The Process

11. WE

We are all so close in our Sleep & Dream Clinic here in Helsinki that when I told them, today, that I was going back to the Sahara to join my old friend Thay Himmer the Seventh in his castle called “Malamut,” on Cape Noon, all the other initiates in the office suddenly broke out singing:

Olav, you are crazy! Olav you are mad!

Why do you want to go back with that man

Who treated you so bad!

That may be because they have had to file so many of my dreams about the time Thay hit me over the head with a pail in a sauna: some of them still think I should have called the police. It was a big local scandal at the time because I am not altogether unknown in my little Finland as an artist and, certainly, Thay Himmer the Seventh, White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Isles, was the most exotic celebrity anyone in Finland had ever brought back from his travels. (Like a tourist trophy: was I still that naïve? Perhaps.) Only Ingating understood and she understood perfectly. Ingating is very intelligent for a Finnish girl because she has read special books. “Did you experience satori when Mr. Himmer hit you in the hot room,” Ingating asked me, “like the adepts of a Japanese master of Zen?” She is a very good girl but I was still under sedation or I would never have blabbed out to her that I am, now and forever, Himmer’s Little White Reindeer. I must say for her that she did not blink a blond eyelash. She kept comimg back to the clinic to see me and, when my head healed, offered to let me move in with her when I was released because, she said, we could all live very well on her state allowance as the unmarried mother of twins. That’s Finnish finesse, for you. She was informing me delicately that I had lost my state-studio over the Himmer scandal and had no place to live. Luckily, the clinic has a Sleep & Dream Research Lab. run by our great oneirologist, Doktor Erno Aalto. He became so interested in my Saharan desert dreams that he invited me to sleep-in at the clinic, five nights a week, and offered me a big bare white room facing north as a studio. Weekends all last year, I slept over at Ingating’s and, when she had twins again this last summer, I simply stayed on in the clinic but, on weekends, I treated myself to a slumber without attaching the old electroencephalograph or the loop for penis-erectile control which is wired to the videometer all other nights of the week. I am going to miss that.

Finland is a little country but in some ways we are well advanced. Actually, Finland is a country without too much excitement because the weather is no good for it. The arrival of someone like Thay Himmer in Helsinki can change the lives of many people in Finland. There were pictures of him in all the papers and magazines, waving at the camera. Only I in all of Finland knew that Thay was warding off image-spells with counter-spells from the Farout Islands. Wearing his funny cut fringe of red Arab beard and his big bright blue eyes, he became a popular figure in Finland. He always smiled at everybody with his more than American teeth and they loved him, at first. When I took him up north with me to see the herds, the whole Finnish nation followed him on television. Thay Himmer grinned out of the screen in every home in Finland like a jack-o’-lantern in a fur parka. While he was standing beside our Finnish President judging the reindeer races, a disgraceful technical accident occurred on the television but, as Thay always said: there are no accidents. Everyone knows who would do a filthy thing in Finland! A ghostly pair of antlers appeared behind Thay’s head for several minutes on all the screens in the land and pictures like that ran in the newspapers, too. I was terribly ashamed as a Finn. However, although it may have been meant as a joke in very poor taste, state television pollsters announced that many country people in outlying districts had identified Bishop Himmer as the Norse hunting god.

It is true: Thay can look almost supernatural at times to very provincial people. Also, he did go around talking in a slightly eerie way about anything from astrology to Grammatology, whether they understood all that much English or not. Rumors ran around that he was the head of a new sect or a secret religion: other tongues clacked that he was an agent. “An agent for what?” I once had the occasion to storm at one fellow Finn, who was just flustered enough to blurt back: “International, I suppose.” I had to laugh back into that Finn’s face for not having the courage to say what he really thought: “Interplanetary! of course.” That is the only possible word for Thay Himmer. Ingating saw right away how interplanetary Mr. Himmer was, so, when I told her I was his Little White Reindeer, she just sighed and replied: “Yes, Olav, I know. If there’s something afoot, you must put your foot in it and you’re always pawing away at the clouds.” Ingating is twenty-two months older than I am and very wise for her age.

When Thay’s cable came, Ingating agreed at once that I should leave for Cape Noon as soon as we found out where it was on my map of Africa, published by Kummerly & Frey; scale: 1/12,000,000, printed in Berne. But, at the clinic this morning, Doktor Aalto drew me aside: “Do I understand you correctly, Olav? Are you really so brave and so brash as to be dashing off to some place in the Sahara which is calling itself, brazenly: ‘Malamut’? You know what it means, of course: Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Grand Assassin and Old Man of the Mountain, called his castle: ‘Alamut’! Is this something worse? Malamut means: The Bad Way, the Way of no Return. Are you ready to risk that, Olav? Are you properly prepared? I hope you have your return fare, Olav. We shall all miss you here at Sleep & Dreams. By the way, I thought your friend Thay, Bishop Himmer, came from the Pacific, the Farout Islands. You met him in the Sahara, I believe: can’t he go home? What is he doing in still another part of the desert? Is this place ‘Malamut’ what he calls his home?”

“I understand it’s a castle built by his wife.”

“His wife, Olav? In the picture we have of him in our dream files, built up out of your dreams, Olav, there is no trace of a wife!”

“Here’s a picture I cut out of a magazine; taken at Orly airport, right after their marriage. It says here she was previously married to the richest boy in the world. She looks bigger than Thay but maybe she was standing on a step.”

“I knew there must be someone behind him; a woman, of course. Olav, I warn you: ‘Malamut’ is a challenge. By giving this name to their house, the Himmers unfurl a banner by far more cynical than any pirate’s Skull and Crossbones. I am utterly taken aback by such audacity. They flaunt an attachment to old heresies kept alive in dark corners of the world, hidden out of the way of modern communication systems so successfully that they might well one day prove to be the springs of human nature if they were revived in a modern form by utterly unscrupulous people. Is that what your friends are up to, Olav?” Professor Aalto sounded me, his glasses glittering: “Keep in touch.” And I will call him, too, every night. We have our dream-code. Dear old Dr. Aalto, he’s such a well-known anti-feminist alarmist, but I guess I had better watch my step.

Helsinki, Nov. 3

The banks were open today but no money came through for me. Why does one always have to wait for money? Ingating is more nervous than I am but she will calm down.

Helsinki, Nov. 4

Still no money but I did find out about airlines and visas. No one here ever heard of Cape Noon, let alone how to get down there but, when I show them where it is on the big bump of Africa, they suggest flying to Casablanca or Dakar. All Thay’s cable says is: JOIN US IN MALAMUT ON CAPE NOON IMMEDIATELY MONEY FORTHCOMING LOVE THAY but it is dated Tanja so I’ll think I’ll fly there. No luggage: this is the way I came and this is the way I shall return. Life is too soft in Finland, I can’t wait to get back to the desert. Ingating understands.

Tanja, Nov. 6

No one here in Tanja has ever even heard of the Himmers. I have tried everywhere: consulates, banks, hotels and I’ve even asked some of the more reputable-looking guides. Tanja must be a very spiritual city because it simply swarms with guides but not all of us are ready for them. I feel safer inside the Café de Paris, where I am writing this, than I would on the terrace with all this money in my pocket. Money makes me nervous, anyway. I hate not to have money and yet I never know what to do with it when traveling. Americans abroad, I’ve noticed, always touch the talisman of AMERICAN EXPRESS once a day, at least, but I am going where travelers’ checks don’t travel. My spirit is already far away ahead of my body; already down in the desert, but Tanja persists in taking me still for a tourist. When I stride around Tanja with my eyes up to the lovely tumbling skies, beyond which I know rises the winter dome over the desert, swarms of shoeshine boys cluster around my feet, tripping me up: “Soo-sine? Soo-sine, buddy?” When I say: “No, go away, not today,” they answer: “Fuck-you, Jack! Fuck off!” I have been playing Pied Piper to all the guides, too, who sidle up according to hierarchy; each offering his wares until the right one finally gets through to me. “Englishman, wanna get fucked?” When I ask any one of the guides if they have ever heard of the Himmers, they all answer at once: “Sure, Johnny!” and lead me into yet another Arab bazaar.

Tanja, Nov. 7

Terrible hangover, today. I was still sitting in that Café de Paris at seven o’clock last night when a middle-aged American woman with big yellow teeth and stringy gray hair pulled back into an untidy but girlish psyche-knot at the back of her head, leaned over from the next table, gave me a rather revolting yellow smile, and she said: “Having the all-too-typical Tanja troubles?” It was a good enough gambit I guess. I ended up by paying for her coffee as well as my own and, then, she led me off to an American bar called the Exit, where everyone seemed to know her only too well. The very tall barman with a mustache and a pompadour leaned over her at her in an almost threatening way as he asked her:

“Well, what’ll it be tonight, Mag?”

She went all kittenish, rubbing herself up against me, gurgling: “I want you to meet everybody’s favorite barman, Billy Beachnut. Whad’ja say your name was, Mac?”

I think she must have taken me for a fellow-American, at first: “Olav Pesonius,” I replied.

“Latin, eh?” cracked Beachnut. “Well, Olav, this little lady’s got you in tow is Mrs. Mag Media, the newspaper-woman: She talks Latin, too.”

“Not Missus! Miss!” She twitched herself onto a barstool, letting her old gray coat fall back off her shoulders.

“A miss that’s still good for many a mile, eh, Mag? What’ll you folks be drinking, tonight?”

My head is splitting and there she is, singing in the bathroom, right now! Last night she drank me — a Finn! — under the table and, when she fished me out to pay for the outrageous bill at the Exit, I guess I must have felt I couldn’t afford to pay for a hotel room on top of all that so I ended up here and I feel simply awful.

Later

Things looking up slightly. Mag not only insists she knows the Himmers and how to get to them—“After all, I’m a newspaperwoman!”—but says she can get in touch with a girl in Casablanca whose brother, Amos Africanus, is general manager for the Himmers, down on Cape Noon. Ana Lyse Africanus will know how to get down to “Malamut.” Unfortunately, Ana Lyse seems not to be on the phone so Mag and I will have to go to Casa together in Mag’s old car to find her. I’ll pay for the gas.

Casablanca, Nov. 8

I knew it. We got here so late that Mag insisted on taking a double room with a bath in this expensive hotel. She’s in the bathroom right now, singing. We no sooner got settled in here last night than Ana Lyse herself phoned up saying she was coming right on over. I may be a dumb Finn but I did raise an eyebrow at that. “I sent her a telegram saying I’d be at this hotel. I’m surprised she’s coming over at this hour, though.” I thought the hotel might be surprised also but, no; they sent her right on up. You might just be able to get away with one woman in your hotel room in Helsinki but never with two in the middle of one night! Actually, we sat up all night plotting our trip south. Ana Lyse is petite but she’s the same sort of girl Ingating is; I felt it immediately. You just know she would know how to cook a good meal over an open fire. Poor thing, she has just heard that her brother, Amos Africanus, has been kidnaped down there in the desert and she doesn’t know where he is. She has tried everything including telepathy but she can’t get in touch with the Himmers, so she is as anxious as I am to get down there. The plan is to drive down as far as we can in Mag Media’s old car and then see what we can do from there on. Ana Lyse speaks Arabic and insists that it is useless to try anything official because officials will only stop us.

Tiznit, Nov. 9

This is the first place south that looks like the desert but the sun doesn’t shine much on this red-walled town because of the mile-high mist-bank formed by the Portuguese Current flowing south offshore a few miles away past this western end of the great beach of the Sahara. Seawater, swift and cold, condenses the hot air from the desert into fog. For all the sun there is this morning, one might as well be back in Finland. At the last minute this morning, I had to buy four new tires for Mag’s car before we headed south with Ana Lyse in the front seat beside Mag and me in the back with her huge Great Dane puppy called Karl Barx. I’ve been treated like a spare tire in the back seat, wrestling with the dog as we swung around all the loops and bends of a superb road hugging the coastline. Luckily, Karl Barx is friendly.

Tomorrow, we ought to get to Goulmimime or Goulimine or Goulmina or Ghoul Mime — anyway, for lunch. Then, on to Tam-tam if the road is in good enough repair after these early rains. It is strangely solacing to be back on the verge of baby country, again: in the Sahara, so many places and people have baby names. There is Ta-ta and Tan-tan and Tam-tam and Da-da and Ba-ba and so many more. At each stop, the hotel gets more primitive and the food worse since the French left this part of the world, except in some cases where a long-gone Madame’s former native “boy” still runs the place. Last night the food was so good I was convinced that some French Madame’s ghost was still out in the kitchen making the omelets.

Tam-tam, Nov. 10

When we got here, we were arrested, right off. The road here from Goulimine has, indeed, been washed out in many places where the water must come across like a wall when it rains. Luckily, it was the long flat “easy” stretches of the road surface which had been wrecked, while hairpin bends over ridges of rock are still in good shape. All this road is new, too, since the Spaniards withdrew further south. At last, we came over a pass to see Tam-tam set out like a tiny, crenellated white toy fort in the middle of a vast sandy plain over which ran a road as straight as an arrow. When we got to the end of it, we found that road barred by a gate out in the middle of nowhere outside of town. Two sentries stopped us at the point of a gun. One of them kept us covered while the other got in touch with the fort through his walkie-talkie. Then, we were ordered to drive straight on in and report. Karl Barx very nearly bit one of those men.

We are now living the sequel to an old Beau Geste movie in which the Arabs have won the fort and are running the show, dressed in classic khaki uniforms, looking more or less like soldiers anywhere these days. The second-in-command here met us out in the sandy street in which we stopped. He was unsmiling but perfectly polite as we showed him our papers. Mag Media was out front with her press card at which he looked dubiously because the photo was so much better than what he saw in front of him. Mag was already wiggling and ogling him; up to all of her tricks. The short surly captain came out to inspect us and then, rather than call us officiously into his office, he invited us into his own poured-concrete villa, which stood out like an eyesore in the landscape of pure white-washed cube-houses surrounded by sand. Inside, Mag pulled out her press card again and went into her act. The captain, who seemed not to understand her French, was completely cowed.

We have all been quartered in the Officers’ Mess, which was obviously built back in colonial days. Nearby, another unlikely relic lies awash in the sands. It is a long building in concrete built in the form of a transatlantic tanker and is said to have been a brothel whose rooms were the cabins in the superstructure. There was a bar on the captain’s bridge. The well-deck was a swimming pool surrounded by walls like the prow of the ship. Today, this astonishing structure has the Cuban flag painted on its side. The mystery man around here is the major, who seems to be quartered there by himself. The captain has not come over here once from his fort or his villa but the major is in the bar here, right now. In the bar of the Officers’ Club they serve only mint tea and soft drinks these days, but Mag and Ana Lyse are in there now with the major. He wears a full beard, a Castro cap and very elegantly tailored raw-silk khaki fatigues. He is so much more outlandish-looking here than we are that they will give us no trouble, I think. Our story is we want to take a look at Tarik, the next stop south and the border. It would be unwise to admit we hope to go further and we won’t. The girls are good liars, I think.

Tarik, Nov. 11

Twenty hours in a caravan of trucks to get here, luckily on top of a cargo of mattresses. We are in the newly ruined Spanish capital city which must once have been shining white; perhaps, only a year ago. Unless someone catches this place pretty quick, it is going to go back to the desert. Only the barracks are well kept, while private houses and the hotel have been boarded up or have already fallen into ruin since they were broken into and looted. A few Arab fishermen in anonymous rags slouch through the streets and along the abandoned avenidas of shut shops. I noticed them hanging their nets from the marquee of a dilapidated movie house down by the beach. There is no proper harbor. Small boats come in over the pounding surf from ships standing a mile or more offshore in deeper water. There is fresh meat other than sheep only when a boat from the Canaries pitches a few head of cattle overboard and they swim ashore to be slaughtered. This is in the very best tradition of this coastline; it’s what was always done here throughout history to all shipwrecked mariners and in the pioneer days of aviation, downed pilots had their throats cut or were held to ransom less than a generation ago. I am delighted to find this part of the Sahara is exactly like the other part of the desert I know: silky, sordid and suspicious. How to explain its infinite attraction to anyone who has not sensed its silences? Only the Sahara and our own pure northern tundra are wordless wastes.

Now, for all my loose talk about words, we have been stuffing the poor officers here with nothing but lies. Mag took care of all that; preening herself and ogling the officers during the lunch they gave us in their mess. I think they have decided we are a thankless lot, just odd enough to be harmless and let alone. The border we have to cross without asking their permission is invisible, of course, but it lies just out beyond the outskirts of town, on the far side of the oued bed where we can see camels grazing near a few nomad fires. In the mad Arab scramble of our arrival here at high noon, Ana Lyse caught a ragged little nomad girl trying to pick our pockets as she slunk up to our truck, pretending to beg. Ana Lyse caught the child by the louse-ridden plaits of her hair and was trying to keep the brat from sinking her teeth in her arms as she panted to me: “Here, Olav, quick! Give me a ten thousand franc note: I’ve got to impress this child.”

As I fumbled for the money, Media butted in with: “You’re not going to give that kid all that cash!”

The kid caught on quicker than she did to what this move was about. Any random observer would have thought, of course, that it was just one of those casual tourist attacks on a native child but Ana Lyse knows her Morocco. She twisted the ears of the urchin as she gave her the money and then, without letting go of her pigtails, she gave her a good sound slap as she whispered something fierce in Arabic into her ear. There’s more money than this where this came from; she was saying, of course. We want three camels and a man to guide us south. The big sum of money was to impress someone we haven’t seen yet but hope that we will after we’ve taken our siestas. We hope to meet him walking down by the oued. I hope no lovelorn lieutenant takes it in his head to follow the girls with a jeep.

near Elayoun

Saharan security seems to have been magically suspended for us, as if we were the Three Wise Kings traveling through the night. In the gray-green light of pre-dawn at this halt, we look more like three tourists who have been taken on too long a ride by some rascally guide. Indeed, here he is with us: Mohamed, looking as picturesque and unreliable as anyone could wish. We have never seen anything of him but his shifty, narrow eyes but Mag Media says he is, “cute.” Right now, she is singing snatches of the old “Desert Song,” as she ties up her gray hair with a ribbon and tries to get the guide to let down his veil. She was begging Ana Lyse to help her in this game with a few Arab phrases when the guide said most unexpectedly: “Soy hijo de España.” When I asked what that meant, Mag informed me acidly that everyone in the world speaks Spanish. I understand less Spanish even than Arabic, although what little I picked up last year in Tam was quite another dialect, I am told. At least, our guide now seems a little less sinister than he did, even if he will not unveil for what he says rather alarmingly are “political reasons”!

Later

We are traveling fast and light to avoid meeting anyone on the trail and that means, of course, that we take the long inland route although, because of the mirage, the sea seems never far away. Tonight, Ana Lyse can hardly open her eyes because they are all puffed up by infection. Mag Media says she has become quite deaf, probably from the sound of her own voice. The desert makes people very disagreeable. We are all suffering from thirst, sunburn and bites. I begin to wonder how I let myself be swept away by these two determined females but, of course, Thay is somewhere down here ahead, waiting for me. All this afternoon, we trudged on through mirage which surrounded us like shimmering seawater with the quicksilver habit of suddenly sliding off like some science fiction cloud of intelligence or a huge soluble fish which can slither over land, suddenly deciding to surge up from one depression and slide down into another. We were plodding across an ancient lava flow, porous and crumbling, full of potholes and even giant caves filled with stalagmites over which we passed on sounding stone arches. Some potholes in the black rock were filled with bleached bones, making them look like huge nests blanched with birdlime. We rode sidesaddle on our camels, our backs to the sun, but we are sadly unprepared for such a journey. I wonder how long we can go on like this? The air smells, tastes of ozone, leaving an iodine taste in the back of my throat which reminds me of childhood delirium and intense anxiety. I am almost too tired to sleep or I would try and contact Doktor Aalto.

In the Middle of Nowhere

Ah, this is much better! We are sailing in an air-conditioned Landrover over ground so level that I can write in this hard-backed notebook on my knees. I would never have dreamed Doktor Aalto could be so severe with me. “Olav!” he snapped as soon as he appeared on my dream-screen. “Don’t you even know when you’re in the wrong dream!’ He screamed at me so loud I almost woke up. “Who do you think you are, Olav — Stanley looking for Livingstone? That happened a lot further south and a long time ago. Are you reliving some French adolescent colonial nightmare, or what! Snap out of that dream, Olav, or you are lost! Of course, I cannot imagine why you have insisted on dragging those two females along with you but I can tell you one sure thing from here: Madame Himmer won’t like it a bit! Nevertheless, you must get yourself out of there at once. Haven’t you noticed that your Sahara has been transistorized since you were there last? Haven’t you noticed that your veiled guide is wearing a Rolex? Dying of thirst on three camels, indeed, Olav! Why, the man owns a fleet of brand-new air-conditioned Landrovers. Stop dreaming: get with it!”

Doktor Aalto’s voice came across with an almost feminine cackle at times but I put that down to my own poor reception.

“Malamut” looms in sight, swimming in the air like a castle of mirage which we cannot approach by the heat of day. I am writing this under a tarpaulin I begged from our blue-veiled guide before he drove off and abandoned us here. I think he must have had some trouble with the Himmers because he said: “From here on you walk or you pay me fi’ ten fitteen thousand dollars apiece for the car.” The girls argued and I argued that the Himmers would undoubtedly pay him anything within reason to deliver us at their door but he picked up a whip that leapt into his land like a snake. Even Karl Barx, who is panting in the intolerable heat, here beside us, cringed and slunk out of the Landrover. Mohamed was out of range before Ana Lyse thought to pull out of her corsage a little pearl-handled revolver. It is a mere.22 caliber but I will handle it from now on.

“Malamut” floats out there on the perfectly round milky horizon like a mother-of-pearl Buddha on a tray of quicksilver. Ana Lyse assures me that what we see is the rock of Cape Noon, Heaven Rock, blasted with dynamite and rebuilt into an immense statue of Princess Mya, turning her back on us. All we have to drink is a hairy guerba, a goatskin of water tasting of goat and tar. Even Karl Barx refused it until we poured some down his throat. This is no place for a dog.