened, everyone cried, and I was filled with a cold feeling, as if I were going to die as well, and everyone was sad for you, because you were too young to understand. Later, I brought you here when my father died, and I had to come to the Project to live with the Soussi.”

It will be a long time yet before the strips of meat are finished being smoked, so Aamma keeps on talking, but she says nothing more about Lalla Hawa. She talks about al-Azraq, who was called the Blue Man, who could tame the wind and the rain, who could make all things obey him, even the stones and the bushes. She talks about the hut made of branches and palm leaves that was his house, standing alone in the middle of the open desert. She says that the sky over the Blue Man’s head would fill with birds of all sorts that sang celestial songs to accompany his prayer. But only those with a pure heart could find the house of the Blue Man. The others would get lost in the desert.

“Did he also know how to talk to wasps?” asks Lalla.

“To wasps and to wild bees, for he was their master, he knew the words to tame them. But he also knew the song to send clouds of wasps, bees, and flies to his enemies and he could have destroyed a whole city if he wanted to. But he was righteous and only used his powers to do good.”

She also speaks of the desert, the wide open desert that commences south of Goulimine, east of Taroudant, beyond the Drâa Valley. It was there in the desert that Lalla was born, at the foot of a tree, as Aamma tells it. There in the open desert, the sky is immense; the horizon has no end because there is nothing for the eye to catch upon. The desert is like the sea, with the waves of wind over the hard sand, with the froth of rolling bramble bushes, with the flat stones, patches of lichen and plaques of salt, and the black shadows that dig out holes when the sun draws near to the earth. Aamma speaks of the desert for a long time, and while she speaks, the flames gradually grow smaller, the smoke gets lighter, transparent, and the embers slowly cover over with a kind of shimmering silver dust.

“Out there, in the open desert, men can walk for days without passing a single house, seeing a well, for the desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return. Sometimes there are storms, but nothing like here, terrible storms, and the wind tears up the sand and throws it high into the sky, and the men are lost. They die, drowned in the sand, they die lost like ships in a storm, and the sand retains their bodies. Everything is so diVerent in that land; the sun isn’t the same as it is here, it burns hotter, and there are men that come back blinded, their faces burned. Nights, the cold makes men who are lost scream out in pain, the cold breaks their bones. Even the men aren’t the same as they are here … they are cruel, they stalk their prey like foxes, drawing silently near. They are black, like the Hartani, dressed in blue, faces veiled. They aren’t men, but djinns, children of the devil, and they deal with the devil; they are like sorcerers…”

Then Lalla thinks again of al-Azraq, the Blue Man, master of the desert, he who could make water spring from under the desert stones.

Aamma thinks of him too and says, “The Blue Man was like the men of the desert, then he received God’s blessing, and he left his tribe, his family, to live alone… But he knew the things that the people of the desert know. He was given the power of healing with his hands, and Lalla Hawa also had that power, and she knew how to interpret dreams, and tell the future, and find lost objects. And when people knew she was a descendant of al-Azraq, they would come to ask her advice, and sometimes she would tell them what they asked of her, and other times she didn’t want to answer…”

Lalla looks at her hands and tries to understand what they hold. Her hands are large and strong, like the hands of boys, but the skin is soft and the fingers are tapered.

“Do I have the power too, Aamma?”

Aamma starts laughing, she rises to her feet and stretches.

“Don’t think about that,” she says. “The meat is ready now, it’s time to put it on the platter.”

When Aamma walks away, Lalla takes down the lattice rack and lays the strips of meat out on the earthenware platter, nibbling on a piece here and there. Since the fire has died down, the wasps have come back in droves; they’re humming very loudly, dancing around Lalla’s hands, getting tangled in her hair. Lalla isn’t afraid of them. She shoos them away gently and throws them another piece of smoked meat, because today is a special day for them too.

Afterward, she goes down toward the sea following the narrow path that leads to the dunes. But she doesn’t go as far as the water. She stays on the other side of the dunes, sheltered from the wind, and looks for a hollow in the sand in which to lie down. When she finds a place where there aren’t too many thistles or ants, she lies down on her back, arms at her sides, and keeps her eyes on the sky. There are big white clouds scudding across. There is the slow sound of the sea scraping against the sand on the beach, and it’s nice hearing it without being able to see it. There are the cries of the gulls slipping along on the wind, making the sunlight blink on and off. There are the sounds of dry shrubs, small acacia leaves, the rustling sound of the filao needles, like water. There are still a few wasps humming around Lalla’s hands, because they smell of meat.

Then Lalla tries once again to hear the stranger’s voice singing very far away, as if from another country, the voice that goes up and down agilely, clearly, like the sound of fountains, like the sunlight. The sky before her grows slowly dim, but night is a long time in coming because it is the end of winter and the beginning of the season of light. Dusk is first gray, then red, with huge clouds like flaming manes. Lalla remains stretched out in her hollow of sand between the dunes, without taking her eyes off the clouds and the sky. She really does hear, in the whoosh of the sea and the wind, in the sharp cries of the gulls seeking out a beach for the night, she hears the soft voice repeating its lament, the clear, yet somewhat shaky voice, as if it already knew death was coming to silence it, the voice which is as pure as the water you can never drink enough of after long scorching days. It’s a music born of the heavens and of the clouds, it bounces off the sand of the dunes, spreads out and resonates everywhere, even in the dry thistle leaves. It’s singing for Lalla, just for Lalla, it envelops her and cleanses her in its fresh waters, it runs its hand through her hair, over her forehead, across her lips, it declares its love, it descends upon her and gives her its blessing. So then Lalla turns away and hides her face in the sand, because something inside of her has come undone, has broken, and tears come silently. No one comes to put a hand on her shoulder and ask, “Why are you crying, little Lalla?” Yet the stranger’s voice makes her warm tears flow, it stirs up images deep inside of her that have been still for years. The tears run into the sand and make a little wet spot under her chin, make the sand stick to her cheeks, her lips. Then suddenly it is gone. The voice deep in the sky has grown silent. Night has fallen now, a lovely, dark blue, velvet night in which the stars sparkle between the phosphorescent clouds. Lalla shivers as if with a passing fever. She wanders down along the dunes amidst the blinking lightning bugs. Because she is afraid of snakes, she goes back to the narrow path where she can still see her footprints and walks slowly toward the Project where the feast is still going on.

LALLA IS WAITING for something. She doesn’t really know what it is, but she’s waiting. The days are long in the Project, the rainy days, the windy days, the summer days. Sometimes Lalla thinks she’s simply waiting for the days to come, but when they arrive, she realizes that wasn’t it. She’s waiting, that’s all. People have a lot of patience, maybe they wait for something all their lives, and nothing ever comes.

The men often sit around on a stone in the sunshine, their heads covered with a flap of their coat or a bath towel. They just stare out into the distance. What are they looking at? The dusty horizon, the dirt tracks where the trucks are rolling along, like large multicolored beetles, and the outline of the rocky hills, the white clouds moving across the sky. That’s what they are looking at. They have no desire for anything else. The women are waiting too, over by the fountain, not talking, veiled in black, their bare feet planted squarely on the ground.

Even the children know how to wait. They sit down in front of the store, and wait, just like that, without playing or shouting. Once in a while, one of them will get up and go turn in his coins for a bottle of Fanta or a handful of mints. The others watch him in silence.

There are days when you don’t know where you’re headed, when you don’t know what might happen. Everyone keeps an eye on the street, and by the side of the highway, the ragged children are awaiting the arrival of the blue bus, or the passage of large trucks carrying diesel fuel, wood, cement. Lalla is very familiar with the sound of the trucks. Sometimes she goes and sits with the other children on the new stone embankment at the entrance to the Project. When a truck is coming, all the children turn toward the far end of the road, a long way off, out where the air dances over the asphalt and makes the hills shimmer. You can hear the sound of the motor long before the truck appears. It’s a high-pitched droning, almost like a whistle with, every now and again, a sharp honk that blares out and echoes off the walls of the houses. Then a cloud of dust comes into view, a yellow cloud mingled with the blue exhaust of the motor. The red truck comes barreling down the paved road at top speed. Over the cab of the truck there is an exhaust pipe spitting out blue smoke, and the sun glints brightly off the windshield and the chrome. The tires are devouring the pavement and zigzagging a little due to the wind, and every time the tires of the semi slip off the pavement, a cloud of dust billows into the sky. Then the truck passes in front of the children, honking very loudly, and the earth shakes under its fourteen black tires, and the dusty wind and pungent odor of diesel fumes waft over them like a hot breath.

Long afterward, the children are still talking about the red truck and telling stories about trucks, red trucks, white tank trucks, and yellow crane trucks.

That’s what it’s like when you’re waiting. You often go out and watch the roads, the bridges, and the sea, to see the people who haven’t been left behind going by, those who are getting away.

Some days are longer than others, because you’re hungry. Lalla knows those days well, when there’s not a penny in the house, and Aamma hasn’t found any work in town. Even Selim the Soussi, Aamma’s husband, doesn’t know where to try to find money anymore, and everyone gets gloomy, sad, almost mean. So Lalla stays outdoors all day long; she goes as far out as possible on the plateau of stones, out where the shepherds live, and looks for the Hartani.

It’s always the same; when she really wants to see him, he appears in a dip in the ground, sitting on a stone, his head wrapped up in a white cloth. He’s watching his goats and sheep. His face is black, his hands thin and strong like the hands of an old man. He shares his black bread and dates with Lalla, and he even gives a few pieces to the shepherds who have come forward. But he’s not proud about it; it’s as if what he gives is of no importance.

Lalla glances over at him every once in a while. She loves his imperturbable face, the aquiline profile, and the light that glows in his dark eyes. The Hartani is also waiting for something, but he’s perhaps the only one who knows what he’s waiting for. He doesn’t say what it is since he doesn’t know how to speak the language of human beings. But you can guess from his eyes what he’s waiting for, what he’s looking for. It’s as if part of him had been left behind in the place of his birth, beyond the rocky hills and the snow-capped mountains, in the immensity of the desert, and one day he would have to find that part of himself, in order to really be whole.

Lalla stays with the shepherd all day long, only she doesn’t get too near to him. She sits on a stone, not far away, and gazes out in the distance; she looks at the air dancing and rushing over the arid valley, the white light making sparks, and the slow meandering of the goats and sheep through the white stones.

When the days are sad, anxious, the Hartani is the only one who can be there, and who doesn’t need words. A look is enough, and he knows how to give bread and dates with nothing in exchange. He even prefers for you to stay a few steps away from him, just like the goats and the sheep, who never completely belong to anyone.

All day long, Lalla listens to the calls of the shepherds in the hills, whistling that bores through the white silence. When she goes back to the Project of planks and tarpaper, she feels freer, even if Aamma does scold her because she’s brought nothing home to eat.

That’s the kind of day it is when Aamma takes Lalla to the house of the woman who sells carpets. It’s on the other side of the river in a poor part of the city, in a big white house with narrow screened windows. When she enters the room used as a workshop, Lalla hears the sound of weaving looms. There are twenty of them, maybe more, lined up one behind the other in the milky half-light of the large room where three neon tubes are flickering. In front of the looms, little girls are squatting or sitting on stools. They work rapidly, pushing the shuttle between the warp threads, taking the small steel scissors, cutting the pile, packing the wool down on the weft. The oldest must be about fourteen; the youngest is probably not yet eight. They aren’t talking, they don’t even look at Lalla when she comes into the workshop with Aamma and the merchant woman. The merchant’s name is Zora; she is a tall woman dressed in black who always holds a flexible switch in her pudgy hands with which to whip the little girls on the legs and shoulders when they don’t work fast enough or when they talk to their workmates.

“Has she ever worked?” she asks, without even glancing at Lalla.

Aamma says she’s shown her how people used to weave in the old days. Zora nods her head. She seems very pale, maybe because of the black dress, or else because she never leaves the shop. She walks slowly over to a free loom, upon which there is a large dark red carpet with white spots.

“She can finish this one,” she says.

Lalla sits down and starts to work. She works in the large dim room for several hours, making mechanical gestures with her hands. At first she has to stop, because her fingers get tired, but she can feel the eyes of the tall pale lady on her and starts working again right away. She knows the pale woman won’t whip her with the switch because she is older than the other girls working there. When their eyes meet, Lalla feels something like a shock deep inside, and a glint of anger flares in her eyes. But the fat woman dressed in black takes it out on the smaller girls, the skinny ones who cower like she-dogs, daughters of beggars, abandoned girls who live at Zora’s house year-round and who have no money. The minute their work slows down, or if they exchange a few words in a whisper, the fat pale woman descends upon them with surprising agility and lashes their backs with her switch. But the little girls never cry. All you can hear is the whistling of the whip and the dull whack on their backs. Lalla clenches her teeth; she looks down at the ground to avoid seeing or hearing it, because she too would like to shout and lash out at Zora. But she doesn’t say anything because of the money she’s supposed to bring back to the house for Aamma. To get even, she just ties a few knots the wrong way in the red carpet.

Still, the following day Lalla just can’t stand it anymore. When the fat pale woman resumes whipping Mina — a puny, thin little girl of barely ten — with the switch because she’s broken her shuttle, Lalla stands up and says coldly, “Stop beating her!”

Zora looks at Lalla incredulously for a minute. Her pale flabby face has taken on such an idiotic expression that Lalla repeats, “Stop beating her!”

Suddenly, Zora’s features screw up in hatred. She strikes out vehemently at Lalla’s face with the switch, but only grazes her left shoulder, as Lalla manages to dodge the blow.

“You’ll see the beating I’ll give you!” Zora screams, and now there’s some color to her face.

“You bully! You wicked woman!”

Lalla grabs Zora’s switch and breaks it over her knee. Then it is fear that twists the fat woman’s face.

She backs away stuttering, “Get out! Get out! Right now! Get out!”

But Lalla is already running across the large room; she leaps outside into the sunlight; she runs without stopping all the way back to Aamma’s house. Freedom is beautiful. You can watch the clouds floating along upside down again, the wasps busying themselves around little piles of garbage, the lizards, the chameleons, the grasses quivering in the wind. Lalla sits down in front of the house, in the shade of the wall of planks, and listens eagerly to all the minute sounds.

When Aamma comes home around evening time, she simply says, “I’m not going back to work at Zora’s, ever again.”

Since that day, things here in the Project have really changed for Lalla. It’s as if she’d grown up all of a sudden, and people have started noticing her. Even Aamma’s sons aren’t like they used to be, cold and scornful. Sometimes she sort of misses the days when she was very young, when she had just arrived in the Project, and no one knew her name, and she could hide behind a shrub, in a bucket, in a cardboard box. She really enjoyed that, being like a shadow, coming and going without being seen, without being spoken to.

Old Naman and the Hartani are the only ones who haven’t changed. Naman the fisherman still tells incredible stories as he repairs his nets on the beach, or when he comes to eat corn cakes at Aamma’s house. He hardly ever catches fish anymore, but people really like him and continue to invite him over. His pale eyes are as transparent as water, and his face is stitched with deep wrinkles like scars from ancient wounds.

Aamma listens to him talk about Spain, about Marseille, or Paris, and about all the cities where he has been, where he’s walked, where he knows the names of the streets and the people who live there. Aamma asks him questions, asks him if his brother can help her find work over there.

Naman nods his head. “Why not?”

That’s his answer to everything, but he promises to write his brother all the same. Leaving the country is complicated though. You need money, papers. Aamma remains pensive, a faraway look in her eyes; she’s dreaming of white cities with so many streets, houses, automobiles. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.

Lalla doesn’t think about that very much herself. It’s all the same to her. She’s watching Naman’s eyes, and it’s a little bit as if she had known those seas, those countries, those houses.

The Hartani doesn’t think about it either. He’s remained like a child still, even though he’s as tall and strong as an adult. His body is slim and elongated, his face is pure and smooth like a piece of ebony. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to speak the same language others do.

He still sits down on a rock, staring out into the distance, wearing his homespun robe, with the white cloth on his head drawn over his face. Around him there are still black shepherds just like him, wild, dressed in rags, whistling as they leap from rock to rock. Lalla likes coming out where they live, out to the place which is filled with white light, the place where time stands still, where you can’t grow up.

THE MAN WALKED into Aamma’s house one morning in the beginning of summer. He was a man from the city, wearing a gray suit with a green sheen, black leather shoes that were as shiny as mirrors. He came with a few gifts for Aamma and her sons, an electric mirror framed in white plastic, a transistor radio no larger than a box of matches, pens with gold-colored caps, and a bag full of sugar and canned food. When he came into the house he passed Lalla at the door but hardly looked at her. He lay all the presents on the floor; Aamma told him to sit down, and he looked around for a seat, but there were only cushions and Lalla Hawa’s wooden trunk that Aamma had brought back from the South with Lalla. The man chose to sit on the trunk after having tested it a little with the palm of his hand. The man waited for tea and sweet cakes to be brought to him.

When she learned a little later that the man had come to ask for her hand in marriage, Lalla felt very frightened. It made her head spin, and her heart started beating wildly. It wasn’t Aamma who told her about it, but Bareki, Aamma’s eldest son.

“Our mother decided to have you marry him, because he is very rich.”

“But I don’t want to get married!” Lalla shouted.

“You have nothing to say about it, you must obey your aunt,” Bareki said.

“Never! Never!” Lalla ran off shouting, her eyes filled with angry tears.

Then she went back to Aamma’s house. The man with the gray-green suit was gone, but the gifts were there. Ali, Aamma’s younger son, was even listening to music, holding the tiny transistor radio against his ear. When Lalla walked in, he gave her a knowing look.

“Why did you keep that man’s gifts? I won’t marry him,” Lalla said to Aamma coldly.

Aamma’s son snickered, “Maybe she wants to marry the Hartani!”

“Get out!” said Aamma. The young man went out with the transistor.

“You can’t force me to marry that man!” Lalla says.

“He will be a good husband for you,” responds Aamma. “He’s no longer very young, but he’s rich, he has a big house in the city, and he has lots of powerful relations. You must marry him.”

“I don’t want to get married, ever!”

Aamma remains silent for a long time. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, but Lalla stays on her guard.

“I raised you as if you were my own daughter, I love you, and today you would affront me in this way?”

Lalla looks angrily at Aamma, because for the first time she’s seeing her dishonest side.

“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t want to marry that man. I don’t want these ridiculous gifts!”

She motions toward the electric mirror on its stand on the dried mud floor. “You don’t even have electricity!”

Then suddenly, she’s had enough. She leaves Aamma’s house and goes out to the sea. But this time she doesn’t run along the path; she walks very slowly. Today, nothing is the same. It’s as if everything has been dulled, worn down from being looked at so much.

“I’m going to have to leave,” Lalla says out loud to herself. But she immediately thinks that she doesn’t even know where to go. So then she crosses over to the other side of the dunes and walks along the wide beach, looking for Old Naman. She would so like for him to be there, as usual, sitting on a root of the old fig tree, repairing his nets. She would ask him all sorts of questions about those cities in Spain with magic names, Algeciras, Málaga, Granada, Teruel, Zaragoza, and about those ports from which ships as big as cities sail, about the roads upon which automobiles drive northward, about trains and airplanes departing. She’d like to listen to him talk for hours about those snow-capped mountains and those tunnels, those rivers that are as vast as the sea, those wheat-covered plains, immense forests, and most of all about those fragrant cities where there are white palaces, churches, fountains, stores glittering with light. Paris, Marseille, and all of those streets, houses so tall you can barely see the sky, the gardens, the cafés, the hotels, and the intersections where you meet people from all corners of the world.

But Lalla can’t find the old fisherman. There is only the white gull gliding slowly along facing the wind, wheeling over her head.

“Hey-o! Hey-o! Prince!”

The white bird swoops over Lalla a few more times, then, caught up in the wind, flies quickly away in the direction of the river.

So Lalla stays on the beach for a long time, with only the sound of the wind and the sea in her ears.

The following days, no one said a word about anything in Aamma’s house, and the man with the gray-green suit didn’t come back. The little transistor radio was already demolished, and the cans of food had all been eaten. Only the plastic electric mirror remained where it had been placed, on the tamped earth near the door.

Lalla hadn’t slept well any of those nights, trembling at the slightest sounds. She remembered stories she’d been told about girls who had been taken away by force, in the night, because they didn’t want to get married. Every morning at daybreak, Lalla went out before anyone else, to wash herself and fetch the water at the fountain. That way, she could keep an eye on the entrance to the Project.

Then came the wind of ill fortune, which blew over the land for several days in a row. The wind of ill fortune is a bizarre wind that only comes once or twice a year, at the end of winter or in the fall. The strangest thing about it is that you don’t really feel it at first. It doesn’t blow very hard, and sometimes it stops altogether, and you forget about it. It’s not a cold wind like those of the midwinter storms, when the sea unleashes its furious waves. It’s not a hot desiccating wind either, like the one that comes from the desert and lights the houses with a red glow, the one that makes sand hiss over the metal and tarpaper roofs. No, the wind of ill fortune is a very mild wind that swirls around, tosses a few gusts about, and then settles heavily on the roofs of the houses, on people’s shoulders and chests. When it’s here, the air gets hotter and heavier, as if there were a gray veil over everything.

When that slow, mild wind comes, people fall sick, almost everywhere, especially small children and elderly people, and they die. That’s why it’s called the wind of ill fortune.

When it began to blow on the Project that particular year, Lalla recognized it right away. She saw the clouds of gray dust moving over the plain, blurring the sea and the mouth of the river. Then people only went out muffled up in their cloaks in spite of the heat. There were no more wasps, and the dogs went off to hide in the hollows at the feet of the houses, with their noses in the dust. Lalla was sad, because she thought of the people the wind would sweep away in its path. So when she heard that Old Naman was sick, there was a pang in her heart and she couldn’t breathe for a minute. She’d never really had that feeling before, and she had to sit down to keep from falling.

Then she walked and ran all the way to the fisherman’s house. She thought there would be people with him, helping him, caring for him, but Naman is all alone, lying on his straw mat, his head resting on his arm. He is shivering so hard that his teeth are chattering, and he can’t even raise himself up on his elbows when Lalla comes into the house. He smiles a little, and his eyes shine brighter when he recognizes Lalla. His eyes are still the color of the sea, but his thin face has turned a white, slightly gray color that is frightening.

She sits down next to him and talks to him, almost in hushed tones. Usually he’s the one who tells stories, and she listens, but today all that has changed. Lalla just talks to him about any old thing, to soothe her anxiety and impart a little human warmth to the old man. She talks to him about things that he used to tell her of in the past, things about his trips to the cities in Spain and France. She talks about it all as if she’d been the one who had seen those cities, who had taken those long journeys. She talks to him about the streets of Algeciras, narrow winding streets near the port, where you can smell the sea wind and the odor of fish, and the train station with blue tiled platforms, and the big railroad trestles straddling ravines and rivers. She talks to him about the streets of Cádiz, gardens with multicolored flowers, tall palm trees lined up in front of white palaces, and about all of those streets with crowds, with black automobiles, buses, coming and going amid mirrored reflections, past buildings as tall as marble cliffs. She talks about the streets of all the cities, as if she had walked through them, Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, Almadén, Toledo, Aranjuez, and about the city that is so big, you could get lost for days on end — Madris, where people come from all corners of the earth.

Old Naman listens to Lalla without saying anything, without moving, but his clear eyes shine brightly, and Lalla knows he loves hearing those stories. When she stops talking, she can hear the old man’s body trembling and his breath wheezing: so she quickly resumes to avoid hearing those terrible sounds.

Now she’s talking about the big city of Marseille in France, about the port with immense wharves where boats from all the countries in the world are docked, freighters as big as citadels with incredibly high forecastles and masts thicker than trees, very white ocean liners with thousands of windows that have strange names, mysterious flags, names of cities, Odessa, Riga, Bergen, Limassol. In the streets of Marseille, the crowd hurries along, endlessly going in and out of giant stores, jostling in front of the cafés, restaurants, movie theaters, and the black automobiles drive down the avenues leading who knows where, and trains fly over the roofs on suspended bridges, and airplanes take off and circle slowly in the gray sky above the buildings and the vacant lots. At noon, the church bells ring, and the sound reverberates through the streets, over the esplanades, deep down in the underground tunnels. At night, the city is lit up, lighthouses sweep the sea with their long pencils, automobile headlights glitter. The narrow streets are silent, and thieves armed with jackknives hide in doorways waiting for late-night stragglers. Sometimes there are terrible battles in vacant lots, or on the wharves in the shadows of the sleeping freighters.

Lalla talks for such a long time and her voice is so soft that Old Naman falls asleep. When he is asleep, his body stops trembling, and his breathing becomes more regular. Then Lalla can leave the fisherman’s house at last, her eyes stinging from the light outside.

Many people are suffering from the wind of ill fortune, poor people, infants. When she passes by their houses, Lalla can hear their laments, the moaning voices of women, children crying, and she knows that there too, perhaps, someone will die. She is sad; she wishes she were far away, across the sea, in those cities she invented for Old Naman.

But the man with the gray-green suit has come back. He probably doesn’t know that the wind of ill fortune is blowing on the plank and tarpaper Project; in any case he wouldn’t really care, because the wind of ill fortune doesn’t affect people like him. He’s a stranger to ill fortune, to all of this.

He’s come back to Aamma’s house, and he passes Lalla in front of the door. When she sees him, it startles her and she lets out a little shriek, because she knew he would come back and felt apprehensive about it. The man in the gray-green suit gives her a funny look. He has a hard steady gaze, like people who are used to giving orders, and the skin on his face is white and dry with the blue shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin. He’s carrying other bags containing gifts. Lalla steps aside when he passes her and looks at the packages. He mistakes her glance and takes a step toward her, holding out the gifts. But Lalla leaps back as fast as she can; she runs away without turning back until she can feel the sand of the path that leads up to the plateau of stones under her feet.

She doesn’t know where the path ends. Eyes blurred with tears, a knot in her throat, Lalla is walking as fast as she can. Up here the sun is always hotter, as if you were closer to the sky. But the heavy wind is not blowing on the brick- and chalk-colored hills. The stones are hard, broken and sharp-edged, jagged; the black shrubs are covered with thorns upon which, here and there, tufts of sheep’s wool have snagged; even the blades of grass are sharp as knives. Lalla walks for a long time through the hills. Some are high and steep, with cliffs like sheer walls; others are low, hardly more than a pile of stones, and you’d think they’d been made by children.

Every time Lalla enters this land, she feels as if she no longer belongs to the same world, as if time and space had expanded, as if the ardent light of the sky had penetrated her lungs and dilated them, and her whole body had taken on the proportions of a giant who would live for a very long time, very slowly.

Taking her time now, Lalla follows the bed of a dry torrent up toward the vast plateau of stones, where the one she calls al-Ser dwells.

She doesn’t really know why she’s heading in that direction; it’s sort of as if there were two Lallas, one who didn’t know, blinded with anxiety and anger, fleeing the wind of ill fortune, and the other who did know and was making her legs walk in the direction of al-Ser’s dwelling place. So she’s climbing up to the plateau of stones, her mind blank, not understanding. Her bare feet find the ancient traces that the wind and the sun weren’t able to erase.

She is slowly climbing up toward the plateau of stones. The sun is burning her face and shoulders, burning her hands and legs. But she can barely feel it. It’s the light that is liberating, that erases memories, that makes you as pure as a white stone. The light cleanses the wind of ill fortune, burns away sickness, evil spells.

Lalla is moving forward, eyes almost closed against the reverberating light, and sweat is making her dress stick to her abdomen, to her chest, to her back. Never, perhaps, has there been so much light on earth, and never has Lalla so thirsted after it, as if she had come from a dark valley in which death and shadows prevailed. The air up here is still, it is hovering, it flickers and pulsates, and you think you can hear the sound of light waves, the strange music that resembles the song of bees.

When she reaches the vast, deserted plateau, the wind blows against her again, making her stagger. It is a cold, hard, unrelenting wind that pushes against her and makes her shiver in her damp, sweaty clothing. The light is blinding; it explodes in the wind, glinting in starbursts off the peaks of the rocks. Up here, there is no grass, no trees, no water, only light and wind for centuries on end. There are no paths, no human traces. Lalla is moving forward aimlessly, in the middle of the plateau, where only scorpions and scolopendras live. It is a place where no one comes, not even the desert shepherds, and when one of their animals strays up here, they jump up and down, whistling and throwing stones to make it come running back.

Lalla is walking slowly along, eyes almost closed, putting the tips of her bare toes down on the burning rocks. It’s like being in another world, near the sun, balancing precariously, ready to fall. She’s moving forward, but the essence of her is absent, or rather, her whole being is preceding her, her vision, her acutely tuned senses, only her body remains behind, still hesitating on the sharp-edged rocks.

She’s waiting impatiently for the one who is bound to come now, she’s sure of it, he must come. As soon as she’d started running to escape the man with the gray-green suit, escape Old Naman’s death, she knew someone was waiting for her up on the plateau of stones, up where there are no people. It is the desert warrior veiled in blue, of whom she knows only the razor-sharp gaze. He was watching her from high up in the deserted hills, and his eyes reached all the way out to her and touched her, pulled her straight up here.

Now she is standing still in the middle of the vast plateau of stones. Around her there is nothing, only the mounds of stones, the powdered light, the cold hard wind, the intense sky with not a cloud, not a trace of mist.

Lalla remains motionless, standing up on a large, slightly inclined slab of stone, a hard dry slab of stone that no water has ever polished. The sunlight is beating down upon her, pulsating on her forehead, on her chest, in her belly, the light which is a gaze.

The blue warrior will certainly come now. It won’t be long. Lalla thinks she hears the soft tread of his feet in the dust, her heart is pounding hard. Whirls of white light envelop her, curling their flames around her legs, tangling in her hair, and she can feel the rough tongue of light burning her lips and her eyelids. Salty tears stream down her cheeks, run into her mouth, salty sweat runs down drop by drop from under her arms, stinging her ribs, trickles down the length of her neck, down between her shoulder blades. The blue warrior must come, now, his gaze will be white-hot like the light of the sun.

But Lalla remains alone in the middle of the deserted plateau, standing on her sloping slab of rock. The cold wind is burning her, the dreadful wind that shuns human life, it’s blowing to abrade her, to pulverize her. The wind that blows up here hardly even cares for the scorpions and the scolopendras, the lizards or the snakes; it might have a slight penchant for the foxes with their burnt coats. Yet Lalla isn’t afraid of it, because she knows that somewhere between the rocks, or maybe up in the sky, there is the gaze of the Blue Man, the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, because he is hidden. He is surely going to come, his eyes will look straight into the deepest part of her being and give her the strength to fight against the man in the suit, against the death hovering over Naman, will transform her into a bird, throw her up into the center of space; then maybe she could at last join the big white gull who is a prince, and who flies untiringly over the sea.

When the gaze reaches her, it makes a whirlwind in her head, like a wave of light unfurling. The gaze of al-Ser is brighter than fire, a light that is blue and burning at once, like that of the stars.

Lalla stops breathing for a few moments. Her pupils are dilated. She squats down in the dust, eyes closed, head thrown backward, because there is a terrible weight in that light, a weight which is entering her and making her as heavy as stone.

He has come. Once again, without making a sound, slipping over the sharp stones, dressed like the ancient warriors of the desert, with his ample cloak of white wool, and his face veiled with a midnight-blue cloth. Lalla watches him moving forward in her dream with every fiber of her being. She sees his hands tinted with indigo, she sees the light pouring from his dark eyes. He doesn’t speak. He never speaks. It is with his eyes that he speaks, for he lives in a world where there is no need for the words of men. There are great whirls of golden light around his white cloak, as if the wind were raising clouds of sand. But Lalla can hear only the beat of her own heart, pounding very slowly, far away.

Lalla has no need for words. She has no need to ask questions, or even to think. Eyes closed, squatting in the dust, she can feel the eyes of the Blue Man upon her, and the warmth penetrates her body, pulses through her limbs. That is the extraordinary thing. The warmth of the gaze finds its way into the smallest recesses of her body, driving out the pain, the fever, the blood clots, everything that can obstruct and cause pain.

Al-Ser does not move. Now he’s standing in front of her, while the waves of light slip and swirl around his cloak. What is he doing? Lalla is no longer afraid, she can feel the warmth growing inside of her, as if it were radiating out through her face, illuminating her whole body.

She can see what is in the eyes of the Blue Man. It is all around her, out into infinity, the shimmering, undulating desert, showers of sparks, the slow waves of dunes inching into the unknown. There are towns, large white cities with towers as slender as palm trees, red palaces adorned with foliage, vines, giant flowers. There are vast lakes of sky-blue water, water so lovely, so pure that it exists nowhere else on earth. It is a dream that Lalla is having, eyes closed, head thrown backward in the sunlight, arms wrapped around her knees. It is a dream that has come from afar, that existed up here on the plateau of stones long before her, a dream in which she is now partaking, as if in sleep, and its realm is unfolding before her.

Where does the path lead? Lalla doesn’t know where she’s going, drifting along in the desert wind that is blowing, burning her lips and eyelids at times, blinding and cruel, and at other times cold and slow, the wind that obliterates people and makes rocks tumble to the foot of cliffs. It’s the wind that is leading out to infinity, out beyond the horizon, beyond the sky, all the way out to the frozen constellations, to the Milky Way, to the sun.

The wind carries her along on the endless path, the immense plateau of stones where the light is whirling. The desert unfurls its empty, sand-colored fields, strewn with crevasses, as wrinkled as dead skin. The gaze of the Blue Man is everywhere, all the way out in the farthest reaches of the desert, and it is through his eyes now that Lalla is seeing the light. She can feel the burn of his gaze, the wind, the dryness on her skin, and her lips taste of salt. She sees the shapes of the dunes, large sleeping animals, and the high black walls of the Hamada, and the immense dried-up city of red earth. This is the land where there are no humans, no towns, nothing that stops and unsettles. There is only stone, sand, wind. Yet Lalla feels happy because she recognizes everything, each detail of the landscape, each charred shrub in the large valley. It’s as if she had walked there, long ago, the ground scorching her bare feet, eyes trained out on the horizon shimmering in the air. Then her heart starts beating harder and faster and she sees signs appear, lost traces, broken twigs, bushes quivering in the wind. She waits, she knows she will get there soon, it is very near now. The gaze of the Blue Man guides her over the fissures, the rockslides, along dry torrents. Then all of a sudden she hears that strange, uncertain, nasal song, quavering way off in the distance; it seems to be coming up from the sand itself, mingling with the constant swish of wind over stones, with the sound of the light. The song makes Lalla’s insides flutter; she recognizes it; it’s Lalla Hawa’s song, the one that Aamma sang, the one that went, “One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make up a bed of acacia sprays…” But now Lalla can’t understand the words anymore because someone is singing in a very distant voice, in the Chleuh language. Yet the song goes straight to her heart, and her eyes fill with tears, despite her holding them closed with all her might.

The music lasts for a long time; it lulls her for such a long time that the shadows under the stones stretch out on the desert sand. Then Lalla can also make out the red city at the end of the immense valley. It’s not really a city like those with which Lalla is familiar, those with streets and houses. It’s a city of mud, wasted by time and worn with the wind, like the nests of termites or wasps. The light is beautiful over the red city, forming a clear pure dome of tranquility in the eternal dawn sky. The houses are grouped around the mouth of the well, and there are several trees, white acacias, standing stock-still like statues. But what Lalla notices most of all is a white tomb, as simple as an eggshell set down upon the red earth. That is where the light of the gaze is coming from, and Lalla realizes it is the dwelling place of the Blue Man.

Something terrible, yet at the same time very beautiful is reaching out to Lalla. It’s as if something deep down inside of her were being torn and broken and allowing death, the unknown to enter. The burn of the desert heat inside of her spreads, courses through her veins, mixes with her entrails. The gaze of al-Ser is terrifying and painful, because it is the suffering born of the desert: hunger, fear, death, which come, pass over her. The lovely golden light, the red city, the delicate white tomb from which the supernatural light is emanating, also carry with them sorrow, anxiety, abandonment. It is a long anguished gaze that comes because the earth is hard, and the sky wants nothing to do with men.

Lalla remains motionless, crumpled over on herself, knees on the stones. The sun is burning her shoulders and neck. She doesn’t open her eyes. Two streams of tears make little furrows in the red dust caked on her face.

When she lifts her head and opens her eyes, her vision is blurred. She needs to make an effort to see straight. The sharp silhouettes of the hills appear, then the deserted stretch of the plateau, with not a blade of grass, not a tree, only the light and the wind.

So then she begins to walk, staggering, slowly making her way back down the path leading to the valley, to the sea, to the plank and tarpaper Project. The shadows are long now, the sun is near the horizon. Lalla can feel her face swollen from the burn of the desert, and she thinks no one will be able to recognize her, now that she’s become like the Hartani.

When she gets back down near the mouth of the river, night has fallen on the Project. The electric lightbulbs make yellow dots. On the road, trucks are driving along throwing out the white beams of their headlights, idiotically.

At times Lalla runs, at other times she moves very slowly, as if she were going to stop, turn around, and flee. There are a few radios making their music mechanically in the night. The fires of the braziers are going out on their own, and in the houses of poorly fitted planks, the women and children are already rolled up in their blankets because of the night dampness. From time to time, the faint wind makes an empty can roll, a piece of corrugated iron flap. The dogs are hiding. Above the Project, the black sky is filled with stars.

Lalla walks silently through the alleys and thinks that no one here needs her, that everything is just perfect without her, as if she’d been gone for years, as if she’d never existed.

Instead of going toward Aamma’s house, Lalla walks slowly to the other end of the Project, where Old Naman lives. She’s shivering because the night air is very damp, and her knees are trembling beneath her because she hasn’t eaten anything since the day before. The day was so long up there on the plateau of stones that Lalla has the impression she’s been gone for days, maybe months. It’s as if she barely recognizes the streets of the Project, the sounds of children crying, the smell of urine and dust. Suddenly she thinks maybe months really have gone by, up there on the plateau of stones, and it only seemed like one long day. Then she thinks of Old Naman, and her throat tightens. In spite of her weakness, she starts running through the empty streets of the Project. The dogs hear her running; it makes them growl and bark a little. When she arrives in front of Naman’s house, her heart is beating very hard, and she can barely breathe. The door is cracked open; there is no light.

Old Naman is lying on his mat, just as she’d left him. He’s still breathing, very slowly, with a wheeze, and his eyes are wide open in the dark. Lalla leans over his face, but he doesn’t recognize her. His mouth is so busy trying to breathe, it can’t smile anymore.

“Naman … Naman…” Lalla murmurs.

Old Naman has no strength left. The wind of ill fortune has given him a fever, the kind that weighs on your body and on your head and keeps you from eating. The wind might carry him away. Anxiously Lalla leans down near the fisherman’s face.

She says, “You don’t want to go now? Not now, not yet?”

She wants so much to be able to hear Naman talk to her, tell her the story of the white bird who was a prince of the sea once again, or the story of the stone the Archangel Gabriel gave to human beings, and which turned black with their sins. But Old Naman can’t tell stories anymore; he barely has enough strength to raise his chest to breathe, as if there were an invisible weight upon him. Foul sweat and urine soak the thin body lying seemingly broken on the floor.

Lalla is too tired now to tell other stories, to continue talking about everything over there, across the sea, all of those cities in Spain and France.

So she sits down next to the old man and watches the night light through the open door. She listens to the wheezing breath, hears the evil sound of the wind outside, rolling tin cans around and making pieces of corrugated iron flap. Then she falls asleep, like that, sitting with her head resting on her knees. From time to time Old Naman’s choked breathing awakens her, and she asks, “Are you there? Are you still there?”

He doesn’t respond, he’s not sleeping; his gray face is turned toward the door, but his shiny eyes don’t seem to see anymore, as if they were contemplating what lies beyond.

Lalla tries to fight against sleep, because she’s afraid of what will happen if she goes to sleep. It’s like the fishermen, the ones who are far away, lost out at sea, who can’t see anything, rocked on the waves, caught in the whirling winds of the storm. They can’t ever fall asleep because then the sea will grab them, throw them down into the depths, swallow them up. Lalla wants to resist, but her eyelids close in spite of herself, and she feels herself falling backwards. She swims for a long time without knowing where she’s going, borne along on the slow sound of Old Naman’s breathing.

Then, before daybreak, she awakens with a start. She looks at the old man stretched out on the floor, his peaceful face resting against his arm. He’s not making a sound now, because he has stopped breathing. Outside, the wind has stopped blowing, the danger has passed. Everything is peaceful, as if no one ever died, anywhere.

WHEN LALLA DECIDED to leave, she didn’t say anything to anyone. She decided to leave because the man with the gray-green suit came back to Aamma’s house several times, and each time he looked at Lalla with those eyes that were as shiny and hard as black stones, and he sat on Lalla Hawa’s trunk to drink a glass of mint tea. Lalla isn’t afraid of him, but she knows if she doesn’t go away, one day he’ll force her to go to his house and marry him, because he is rich and powerful and doesn’t like anyone to resist him.

She left this morning at the crack of dawn. She didn’t even glance into the back of the house at the shape of Aamma sleeping, rolled up in her sheet. She just took a piece of blue cloth in which she put some stale bread and a few dried dates, and a gold bracelet that had belonged to her mother.

She went out without making a sound, without even waking a dog. She walked barefoot over the cold earth, between the rows of sleepy houses. Before her, the sky is a little pale, because day is coming. The mist is coming in from the sea; it makes a big, soft cloud that floats up the river, spreading out two curving arms like a gigantic bird with gray wings.

For a minute, Lalla feels like going as far as Naman the fisherman’s house, just to see it once more, because he’s the only person that Lalla has felt sad about losing. But she’s afraid of being late, and she walks away from the Project, along the goat path, toward the rocky hills. When she begins climbing up the rocks, she feels the cold wind cutting through her. There is no one up here either. The shepherds are still asleep in their huts of branches by the corrals, and it’s the first time that Lalla has entered the region without hearing their sharp whistling. It makes her a little frightened, as if the wind had turned the earth into a desert. But little by little, the sunlight appears on the other side of the hills, a red and yellow patch mingling with the gray night. Lalla is glad to see it, and she thinks that is where she’ll go later, to the place where the sky and the earth are filled with that huge patch of first light.

Thoughts are a bit jumbled in her mind as she walks over the rocks. It’s because she knows she won’t be coming back to the Project, that she’ll never see all the things she is so fond of again, the vast arid plain, the stretch of white beach where the waves fall one after the other; she’s sad because she’s thinking of the still dunes where she used to sit and watch the clouds make their way across the sky. She’ll never see the white bird who was the prince of the sea again, or the silhouette of Old Naman sitting in the shade of the fig tree by his upturned boat. So she slows down her pace a bit, and for a minute she feels like looking back. But before her are the silent hills, the sharp stones where the light is beginning to sparkle, and the little thorn bushes, where small droplets of moisture from the sky are trembling, and also the feather-light gnats drifting along on the wind.

So she walks on without turning around, holding the bundle of bread and dates tightly against her chest. When the path comes to an end, it means there are no more humans around. Then the sharp stones come up out of the ground, and you have to leap from rock to rock, making your way up to the highest hill. That’s where the Hartani is waiting for her, but she can’t see him yet. Maybe he’s hiding in a cave over by the cliff, in the place where you can look out over the whole valley, all the way to the sea. Or else he’s right nearby, behind a burnt bush, hidden up to his neck in some hole made from a stone, just like a snake.

He’s always on the lookout, like the wild dogs, ready to jump away, take flight. Maybe today he doesn’t want to leave anymore? Yet Lalla told him only yesterday that she would come, and she’d pointed to the long expanse in the distance, to the large block of limestone that seems to be holding up the sky, right where the desert begins. His eyes had shone brighter, because the idea has always been in his mind, since he was very small, and he has never stopped thinking about it for a second. You can tell by the way he looks out at the horizon, neck craning forward, eyes fixed. He never sits down; he squats on his heels, as if he were ready to leap up. He’s the one who showed Lalla the path in the desert, the path you get lost on, the one no one ever comes back from, and the sky, so beautiful and pure out there.

The sun is up now, it appears before her like a huge disk of fire, dazzling, it rises slowly, ballooning out over the chaos of stone. Never has it seemed so beautiful. In spite of the pain and the tears pouring from her eyes and running down her cheeks, Lalla looks straight at it, without blinking, just like Old Naman said the princes of the sea did. The light goes deep inside of her, touches everything that is hidden in her body, especially her heart.

There’s no longer any trace of the path now, and Lalla has to pick her way through the boulders. She jumps from rock to rock, over dried torrents, she skirts the cliff walls. The rising sun has made a big blind spot on her retinas, and she’s moving along somewhat haphazardly, bent forward to keep from falling. She goes through the hills, one after the other, then walks down the middle of a vast field of stones. There isn’t a soul. As far as she can see, there is nothing but the expanse of dry stone, with a few cactuses and tufts of euphorbia. The sun has depopulated the earth, burned it and worn it down until there is nothing left but these white stones, this brush. Lalla isn’t looking straight at it anymore; it is too high in the sky, and her pupils would be burned in a second, as if by lightning. The sky is ablaze. It’s blue and is burning like a huge flame, and Lalla has to squint up her eyes very tightly to be able to see ahead of herself. As the sun gradually rises in the sky, the things of the earth fill out, soak up light. There is no sound out here, but it seems as if you can hear the stones dilating, cracking from time to time.

She’s been walking for a long time. How long? Hours probably, without knowing where she’s going, simply in the opposite direction of her shadow, toward the other end of the horizon. Out there, the tall red mountains seem to be hanging in the sky, there are villages, a river maybe, lakes of sky-colored water. Then suddenly, without her understanding where he’s come from, the Hartani is there, standing in front of her. He isn’t moving, dressed as he is every day in his homespun robe, his head wrapped in a piece of white cloth. His face is black, but his smile lights it up when Lalla walks up to him.

“Oh, Hartani! Hartani!”

Lalla presses herself against him; she recognizes the smell of his sweat and his dusty clothes. He too has brought a little bread and some dates in a damp rag tied to his belt.

Lalla opens her bundle and shares a little bread with him. They eat quickly, without sitting down, because they’ve been hungry for a long time. The young shepherd glances around. He is studying the landscape carefully, and he resembles a bird of prey with unblinking eyes. He motions to a point, far away, out on the horizon over by the red mountains. He puts the palm of his hand under his lips: there is water out there.

They start walking again. The Hartani is out front, jumping lightly over the rocks. Lalla tries to place her feet in his steps. The boy’s frail, light-footed silhouette is forever out in front of her, he seems to be dancing over the white stones; she watches it like a flame, like a reflection, and her feet seem to move all by themselves, in rhythm with the Hartani.

The sun is beating down hard now, it weighs on Lalla’s head and shoulders, it aches inside her body. It’s as if the light that entered her in the morning was beginning to burn, to well up, and she can feel long painful waves moving up her arms and legs, becoming lodged in the cavity of her skull. The burn of the light is dry and dusty. There is not a drop of sweat on Lalla’s body, and her blue dress rubs against her belly and thighs, crackling with static electricity. The tears in her eyes have dried; crusts of salt have made sharp little crystals like grains of sand in the corners of her eyelids. Her mouth is dry and hard. She runs the ends of her fingers over her lips and thinks that her mouth has become like that of a camel, and she’ll soon be able to eat cactuses and thistles without feeling anything.

As for the Hartani, he’s still springing from rock to rock without looking back. His nimble white silhouette is farther and farther away; it’s like an animal fleeing, not stopping, not looking back. Lalla would like to catch up with him, but she hasn’t enough strength left. She staggers haphazardly over the chaos of stones, eyes trained straight ahead. Her wounded feet are bleeding, and in falling down several times, she’s skinned her knees. But she can hardly feel the pain at all. All she can feel is the withering reverberation of the light everywhere. It’s as if there were a bunch of animals jumping all about her on the rocks, wild dogs, horses, rats, goats making tremendous leaps… There are also large white birds, ibises, secretary birds, storks, beating their long fiery wings, as if they were trying to take flight, and they begin an interminable dance. Lalla can feel the breeze from their wings in her hair; she can hear the rustling of their quill feathers in the thick air. So then she turns her head, looks back to see all of those birds, all of those animals, even the lions she glimpsed out of the corner of her eye. But when she looks at them, they instantly melt away, disappear like mirages, and recompose behind her.

The Hartani is barely visible. His light silhouette is dancing over the white stones, like a shadow detached from the earth. Lalla isn’t trying to follow in his steps now, she can’t even see the immobile red mass of the mountain in the sky at the other end of the plain any longer. Maybe she’s not moving forward anymore? Her bare feet stub up against the rocks, bleed, stumble over holes. But it is as if the path is always undoing itself right behind her, like river water slipping through your legs. Most of all, it’s the light which is flowing by, it runs down onto the vast empty plain, flows by on the wind, sweeping over the open space. The light is making a sound like water, and Lalla hears its song, without being able to drink. The light is coming from the center of the sky; it burns down on the earth in the gypsum, in the mica. From time to time, in amidst the ochre dust between the white pebbles, there is an ember-colored flint, sharp as a fang. Lalla keeps her eye on its glint as she walks, as if the stone were giving her strength, as if it were a sign left by al-Ser, to show her which way to go. Or else, still farther out, a plaque of mica just like gold, with reflections that look like a nest of insects, and Lalla thinks she can hear the humming of their wings. But sometimes on the dusty ground, there just happens to be a dull, gray, round stone, an ordinary shingle from the sea, and Lalla looks at it as hard as she can; she takes it in her hand and holds it tight, to save herself. The stone is burning hot, all striped with white veins that make up a route in its center from which branch other routes as fine as baby hairs. Holding it in her fist, Lalla walks straight ahead. The sun is already going down toward the other end of the white plain. The evening wind is sweeping up flurries of dust that hide the tall red mountain at the foot of the sky.

“Hartani! Hartani!” Lalla shouts. She’s fallen to her knees on the stones because her legs refuse to walk any farther. Above her the sky is blank, ever more vast, ever more blank. There isn’t an echo to be heard.

Everything is clear and pure, Lalla can see the smallest pebbles, the slightest shrub, almost all the way out to the horizon. No one is moving. She’d love to see the wasps; she thinks she’d really like that, watch them making their invisible knots in the air around the children’s hair. She’d really like to see a bird, even a crow, even a vulture. But there’s nothing, no one. Only her dark shadow stretching out behind her, like a pit in the too-white earth.

So she lies down on the ground, and thinks that she is going to die soon, because there’s no strength left in her body, and the fire of the light is burning her lungs and her heart up. Slowly, the light fades, and the sky becomes veiled, but perhaps it is the weakness inside of her that is dimming the sun.

Suddenly Hartani is there again. He’s standing in front of her on one leg, balancing himself like a bird. He comes up to her, leans over. Lalla grabs onto his homespun robe, she clings to the cloth with all her might, she doesn’t want to let go of it, and she almost makes the boy fall over. He squats down next to her. His face is dark, but his eyes are filled with intensity and are shining very brightly. He touches Lalla’s face, her forehead, her eyes, he runs his fingers over her cracked lips. He motions to a point out on the stony plain, in the direction of the setting sun, over where there is a tree next to a rock: water. Is it near, is it far? The air is so pure that it’s impossible to tell. Lalla tries to get back to her feet, but her body isn’t responding anymore.

“Hartani, I can’t go on…” murmurs Lalla, nodding toward her bleeding legs doubled up underneath her.

“Go away! Leave me, go away!”

The shepherd hesitates, still squatting next to her. Maybe he is going to go away? Lalla looks at him without saying anything; she feels like going to sleep, disappearing. But the Hartani puts his arms around Lalla’s body, slowly lifts her up. Lalla can feel the muscles of the boy’s legs trembling under the load, and she tightens her arms around his neck, tries to make her weight blend in with that of the shepherd.

The Hartani walks over the stones, he lopes along quickly as if he were alone. He runs along on his long wobbly legs, crossing ravines, striding over rifts. The sun and the dusty wind have stopped whirling over the stony plain, but there are still slow movements out on the red horizon throwing sparks off the flint stones. There is something like a huge funnel of light before them, out where the sun has plunged toward the earth. Lalla listens to the Hartani’s heart beating in the arteries of his neck, she can hear his panting breath.

Before nightfall, they reach the rock and the tree, the place where there is an eye of water. It’s just a hole in the stony ground with gray water in it. The Hartani sets Lalla down gently beside the water and helps her drink from his cupped hand. The water is cold, a little bitter. Then the shepherd leans over too, and drinks for a long time with his head near the water.

They wait for the night. It falls very rapidly out here, sort of like a curtain being drawn, with no mist, no clouds, nothing spectacular. It’s almost as if there were no more air, or water, just the glow of the sun being gradually extinguished by the mountains.

Lalla is lying on the ground against the Hartani. She isn’t moving. Her legs are bone tired, lacerated, and the clotted blood has made scabs covering the soles of her feet like black shoe leather. Sometimes the pain from her feet shoots up through her legs, running along the bones and muscles to her groin. She moans a little, teeth clenched to keep from crying out, her hands squeeze the young boy’s arms. He doesn’t look at her; he’s looking straight out at the horizon, over in the direction of the dark mountains, or maybe he’s watching the huge night sky. His face has grown very black due to the shadows. Is he thinking about something? Lalla would really like to go inside of him to find out what he wants, where he’s going… She starts to talk, more for herself than for him. The Hartani listens to her in the way a dog does, lifting its head and following the sound of the syllables.

She talks to him about the man with the gray-green suit, about his hard black eyes like bits of metal, and then about the night spent with Naman, when the wind of ill fortune was blowing over the Project. She says, “Now that I’ve chosen you for my husband, no one can take me away, or force me to go before a judge to get married… We’re going to live together now and we’ll have a child, and no one else will want to marry me, you understand, Hartani? Even if they catch us, I’ll say that you are my husband, and that we are going to have a child, and they won’t be able to stop that. So then they’ll let us go, and we can go and live in the lands to the south, far away, in the desert…”

She no longer feels the fatigue, or the pain, only the exhilaration of that freedom, in the middle of the field of stones, in the silent night. She holds the body of the young shepherd very tightly until their odors and their breaths have completely mingled. Very slowly, the boy enters and possesses her, and she can hear the sound of his heart quickening against her chest.

Lalla turns her face up toward the center of the sky, and looks out intently. The cold, beautiful night envelops them, holding them in its blue darkness. Never has Lalla seen such a beautiful night. Back there in the Project, or on the shores of the sea, there was always something that came between you and the night — mist or dust. There was always a veil dulling it, because there were people everywhere, with their fires, their food, their breathing. But here, everything is pure. Now the Hartani lies down beside her, and a very deep, dizzy feeling traverses them, widening their pupils.

The Hartani’s face is taut, as if the skin on his forehead and cheeks was of polished stone. Above them, space slowly fills with stars, thousands of stars. They throw out bursts of white, pulse, trace their secret figures. The two fugitives watch them, almost holding their breath, eyes wide. They can feel the pattern of the constellations settling on their faces, as if they only existed through their gaze, as if they were drinking in the soft light of night. They aren’t thinking of anything anymore, not of the path in the desert, not of the suffering they will know tomorrow or the other days; they can’t feel their wounds anymore, or hunger or thirst, or anything earthly; they have even forgotten the burn of the sun that blackened their faces and bodies, that devoured the inside of their eyes.

The starlight falls gently down like rain. It makes not a sound, raises no dust, stirs up no wind. Now it is lighting the stony field, and the area around the mouth of the well, the charred tree becomes light and frail as a wisp of smoke. The earth is no longer really flat, it has been drawn out like the prow of a boat, and now it drifts slowly forward, glides along, rocking and rolling, moving slowly through the lovely stars, while the two children holding tightly to one another, bodies buoyed, carry out the gestures of lovemaking.

New stars appear every second, tiny, hardly even possible in the blackness, and the invisible threads of their light join the others. There are myriads of gray, red, white lights intermingling with the deep blue of the night, suspended like bubbles.

Later, as the Hartani is drifting peacefully off to sleep with his face against her, Lalla watches all the signs, all the bursts of light, everything that is pulsing, flickering, or remaining fixed, like an eye. Still higher up, directly above her, is the vast Milky Way, the path traced by the blood of Gabriel’s lamb, according to what Old Naman used to say.

She drinks in the extremely soft light coming from the clusters of stars, and suddenly she has the feeling, like the words to the song Lalla Hawa’s voice sang, that it is so very close, she could simply reach out her hand and take a handful of the beautiful shimmering light. But she doesn’t move. Her hand is resting on the Hartani’s neck and listening to the blood beating in his arteries, the tranquil passage of his breathing. Night has eased the fever of the sun and the dryness. Thirst, hunger, anxiety have all been relieved by the light of the galaxy, and on her skin, like droplets, are the marks of each star in the sky.

The two children can no longer see the earth now, holding tightly to one another, they are wheeling out through the open sky.

EACH DAY ADDED a little more land. The caravan had been divided into three sections, separated by a two- or three-hour march. The one headed by Larhdaf was on the left, over by the foothills of the Haua, on the route to Sidi al-Hach. Saadbou, the youngest son of the great sheik, was leading the one on the far right, following the dried riverbed of the Jang Saccum up through the middle of the valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra. In the middle, and hanging back, Ma al-Aïnine moved along with his warriors on camelback. Then came the caravan of men, women, and children prodding their livestock out in front, following the huge cloud of red dust rising into the sky ahead of them.

Each day, they walked along the bottom of the immense valley while the sun over their heads followed the opposite path. It was the end of winter, and the rains had not yet assuaged the earth. The bottom of the Saguiet al-Hamra was as hard and crackled as an old goatskin. Even its red color burned their eyes and the skin on their faces.

In the morning, before the sun was even up, the call for the first prayer rang out. Then the sounds of the animals arose. The smoke from the braziers filled the valley. In the distance, Larhdaf’s soldiers called out their chants and were answered by Saadbou’s men. But the blue men of the great sheik prayed in silence. When the first signs of red dust rose into the air, the men set the herds to moving. Everyone picked up their bundles and started walking again over the earth, which was still cold and gray.

Slowly, day broke on the horizon, up above the Hamada. The men watched as the gleaming disk lit up the valley bottom and, already, they squinted their eyes and leaned slightly forward, as if to resist the weight and pain of the light on their brows and shoulders.

At times Larhdaf’s and Saadbou’s troops were so close that the sound of their horses’ hooves and the grumbling of their camels could be heard. Then the three dust clouds blended together in the sky and almost obscured the sun.

When the sun was at its zenith, the wind rose and swept everything clean, driving away the high walls of red dust and sand. The men stopped their herds in half circles and took shelter behind the reclining camels or up against the thorn bushes. The earth seemed as vast as the sky, as barren, as blinding.

Nour walked behind the great sheik’s troops, carrying his load of provisions in a large piece of canvas knotted around his chest. Each day from dawn to dusk, he walked in the tracks of horses and men without knowing where he was going, without being able to see his father, or his mother, or his sisters. Sometimes he would meet back up with them in the evening, when the travelers lit their twig fires for tea and porridge. He spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him. It was as if the fatigue and dryness had burned up the words in his throat.

When night was falling, and the animals had pawed out a hollow in which to sleep, Nour was able to take a look at the immense deserted valley surrounding him. Walking out a little ways from the camp, standing upon the desiccated plain, Nour felt as if he were as tall as a tree. The valley seemed boundless, an infinite expanse of stones and red sand, unchanged since the beginning of time. Scattered in the distance were the burnt shapes of small acacias, bushes, and tufts of cactuses and dwarf palms, in places where the moisture in the valley made faint dark marks. The earth took on a mineral color in the twilight. Nour stood absolutely still, waiting for darkness to descend and fill up the valley, slowly, like impalpable water.

Later, other parties of nomads came to join Ma al-Aïnine’s group. They conferred with the chieftains of the tribes, asking them where they were going and then followed the same route. Now there were several thousand of them walking along the valley toward the wells of Hausa, al-Faunat, and Yorf.

Nour no longer knew how many days it had been since the journey began. Maybe it was only one single and interminable day unfolding like that, while the sun rose and set again in the blazing sky, and the cloud of dust swirled in on itself, churning like a wave. The men following Ma al-Aïnine’s sons were far ahead; they had probably already reached the end of the Saguiet al-Hamra, beyond the tomb of Mohammed Embarek, the place where the lunar wasteland of the valley of Mesuar opens out on the plateau of the Hamada. Maybe their horses were already climbing the slopes of the rocky hills, and seeing the immense valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra opening out behind them with the billowing red-ochre clouds of Ma al-Aïnine’s people and herds.

Now, the men and women in the last column were beginning to slow down. From time to time, Nour stopped to wait for his mother and sisters’ group. He sat down on the hot stones, a flap of his cloak pulled over his head, and watched the horde moving slowly along the trail. The unmounted warriors walked bent over, staggering under the loads on their shoulders. Some of them were leaning on their rifles, their spears. Their faces were black, and through the crunching of their footsteps in the sand, Nour could hear the sound of their labored breathing.

Behind them came the children and the shepherds, pursuing the herds of goats and sheep, throwing stones to drive them onward. The swirls of dust enveloped them like a red fog, and Nour watched the strange, disheveled shapes that seemed to be dancing in the dust. The women walked alongside the pack camels, some were carrying babies in their cloaks, slowly making their way barefoot over the scorching earth. Nour could hear the clear tinkling of their gold and copper necklaces, the bangles on their ankles. They walked along humming a sad interminable song that came and went like the sound of the wind.

But at the very end came those who could not go on, the aged, the infants, the wounded, young women whose men were dead and who no longer had anyone to help them find food or water. There were many of them, scattered along the trail in the valley of the Saguiet, and they kept coming for hours after the soldiers of the sheik had passed. They were the ones Nour looked upon with special compassion.

Standing by the side of the trail, he saw them walking slowly past, hardly lifting their legs, heavy with weariness. They had emaciated gray faces, eyes shiny with fever. Their lips were bleeding; their hands and chests were marked with wounds where the clotted blood had mixed with golden particles of dust. The sun beat down on them as it did on the red stones of the path, and they received a real beating. The women had no shoes, and their bare feet were burned from the sand and eaten away with the salt. But the most painful thing about them, the most disquieting thing that made pity rise in Nour’s breast, was their silence. Not one of them spoke or sang. No one cried or moaned. All of them, men, women, children with bleeding feet, plodded noiselessly forward, like a defeated people, not uttering a word. All that could be heard was the sound of their footsteps in the sand and the shallow panting of their breaths. Then they moved slowly away, bundles rocking on their backs, like strange insects after a storm.

Nour remained standing by the side of the trail, his bundle resting at his feet. From time to time, when an old woman or a wounded soldier walked in his direction, he tried to talk to them, drew near them saying, “Hello, hello, you aren’t too terribly tired, are you? Would you like me to help you with your load?”

But they remained silent, they didn’t even look at him, and their faces were as hard as the stones in the valley, closed tight against the pain and the light.

A group of men from the desert came, warriors from Chinguetti. Their ample sky-blue cloaks were in shreds. They had bound up their legs and feet with bloodstained rags. They were carrying nothing, not even a bag of rice, not even a flask of water. They had nothing left but their rifles and their spears and they struggled along, like the old people and children.

One of them was blind, and he was holding on to the group by a flap of cloak, staggering over the rocks in the path, tripping against the roots of shrubs.

When he passed near Nour and heard the voice of the young boy greeting them, he stopped and let go of his companion’s cloak.

“Have we arrived?” he asked.

The others kept on walking without even looking back. The desert warrior’s face was still young, but wasted with fatigue, and a dirty piece of cloth was tied across his burned eyes.

Nour gave him a little of his water to drink, put his load back on his shoulders, and placed the warrior’s hand on his cloak.

“Come, I’ll be your guide now.”

They struck out walking on the path again, toward the end of the valley, pursuing the huge cloud of red dust.

The man did not speak. His hand was gripping Nour’s shoulder so tightly it was painful. In the evening, when they stopped at the Yorf well, the boy was exhausted. They had now reached the foot of the red cliffs, where the mesas of the Haua and the valley leading northward began.

All the caravans had come together there: Larhdaf’s, Saadbou’s and the great sheik’s, with his blue men. In the dusk light, Nour watched the thousands of men sitting on the dried earth around the dark stain of the well. The red dust was settling gradually, and the smoke of the braziers was already rising into the sky.

When Nour had rested, he picked up his bundle but didn’t knot it around his chest. He took the blind warrior’s hand, and they walked over to the well.

Everyone had already drunk, the men and women on the east side of the well, the animals on the west side. The water was murky, mixed with the red mud of the banks. Yet never had it seemed more beautiful to the people. The cloudless sky shone upon its black surface as if upon polished metal.

Nour leaned toward the water and drank deeply without catching his breath. Kneeling at the edge of the well, the blind warrior also drank, avidly, almost without even using his cupped hand. When he had had his fill, he sat down at the edge of the well, his face dark and his beard dripping with water.

Then they walked back, over near the animals. The sheik had given the order for everyone to stay clear of the well, so as not to trouble the water.

Night was falling quickly near the Hamada. Darkness crept into the bottom of the valley, leaving only the sharp peaks of red stone in the flaming sun.

Nour looked for his mother and father for a minute, without seeing them. Maybe they had already left for the first part of the northern trail with Larhdaf’s soldiers. Nour chose a place for the night, near the livestock. He set his bundle down and shared a piece of millet bread and some dates with the blind warrior. The man ate quickly and stretched out afterward on the ground with his hands under his head. Then Nour spoke to him, to ask him who he was. The man began slowly, with his voice slightly hoarse from having remained silent, telling about everything that had happened back there, far away in Chinguetti, near the great salt lake of Chinchan, the soldiers of the Christians who had attacked the caravans, burned the villages, who had taken the children away to camps. When the soldiers of the Christians had come from the west, from the shores of the sea, or else from the south, warriors clad in white, mounted on camels, and black men from Niger, the desert peoples had had to flee northward. During one of the battles, he had been wounded with a rifle and had lost his sight. So his companions had brought him northward, to the holy city of Smara, because they said the great sheik knew how to heal wounds caused by the Christians, that he had the power of restoring sight. While he was talking, tears ran from his closed eyelids, because now he was thinking of everything he had lost.

“Do you know where we are now?” He was always asking that of Nour, as if he were afraid of being abandoned there, in the middle of the desert.

“Do you know where we are? Are we still a long way from the place where we’ll be able to stop for good?”

“No,” Nour would say, “we’ll soon reach the lands the sheik promised, the lands of plenty, where it will be like the kingdom of God.”

But he had no idea, and deep down in his heart, he thought perhaps they would never reach that land, even if they did cross the desert, the mountains, and even the sea, all the way out to the place where the sun first appears on the horizon.

Now the blind warrior was starting to speak again, but he wasn’t talking about the war. He was telling, in an almost hushed voice, about his childhood in Chinguetti, the salt road with his father and brothers. He was telling about his schooling in the Chinguetti mosque and then the departure of the huge caravans, through the expanse of the desert, heading for the Adrar, and even farther east, out by the Hank Mountains, around the Abd al-Malek well, where the miraculous tomb stands. He was talking about all of that softly, almost singing, lying on the ground, with the cool darkness of night covering his face and his burned eyes.

Nour lay down beside him, wrapped in his woolen cloak, his head resting upon the bundle, and he went to sleep with his eyes open, looking up at the sky and listening to the voice of the man who was talking to himself.

Desert nights were cold, but Nour’s tongue and lips continued to burn, and it seemed as if red-hot coins were placed on his eyelids. The wind blew over the rocks, making the men shiver with fever in their rags. Somewhere in the midst of the sleeping warriors, the old sheik draped in his white cloak was looking out at the night, not sleeping, as he had done for months. His gaze wandered through the maze of stars bathing the earth in their soft light. Sometimes, he walked a short way among the sleeping men. Then he went back to sit in his place and drink some tea, slowly, listening to the coals crackling in the brazier.

Days passed in that way, burning and grueling, while the herds of men and animals made their way northward up the valley. Now they were following the trail to Tindouf, through the arid plateau of the Hamada. The sons of Ma al-Aïnine, along with the most able-bodied men, rode on ahead to scout out the narrow valleys of the Ouarkziz Mountains, but that route was too difficult for the women and children, and the sheik decided to follow the trail to the east.

Nour walked at the end of the caravan with the blind warrior clutching his shoulder. Each day the bundle of provisions grew lighter, and Nour knew there would not be enough to get to the end of the journey.

Now they were walking along the immense plateau of stones, very close to the sky. Sometimes they crossed crevasses, great black wounds in the white rock, slides of knifelike stones. The blind warrior squeezed Nour’s shoulder and arm very tightly to keep from falling.

The men had worn out their goatskin shoes, and many of them had wrapped their feet in strips of their garments to stop the bleeding. The women went barefoot because they were used to it since their childhood, but at times a sharper stone cut into their skin, and they moaned as they walked.

The blind warrior never talked during the day. His dark face was hidden by his blue cloak and the bandage covering his eyes like the hood of a falcon. He walked without complaining, and ever since Nour had become his guide, he was no longer afraid of getting lost. Only when he could feel evening coming on, when Larhdaf and Saadbou’s men, far out ahead in the valleys, called out in their chanting voices the signal to halt, the blind warrior would always ask with the same anxiousness, “Is this the place? Have we arrived? Tell me, have we arrived in the place where we will stop at last?”

Nour looked around and saw nothing but the endless stretch of stone and dust, the changeless earth beneath the sky. He untied his bundle and simply said, “No, this isn’t it yet.”

Then, as he did every evening, the blind warrior would drink a few swallows from the waterskin, eat a few dates and some bread, stretch out on the ground, and continue to talk about things in his land, about the great holy city of Chinguetti, near Lake Chinchan. He talked about the oasis where the water is green, where the palm trees are immense and their fruit is as sweet as honey, where the shady groves are filled with the song of birds and the laughter of young girls on their way to fetch water. He talked about all of that in a sort of singsong voice, softly, as if he were rocking himself to ease the suffering. At times, his companions came to sit with him; they shared bread and dates with Nour, or they made tea from chiba weed. They listened to the blind warrior’s monologue, then they too spoke of their land, of the wells in the South, Atar, Oujeft, Tamchakatt, and of the great city of Oualata. They spoke a strange, gentle language like that of the prayers, and their thin faces were the color of metal. When the sun was nearing the horizon, and the deserted plateau grew bright with light, they knelt down and prayed, foreheads in the dust. Nour helped the blind warrior bow down facing eastward, then he lay down, wrapped in his cloak, and listened to the sound of the men’s voices until sleep crept over him.

That is how they crossed the Ouarkziz Mountains, following the fissures and the dried beds of torrents. The caravan was spread out across the entire plateau, from one end of the horizon to the other. The huge column of red dust rose each day in the blue sky, slanting in the wind. The herd of goats and sheep, the pack camels walked amidst the men, blinding them with dust. Far behind them, old people, sick women, abandoned children, wounded warriors walked in the excruciating light, heads bowed, legs wobbling, leaving drops of blood here and there in their tracks.

The first time Nour saw someone fall by the side of the trail without a sound, he wanted to stop; but the blue warriors and those who were walking with him pushed him onward, not saying anything, because there was nothing else to do. Now Nour no longer stopped. Sometimes there would be the shape of a body in the dust, arms and legs drawn in, as if it were asleep. It was an old man, or woman, that the pain and exhaustion had stopped there, by the side of the trail, struck in the back of the head as if with a hammer, the body already desiccated. The blowing wind would throw handfuls of sand over it, would soon cover it over, without anyone having to dig a grave.

Nour thought of the old woman who had given him some tea back there in the Smara camp. Maybe she too had fallen one day, struck down by the sun, and the desert sand had covered her over. But he didn’t think about her for very long, because each step he took was like someone’s death, wiping his memory clean, as if crossing the desert had to destroy everything, burn everything out of his memory, make him into a diVerent boy. The hand of the blind warrior pushed him onward when Nour’s legs slowed with fatigue, and perhaps, without that hand lying on his shoulder, he too would have fallen by the side of the trail, arms and legs drawn in.

There were always new mountains on the horizon; the plateau of stones and sand seemed endless, like the sea. Each evening, when he heard the signal for the halt being called, the blind warrior would say to Nour, “Is this it? Have we arrived?”

And then he would say, “Tell me what you can see.”

But Nour simply answered, “No, this isn’t it yet. There’s nothing but desert, we have to keep walking.”

Despair was beginning to spread amongst the people. Even the warriors of the desert, Ma al-Aïnine’s invincible blue men, were exhausted, and their eyes looked shamed, like those of men who have lost faith.

They remained seated in small groups, rifles cradled in their arms, without talking. When Nour went to see his mother and father to ask them for water, it was their silence that frightened him the most. It was as if the threat of death had afflicted the people, and they no longer had the strength to love one another.

Most of the people in the caravan, the women, the children, were lying prostrate on the ground, waiting for the sun to die out on the horizon. They no longer even had the strength to say the prayer, despite the call of Ma al-Aïnine’s religious men echoing over the plateau. Nour stretched himself out on the ground, resting his head upon his nearly empty bundle, and watched the fathomless sky changing color while he listened to the voice of the blind man singing.

Sometimes he felt as if it were all a dream, a terrible interminable dream he was having with his eyes open, a dream that was pulling him along the star routes, over the earth as smooth and hard as polished stone. Then all of the suffering was like thrusting spears, and he moved onward without understanding what was tearing at him. It was as if he had stepped outside of himself, abandoning his body on the burnt earth, his motionless body on the desert of stones and sand, like a stain, a pile of old forgotten rags, and his soul was venturing out into the icy sky, out amongst the stars, covering in the wink of an eye all of the space that his life would never be enough to apprehend. Then he saw, appearing like mirages, the extraordinary cities with palaces of white stone, towers, domes, large gardens streaming with pure water, trees laden with fruit, flower beds, fountains where young girls with tinkling laughter gathered. He saw it all distinctly, he slipped into the cool water, drank at the waterfalls, tasted each fruit, breathed in each smell. But what was most extraordinary was the music he heard when he left his body. He had never heard anything like it. It was the voice of a young woman singing in the Chleuh language, a gentle song that moved through the air and kept repeating the same words, like this:

“One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make bedding of acacia sprays, oh, one day, the snake will spit no more poison, and rifle bullets will bring no more death, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

Where was such a clear gentle voice coming from? Nour could feel his consciousness slipping still farther out, beyond this world, beyond this sky, toward the land where there are black clouds filled with rain, wide deep rivers where the water never stops flowing.

“One day, oh, one day, the wind will cease to blow over the earth, the grains of sand will be sweet as sugar, under each white stone on the path, a spring will be awaiting me, one day, oh, one day, the bees will sing for me, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

Out there, the mysterious sounds of the storm rumble; out there cold and death reign supreme.

“One day, oh, one day, there will be the night sun, and puddles of moon water will gather upon the earth, the gold of the stars will rain from the sky, one day, oh, one day, I’ll see my shadow dancing for me, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

The new order is coming from there, the order that is driving the blue men from the desert, that is giving rise to fear everywhere.

“One day, oh, one day, the sun will go black, the earth will split open to its very core, the sea will cover the sand, one day, oh, one day, my eyes will see no light, my lips will be unable to say your name, my heart will stop beating, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

The stranger’s voice faded away in a murmur, and Nour could once again hear the slow sad song of the blind warrior talking to himself, his face turned toward the sky he could not see.

One evening Ma al-Aïnine’s caravan arrived on the rim of the Drâa, on the far side of the mountains. There, as they descended toward the west, they caught sight of the smoke coming from Larhdaf’s and Saadbou’s camps. When they met back up with one another there was a surge of new hope. Nour’s father came to see him and helped him carry his load.

“Where are we? Is this the place?” asked the blind warrior.

Nour explained to him that they had made it across the desert and that they weren’t far from their goal.

That night there was a sort of celebration. For the first time in a very long time the sounds of guitars and drums were heard, and the clear song of flutes.

The night was milder in the valley, and there was grass for the animals. With his mother and father, Nour ate millet bread and dates, and the blind warrior also got his share. He spoke with them about the long road they had traveled from the Saguiet al-Hamra to the tomb of Sidi Mohammed al-Quenti. Afterward, they walked together, guiding the blind warrior through the fields of brush to the dried bed of the Drâa.

There were many people and animals, because the people and animals of the great sheik’s caravan had been joined by the nomads of the Drâa, those of the wells of Tassouf, the people of Messeïed, of Tcart, of al-Gaba, of Sidi Brahim al-Aattami, everyone whom poverty and the threat of the arrival of the French had driven from the coastal regions and who had heard that the great sheik Ma al-Aïnine was en route for a holy war to expel the foreigners from the lands of the Faithful.

So the gaps in the ranks of men and women that death had made could no longer be seen. One no longer saw that most of the men were wounded or ill, or that the little children were slowly dying in their mothers’ arms, burning up with fever and dehydration.

All that could be seen, on all sides of the black bed of the dried river, were human shapes walking slowly along, and herds of goats and sheep, and men riding their camels, their horses, all heading toward something, toward their destiny.

For days they walked up the huge Drâa Valley, over the tract of crackled sand, hard as kiln-baked clay, over the black bed of the river where the sun blazed at its zenith like a flame. On the other side of the valley, Larhdaf and Saadbou’s men rode their horses up a narrow torrent, and the men, women, and herds followed the path they opened. Now it was Ma al-Aïnine’s warriors who were going in last, mounted on their camels, and Nour was walking with them, guiding the blind warrior. Most of Ma al-Aïnine’s soldiers were on foot, using their rifles and spears to help themselves scale the ravines.

That same evening, the caravan reached the deep well, the one that was called Aïn Rhatra, not far from Torkoz, at the foot of the mountains. Just as he did every evening, Nour went to fetch water for the blind warrior, and they performed their ablutions and said their prayer. Then Nour settled in for the night not far from the sheik’s warriors. Ma al-Aïnine didn’t pitch his tent. He slept out of doors, like the men of the desert, simply wrapped in his white cloak, crouching on his saddle blanket. Night fell rapidly, because they were near the high mountains. The chill made the men shiver. Next to Nour, the blind warrior no longer sang. Maybe he didn’t dare, due to the presence of the sheik, or maybe he was too exhausted to say anything.

When Ma al-Aïnine ate his evening meal with his warriors, he had a little food and tea brought over for Nour and his companion. It was the tea especially that made them feel better, and Nour thought he’d never had anything better to drink. The food and the fresh water of the well were like a light in their bodies that restored all of their strength. Nour ate the bread, watching the seated shape of the old man wrapped in the large white cloak.

From time to time, people approached the sheik to ask for his blessing. He welcomed them, had them sit down at his side, and offered them a piece of his bread, talked to them. They went away after having kissed a flap of his cloak. They were nomads from the Drâa, shepherds in rags, or blue women carrying their small children rolled up in their cloaks. They wanted to see the sheik, to glean a little strength, a little hope, to have him soothe the wounds on their bodies.

Later, during the night, Nour woke with a start. He saw the blind warrior leaning over him. The face filled with suffering glowed in the starlight. As Nour shrank back, almost frightened, the man said softly, “Will he restore my sight? Will I be able to see again?”

“I don’t know,” said Nour.

The warrior whimpered and fell back to the ground, head in the dust.

Nour looked around. On the floor of the valley, at the foot of the mountains, there was not a sign of movement, not a sound. Everywhere, people were sleeping, rolled up in their covers to stave off the cold. Alone, sitting on his saddle blanket, as if weariness did not exist for him, Ma al-Aïnine was motionless, eyes fixed on the night landscape.

So then Nour lay down on his side, cheek resting against his arm, and he watched the old man who was praying for a long time, and once again, it was as if he were slipping away into an interminable dream, a dream much greater than himself, which led him out toward another world.

Each day at sunrise the men were on their feet. They took up their burdens in silence, and the women rolled the young children up on their backs. The animals rose too, pawing the ground and making the first dust rise, for the old man’s order had entered them, spreading through them along with the warmth of the sun and the giddiness of the wind.

They pursued their march northward, through the jagged mountains of the Taïssa, along narrow passes as blistering hot as the sides of a volcano.

Sometimes in the evening, when they arrived at a well, blue men and women, emerging from the desert, ran up to them with offerings of dates, sour milk, millet bread. The great sheik gave them his blessing, for they had brought their small children who had stomach ailments or eye infections. Ma al-Aïnine anointed them with a little dirt mixed with his saliva, he laid his hands on their foreheads; then the women went off, returned to their red desert just as they had come. Men also came at times with their rifles and spears to join the troop. They were peasants with coarse features, with blond or red hair and strange green eyes.

On the other side of the mountains, the caravan arrived at the Taïdalt palm grove, where the Noun River and the trail to Goulimine begin. Nour thought they would be able to rest and drink to their heart’s content, but the palm grove was small, shrunken from drought and the desert wind. The tall gray dunes had eaten into the oasis, and the water was mud-colored. There was hardly anyone in the palm grove, save a few old men, wasted with hunger. So Ma al-Aïnine’s troop traveled on the next day, following the dried river toward Goulimine.

Before reaching the city, the troops of Ma al-Aïnine’s sons rode out ahead. Two days later, they came back with bad news: the soldiers of the Christians had landed at Sidi Ifni, and they too were heading northward. Larhdaf wanted to go to Goulimine all the same, to fight against the Spanish and the French, but the sheik motioned toward the men camping on the plain and merely asked him, “Are those your soldiers?” Then Larhdaf bowed his head, and the sheik gave the order to depart, skirting Goulimine, toward the Aït Boukha palm grove, then across the mountains to reach the Bou Izakarn trail to the east.

Despite their exhaustion, the men and women made their way for weeks through the red mountains, along dry torrents. The blue men, the women, the shepherds with their herds, the pack camels, the horsemen, all had to weave their way through the blocks of stone, to find a passageway over the rockslides. That is how they reached the holy city of Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa, the patron saint of acrobats and jugglers. The caravan spread out over the arid valley to pitch camp. Only the sheik and his sons and members of the Goudfia stayed within the confines of the tomb while the noblemen came to show their allegiance.

That evening there was a collective prayer beneath the starry sky, and the men and women came together at the tomb of the saint. The silence around the fires was broken only by the crackling of dry branches, and Nour could see the slight frame of the sheik squatting on the ground, reciting the formula of the dzikr in a low voice. But that evening, it was a prayer without shouts or music, because death was too close, and fatigue had made their throats tight. There was nothing but the very gentle voice, light as a wisp of smoke, chanting in the silence. Nour looked around and saw the thousands of men sitting on the ground, draped in their woolen cloaks, lit by fires scattering out into the distance. They sat motionless in silence. It was the most intense, most painful prayer he had ever heard. No one moved except, from time to time, a woman breastfeeding her child to put it to sleep, or an old man coughing. In the steep-walled valley, there wasn’t a breath of air, and the fires were burning very straight and bright. The night was ice-cold and beautiful, filled with stars. Then the glow of the moon appeared at the horizon, over the black cliffs, and the absolutely round silver disk rose hour by hour to its zenith.

The sheik prayed all night long as the fires went out, one after the other. The people, overcome with exhaustion, lay down to sleep right where they were. Nour only left the gathering two or three times, to go urinate behind the bushes in the valley bottom. He couldn’t sleep, as if his body were burning with fever. Next to him, his father, mother, and sisters had dozed off, wrapped up in their cloaks, and the blind warrior was sleeping too, his head lying on the cold earth.

Nour continued to watch the old man sitting next to the white tomb, chanting softly in the silent night, as if he were rocking a child.

At daybreak, the caravan went on, accompanied by some of the Aït ou Moussa and mountain men from Ilirh, from Tafermit, the Ida Gougmar, the Ifrane, the Tirhmi, all those who wanted to follow Ma al-Aïnine in his war for the kingdom of God.

There were still many more days of crossing the deserted mountains, along dried torrents. Each day the burning sun, the thirst, the blinding, overly white sky, the all-too-red rocks, the dust that suffocated the animals and people started over again. Nour couldn’t remember anymore what the world was like when he wasn’t on the move. He couldn’t remember the wells, where the women go to fetch water in their jugs and chatter like birds. He could no longer remember the song of the shepherds who allow their herds to wander, or the games children play in the sand of the dunes. It was if he had been walking forever, endlessly seeing identical hills, ravines, red rocks. At times he would have liked so much to sit down on a stone, just any stone by the side of the trail, and watch the long caravan going off, the dark shapes of the men and the camels in the shimmering air, as if it were a mirage fading away. But the hand of the blind warrior did not leave his shoulder, it pushed him onward, forced him to keep walking.

When they came in sight of a village, they stopped. The name of the village was passed from one person to the next, buzzing on everyone’s lips, “Tirhmi, Anezi, Assaka, Asserssif…” Now they were walking along a real river, in which a thin trickle of water ran. Argans and white acacias grew along its banks. Then they walked over an immense sandy plain, as white as salt, where the sunlight was blinding.

One evening as the caravan was settling in for the night, a band of warriors arrived from the north, in the company of a man on horseback wearing a long white cloak.

It was the great sheik Lahoussine himself, who had come to bring the aid of his warriors and distribute food to the travelers. Then the people realized the journey was drawing to an end, because they were entering the valley of the great Souss River, the place where there would be water and pasture for the livestock, and land for all of the men.

When the news spread amongst the travelers, a feeling of emptiness and death came over Nour once again, as it had before leaving Smara. The people were running back and forth in the dust shouting out, calling to one another, “We’ve arrived! We’ve arrived!” The blind warrior was gripping Nour’s shoulder very tightly, and he too was shouting, “We’ve arrived!”

But it wasn’t until two days later that they arrived in the valley of the great river, before the city of Taroudant. For hours they followed the river upstream, walking in the thin streams of water running through the red stones. In spite of the river water, the banks were barren and dry, and the earth was hard, baked by the sun and the wind.

Nour walked over the smooth stones of the river, dragging the blind warrior behind him. In spite of the blaze of the sun, the water was as cold as ice. A few scraggly shrubs were growing in the middle of the river, on little pebble islands. There were also long white tree trunks that the floodwaters had brought down from the mountains.

Nour had already forgotten the presentiment of death. He was happy because he too believed it was the end of the journey, that this was the land Ma al-Aïnine had promised them before leaving Smara.

The hot air was laden with smells, for it was the beginning of spring. Nour breathed in that smell for the very first time. Insects danced over the streams of water, wasps, light flies. It had been so long since Nour had seen any wildlife that he was happy to see those flies and those wasps. Even when a horsefly suddenly stung him through his clothing, it didn’t anger him, and he merely shooed it away with his hand.

On the other side of the Souss River, hugging the red mountain, was the large city of mud houses, looming up like a celestial vision. Unearthly, as if suspended in the sunlight, the city seemed to be waiting for the men of the desert, waiting to offer them refuge. Never before had Nour seen such a beautiful city. The high windowless walls of red stone and mud glowed in the light of the setting sun. A halo of dust was floating over the city like pollen, encompassing it in its magical cloud.

The travelers stopped in the valley, below the city, and gazed at it for a long time in both love and fear. Now, for the first time since the beginning of their journey, they felt how truly weary they were, their clothing in shreds, their feet wrapped in bloody rags, their lips and eyelids burned by the desert sun. They were sitting on the shingles of the river, and some had pitched their tents or had built shelters out of branches and leaves. As if he too were feeling the fear of the crowd, Ma al-Aïnine stopped with his sons and warriors on the bank of the river.

Now the large tents of the tribal chieftains were being raised; the pack camels were being unloaded. Night fell on the ramparts of the city; the sky went dark, and the red earth turned black. Only the high frost-covered peaks of the Atlas, Mount Tichka, Mount Tinergouet, still glistened in the sun when the valley was already sunk in darkness. The call for the evening prayer in the city could be heard, a voice that echoed out strangely like a lament. On the shingles of the river, the travelers were prostrating themselves and praying too, without raising their voices, accompanied by the soft gurgling of the stream.

When morning came, Nour was astounded. He had slept through the night without feeling the stones bruising his ribs, or the cold, or the dampness of the river. When he awoke, he saw the mist drifting slowly down the valley, as if the light of day were pushing it along. In the riverbed, amidst the sleeping men, the women were already up, going to fetch water, or gathering a few twigs. The children were looking for shrimp under the flat stones.

But it was when he looked at the city that Nour was filled with wonder. In the pure dawn air, at the foot of the mountains, stood the tall fortress of Taroudant. Its walls of red stone, its terraces, its towers were clear and distinct, seeming to have been sculpted out of the bedrock of the mountain itself. From time to time, the white mist passed between the riverbed and the city, half hiding it, as if the citadel were floating above the valley, a sort of earthen and stone vessel gliding slowly past the islands of the snow-capped mountains.

Nour stared at it without being able to turn away. His eyes were fascinated with the high windowless walls. There was something mysterious and threatening in those walls, as if the city wasn’t inhabited by people, but by supernatural spirits. Slowly, the light appeared in the sky — pink, then amber-colored, just like that, until the intense blue was everywhere. The light sizzled on the mud walls, on the terraces, on the gardens of orange trees and on the tall palms. Lower down, the arid lands traversed by the irrigation canals were an almost dusky color of red.

Standing stock still on the beach in the silence, surrounded by the men of the desert, Nour watched the magical city awakening. Thin wisps of smoke lifted into the air, and — almost ethereal — the familiar sounds of life, voices, the laughter of children, a young woman singing could be heard.

For the men of the desert, sitting motionless in the bed of the river, those wisps of smoke, those sounds seemed immaterial, as if they were dreaming that fortified city on the mountainside, those fields, those palm and orange trees.

The sun had risen high in the sky, was already burning the stones of the riverbed. A strange odor wafted over to the nomad camp, and Nour had a hard time recognizing it. It wasn’t the sharp and cold smell of the days of fleeing and fear, the smell he had been breathing in for such a long time across the desert. It was an odor of musk and oil, pungent, inebriating, the smell of braziers in which cedar coal is being burned, the smell of coriander, of pepper, of onions.

Nour breathed in that odor, without daring to move for fear of losing it, and the blind warrior also recognized that blissful smell. All the men remained motionless, their wide eyes looking on unblinkingly, achingly, at the high red wall of the city. They looked at the city which was so close and yet so distant at the same time, the city that might open its gates, and their hearts beat faster. Around them, the pebble beaches of the river were already shimmering in the heat of day. They watched the magical city without moving. Then, as the sun rose higher in the sky, each of the men, one after the other, covered his head with a flap of his cloak.