Gold Dust

13

Marry her and be damned.”

This was the message Ukhayyad’s father sent him through Sheikh Musa. He had not expected this sort of response, and it filled his eyes with a cloud of rage. Sheikh Musa tried to warn him. “Gently,” he said as he shook his finger. “Fathers may speak to sons however they like, but a son cannot answer his father in kind.” Ukhayyad swallowed his anger and rose to hide his humiliation in the desert.

The reason for all this was that an Eve had joined the tribe to help herd the skinny she-goats. The gorgeous girl came with her kin from Aïr, fleeing the drought that had gripped that part of the desert over the last five years. While unmistakable signs of affliction showed on the miserable beasts of her tribe, her beauty remained in full bloom. Not even the dusty road had stripped her of her splendor. Besides her beauty, she had a light spirit and a great deal of charm. It was this charm that slew Ukhayyad the first time they met.

Beware the charms of women! Their allure is a mystery — it is as plain and simple as the desert itself and yet there is nothing more obscure or indecipherable. Their charm is like the murmuring of jinn on Jebel Hasawna — you hear it, but cannot make out the words, or you hear the sounds, but their meaning escapes you. A look might suggest a woman’s charm — or an offhand smile, passing glance, shake of the head, or the way a word is spoken. Or it might be nothing more than a musical ring in her voice. The allure of women was something created just to slay men like Ukhayyad.

He first met her during a moonlit gathering. He watched her bewitching smile flash in the dim light and followed her slim silhouette as she wandered between the women. Then he heard her sing. My God — what a powerful voice! Her songs welled up from deep inside. She sang as if she were plucking out the loneliness from her heart. She sang as if she were exorcising the bleak solitude of the desert. Her divine voice communicated what her charms could never directly express. Each man who heard her sing that night began to swoon and dance. Ukhayyad danced with the other young men until morning.

He met her in passing after that, both during the late-night gatherings and in the pastures. She would sing heavenly songs for him out in the open desert spaces and he would listen attentively to the agony of a girl who had been driven by drought and famine to emigrate and live in exile from her homeland. It was not difficult to find this melody among the people of the desert. Who in the desert had never tasted drought? Who had not been driven into exile by famine? Such things were the inescapable fate of the desert — and all the songs of the desert were an expression of this grief, drought, and homelessness. The peoples of the desert sang of endless exile, of the eternal longing to return to God’s presence and the origin of all. They sang of longing for that ever-merciful oasis, the original oasis, the oasis of which the oases of Fezzan were but miserable ghosts. The oasis that no longer exists, that never existed.

Ukhayyad had caught a glimpse of that oasis when he tumbled into the well. But now that mystery had vanished. Now it was the girl’s songs of longing and agony that made him burn — and in his heart, he wept. He spoke with the girl often, asking about Aïr, the drought, and the grief of emigrating from Timbuktu. Then they played, reciting lines of poetry back and forth to one another. She knew more poems by heart than she had hairs on her head. Her hair was itself a poem of braided plaits falling thickly across a full bosom.

He went to her uncle to ask for her hand, and won his approval. He then sent word to his father, asking for his counsel, and was stunned by the response, “Marry her and be damned!” He did not understand his father at all — he had never lived with the man and did not know him well. All he knew was that women held first place in his father’s life. His mother had occupied second rank among his wives. The poor woman was sickly and weak in body and heart. Ukhayyad remembered her colorless face right before she died. Her heart killed her before Ukhayyad’s seventh birthday. An African slave woman had raised him after that. Ukhayyad’s father then married another woman from the clans of the vassals. He married her before he became chief, but they never produced any offspring. Even with all these wives, the man’s adventures with other women had never ceased throughout the years. He was famous for often repeating the saying of the Prophet, “The three dearest things to me in your world are: women, perfume, and — most of all — prayer.” He then liked to offer his commentary, “See? Women come first. They’re at the top of the Prophet’s list.” When the clan engaged in raids into the African interior, his father would relinquish his share of the spoils save for what he was owed of the women captives. He would then snatch them up, carrying them back into the desert as his concubines. He had even married a number of them according to God’s law, despite the fact that they were heathens who knew nothing of Islam. In the clan, it was said that back when Ukhayyad was a small child, his parents had fallen out because of how the man carried on with a beautiful mulatta who lived in a neighboring encampment. After Ukhayyad’s mother passed away, his father became chief, inheriting the title from his maternal uncle who had died unexpectedly. It was said that the uncle had not intended to leave the leadership to Ukhayyad’s father, but had died precipitously, ambushed by bandits in the Danbaba desert, and the sheikhs of the clan had not been able to go against custom simply because of the nephew’s well-known passion for women. In those days, a passion for women was not seen as a vice that compromised a man’s virility. On the contrary, to be passionate, even mad for a woman was a virtue thought to befit warriors and noblemen. Ukhayyad’s father bolstered his standing by repeating the lofty saying of the Prophet concerning women. In doing so, he effectively ambushed and neutralized the men of religion, ensuring his immunity from the malicious interference of would-be religious scholars and people who think that Islamic law should be used to settle disputes.

Like his father before him, Ukhayyad also learned a few Qur’anic verses from a blind sheikh who spent his life wandering with the clan. Then the sheikh died from the bubonic plague, and his place was taken by Sheikh Musa, who not only educated him, but also treated him like a sincere friend. Noticing the coolness of the youth’s relationship with his father, Sheikh Musa took an interest in Ukhayyad and helped to ease the early loss of his mother. Despite the introverted character Ukhayyad had inherited from his mother, the sheikh found a path to his heart. The first time was when he rescued the boy from the flashflood. That day, some people of the tribe thought they heard thunder echoing through the mountains to the north. But others told them they were wrong, writing off the possibility of such a miraculous thing. “Who’s ever seen rain in the desert in the middle of the summer? When have the southern winds ever brought a downpour?” They said that those who sounded the alarm had heard nothing more than the call of Resurrection Day — and they ridiculed the idea that a roar of thunder had been heard by anybody. And so, no one bothered to move out of the low-lying valley. At night’s end, when the deluge came, it swept away the entire tribe. The only one who clearly foresaw the flashflood that night was Sheikh Musa. When the torrent surprised the encampment, he was squatting, reciting his devotionals in front of his tent.

The young Ukhayyad had been sleeping under the moonlight in the tent door, while his old African slave took refuge from snakes and wolves by sleeping further inside. In a dream, he watched as glowing embers floated, unextinguished, across a large body of water. Then he was swimming beside the hot embers as they began to die. Dream mixed with reality as he awoke from his sleep. All was chaos — the old woman was shrieking, along with the other women and children in the camp. Men shouted and goats bellowed. The roar of the water shook the earth, but even all this could not drown out the soft hissing sound of embers as they died in the waters of his dream. That hissing sound would reverberate in his ears forever.

Sheikh Musa swooped by, snatching the old woman with his right hand, and clasping the boy to his waist with his left. He raced them across the valley. The only thing Ukhayyad remembered from that experience was the faint whisper, the soft hissing of the embers.