The Process

1. I

I am out in the Sahara heading due south with each day of travel less sure of just who I am, where I am going or why. There must be some easier way to do it but this is the only one I know so, like a man drowning in a sea of sand, I struggle back into this body which has been given me for my trip across the Great Desert. “This desert,” my celebrated colleague, Ibn Khaldoun the Historian, has written, “This desert is so long it can take a lifetime to go from one end to the other and a childhood to cross at its narrowest point.” I made that narrow childhood crossing on another continent; out through hazardous tenement hallways and stickball games in the busy street, down American asphalt alleys to paved playgrounds; shuffling along Welfare waiting-lines into a maze of chain-store and subway turnstiles and, through them, out onto a concrete campus in a cold gray city whose skyscrapers stood up to stamp on me. It has been a long trail a-winding down here into this sunny but sandy Middle Passage of my life in Africa, along with the present party. Here, too, I may well lose my way for I can see that I am, whoever I am, out in the middle of Nowhere when I slip back into this awakening flesh which fits me, of course, like a glove.

I know this body as if it were a third party whose skin I put on as a mask to wear through their “Land of Fear” and I do go in a sort of disguise for, like everyone else out here in this blazing desert where a man is a fool to show his face naked by day, I have learned to wrap five or six yards of fine white muslin around my head to protect the mucus of my nose and throat against the hot, dry wind. All you can see of me is my eyes. For once, I look just like everyone else. No need for me to open these eyes. I know what is out there — nothing but the very barest stripped illusion of a world; almost nothing, nothing at all.

Bundled up like a mummy, I huddle here under my great black burnous, a cape as big as a bag for an animal my size, shape and color. It also serves as a portable tent smelling of woodsmoke and lanolin, under which I fumble for the two pencil-thin sections of my sebsi, my slim wooden keef-pipe from Morocco, to fit them together. A fine flesh-pink clay pipe head, no bigger than the last joint of my little finger, snuggles up over a well-fitted paper collar shaped wet with spit. I try it like a trumpet; airtight, good. My keef-pouch from Morocco is the skin of a horned viper sewn into a metoui and stuffed with great grass. I check with my thumb the tide of fine-chopped green leaf which rolls down its long leather tongue, milking most of the keef back into the pouch. What remains, I coax into the head of my pipe with the beckoning crook of my right forefinger.

A masterpiece matchbox the size of a big postage stamp leaps into the overturned bowl of my left hand, riding light but tight between the ball of my thumb and my third finger. I make all these moves not just out of habit but with a certain conscious cunning through which I ever-so slowly reconstruct myself in the middle of your continuum; inserting myself, as it were, back into this flesh which is the visible pattern of Me. Yet, I know this whole business is a trap which may well be woven of nothing but words, so I joggle the miniature matchbox I hold in my hand and these masterpiece matches in here chuckle back what always has sounded to me like a word but a word which I cannot quite catch. It could be a rattling Arabic word but my grasp of Arabic is not all that good and no one, not even Hamid, will tell me what the matches say to the box. I hold the box up to my ear as I shake it again, trying to hear what the box stutters back. If I remember correctly, Basilides in his “Game” reduced all the Names proposed by the Gnostics to one single rolling, cacophonic, cyclical word which he thought might well prove to be a Key to the heavens: “Kaulakaula-kaulakaulakau …” Can the matches match that?

I love these little matches bought back in Tanja. Each match is a neat twist of brown paper like a stick dipped in wax, with a helmet-shaped turquoise-blue head made to strike on the miniature Sahara of sandpaper slapped onto one side of the box. Matchbox is clamped into the claw of left thumb and middle finger. This indifferent caliper proves suddenly sadist as it rams poor matchbox back onto himself, with little-finger of right hand clear up his ass. Little-finger holds him impaled; proffering a drawerful of identical matches to caliper, who solemnly selects one little brother, pinching him tight. Matchbox is closed with a small, scraping sigh against the heel of right hand. Little-finger withdraws from the rape to help snub poor match against the backslide of his box; striking and exploding his head.

I elbow my way out of this cocoon of felted camel-hair smelling of woodsmoke to thrust forward this pipe, pouch and matches just as we go over a bump and I open my eyes. I am not alone. We are five passengers in here, where we should be only four in the blistering metal cabin of this truck whose red-hot diesel is housed in with us, too. Two seats on either side of it are called First-Class Transportation, while Third-Class is out on the back on top of the cargo of sacks beneath a cracking tarpaulin. In the front seat, Driver, who looks like a chipmunk with the toothache because of the way his sloppy turban hangs under his chin, crouches over the wheel like a real desert rat. Black Greaser, his number-two man, has been playing a long windy tune on a flute made out of a bicycle-pump and the bump nearly rams the flute down his throat. An anonymous vomiting man, like a doll leaking wet sawdust and slime, flops out the far window carsick while, here right beside me, crammed into my seat with me when we are not up in the air, is Middleman; Stowaway. We rise shoulder to shoulder and I hope he lands back on the diesel and burns.

He has risen up in the air without losing his cross-legged Sufi saint pose, as if to show me he knows how to levitate. I shoot up my own dusty eyebrows at him as much as to say: So can I! because he glares at my pipe with all the baleful ferocity of a carnivorous bird. He feels I pollute him with my keef-smoke — too bad! We both drop back into my seat. I paid First-Class Transportation for these broken springs; no need to share them with him. Yesterday, or the day before, or one of those days back along our trail, he suddenly jumped up from behind a bare dune in the middle of nowhere, flagging us down. I had spotted him up there ahead of us and was just saying to myself: “Is that a man or a bush?” when he started up, skipping and waving his arms. Driver changed gear without daring to stop in the sand from which this little old stick of a man hopped up quick as a bird when Black Greaser threw open the door, grandly waving him into my seat with me. He is a Hadj, just back from the pilgrimage to Mecca; a new little saint. Black Greaser let his whole ugly face fall apart in a welcoming grin: “No baggage, Father?”

The little old man twitched aside the yards of gray-green muslin piled on top of his head and swathing his bearded face: “No baggage. This is the way I came and—Inch’ Allah! — this is the way I shall return.”

I push back the window of opalescent glass frosted by the blasting of sand, to thrust the whole length of my slender pipe out like a periscope into the bouncing air of the dazzling desert through which we churn night and day no faster than a funeral. When I lean out the window, the light out there hits me like a blow. Shading my eyes, I look down into the granular shallows of flowing sand on whose current we ride until I am dizzy and sick. Everything visibly crawls; even the cloth of my sleeve when I look at it close. I glance up and out with my eyes clenched against the all but intolerable brightness of the blazing desert where the mirage sizzles across the horizon like a sweep of glittering marshes, thickly grown with tall rushes whipped by the wind. Air ignites and flames up around the truck like the billowing breath of a blast furnace searing my lungs. The water should lie not more than a half hour’s distance away — or so you might think. Hour after hour, day after day, we bore on through the sands without reaching those marshes.

All this ululating emptiness aches in my ears like the echo of a shell. Now and again, I swear I can hear the lowing and bellowing of invisible herds of longhorn cattle but, of course, there are none. When I listen even further down into myself, I contact something else which shakes my whole intimate contact with Me. When I try to tune out the constant moaning roar of the wind, my whole being vibrates to a sound down below the threshold of hearing. My sinuses, antrums, the cords of my throat and the cavities of my chest, the very hollows of my bones hum in a register too low for my ear but, for no known reason, I tremble, I quake. This, so they tell me, is the voice of Ghoul and Ghoul is the Djinn of the Desert, Keeper of the Land of Fear. Grains of sand in their incalculable billions of billions are grinding, grinding together, rolling and sliding abrasively in dunes as big as New York and as high, vibrating this ocean of air through which we paddle like sick fish on their flight from some distant dynamite blast. At that, a very American thought suddenly strikes me: they do have an atomic center out here in the Sahara. Could this air be radioactive, perhaps? Or, is that just the black breath of Ghoul?

Far away back up north in the green hills of Morocco, which I call home since I began to merge almost against my will into this scene with Hamid my Moroccan mock-guru, everyone around the keef cafés is always talking and singing of the Sahara but not one man in ten knows where it begins or ends or how to get into this desert. “It lies down that way, many days marching,” they say, swinging their long slim keef-pipes around vaguely south. Yet, every last man sitting there on a straw mat on the floor feels he owns the whole sweep of the Sahara desert, personally, inside his own Muslim head. Let some paleface tourist appear on the scene and they will all proclaim themselves competent “guides,” if you please; when not one of them can read even a map. In my forlorn American way, I thought to teach Hamid the lay of the land and, to this end, I pulled my poor self together to make an expedition up out of the damp grotto in which Hamid and I were living in the native quarter of Tanja, in the impasse of a narrow alley in a section of the Medina below even the tight-packed little pedestrian square of cafés called the Socco Chico; in other words, lost.

I adjusted my shades and smoked one last pipe for the road before I stepped cautiously out into the mainstream of mankind in the swarming alley as narrow as a corridor that is our street. At first, the entire Medina of Tanja feels like one mysteriously rambling mansion packed full of maniacs but, eventually, what looks like a terrifying trap to a tripper gets to feel like your very own house. I cut into the traffic and kept my head down as I whipped around corners with my eyes glued to the ground; so as not to be noticed, I hoped. I slid through alleys so wide I could touch the walls on both sides with my elbows and I had to flatten myself into doorways to let heavily-laden don-keys and porters push past. The whole point of this game, best known to Old Tanja Hands, is to get from one side of the Socco Chico to the other without crossing it; invisible to all traders and touts. My own cunning route, first shown me by Hamid of course, is a turnoff between the old Hotel Satan and the Casa Delerium, once a whorehouse in better days. This way, you can bypass not only the Socco Chico but also steep Siaghine Street running up out of it; lined as it is with neon-lit bazaars, swarming with tourists and tramps.

I meant to drop by the American Library on my way up to the Boulevard in the New Town of Tanja but, when I caught sight of myself in a mirror in a shop window, I thought: Uh-uh, better not! I managed to make myself look a little more human before I got to the Café de Paris on the Place de France. I drew up in front of a raggedy man who sells raggedy books in the street. On an earlier trip, I had spotted his stock of old dog-eared French guidebooks and road maps of North Africa, put out by Michelin, the makers of tires. As I bent over his wares, I picked up on the fact that I was getting scanned from behind their newspapers by the whole row of white American and British operatives seated, as always, out on the terrace of the Café de Paris. They had their telepathic finders out feeling all over me as I bought, for one dirham, a map which is now out of print. I scuttled back down to the Socco and called Hamid out of his cavernous keef café to drag him home for a bout of instruction in the map.

#151 Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (1 centimeter for 20 kilometers or 1/2,000,000). On this map, one handspan to the right along the Mediterranean shore lies Woran. With your thumb on Woran, your little-finger lands on Algut. If you pivot due south from that white city on the cliffs, your thumb will fall on Ghardaïa, the mysterious desert capital of the Dissident Mozabites. All that can take at least three or four days of travel from the bright blue Straits of Gibraltar, along the lush coastal valleys, over green hills and mountains so high they are covered with snow. On the far side of these are plains marked in brown to denote almost no annual rainfall at all and they must be crossed before you get to even the fringe of the bright golden Sahara. The trouble with this map is that it has two big insets of Woran and Algut, shown in some detail at a scale of 1/500,000, and these effectively obscure the desert trails to the south.

I trundled myself back up to the Boulevard again next day, or was it next week? Anyway, one fine day when I could tear myself away from the great smells of Hamid’s cooking and manage to part the curtain of keef which hung over our door, I fell out into the street and worked my way back to the Boulevard bookstall, where I bought, unobserved, an old guide to Algeria and the Michelin map #152—a great prize. This pretty, pictorial map was printed to illustrate the glorious exploit of General Leclerc, who marched a Free French army from Dakar all the way north to Tunis across the Sahara by way of Lake Chad. Not even the Romans could have brought off such a feat but Hamid shows little interest in anything done by the French or the Roumis, in general. Being Black, I am not a real Roumi to Hamid. On the other hand, Hamid looks down on all Blacks as the natural slaves of the Arabs; even though his own hair is curly enough to give him trouble finding a barber, back in the States. Hamid shuts me up when I tell him I am Black. “You’re not Black, you’re American! Safi! Enough!”

Hamid suddenly became fascinated by the form he began to see in my map. He pointed out that the Great Desert is in the shape of a camel stretching its neck right across Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. He laughed like a lunatic to see that the western butt-end of his camel was dropping its Mauretanian crud on the Black Senegalese—“Charcoal Charlies,” Hamid calls them, having picked up the term in the port. The head of Hamid’s camel drinks its fill in the sweet waters of the Nile. The eye of the camel, naturally enough, is that fabled city of Masr, where the Arab movies are made and all the radios ring out over streets paved with gold. Us poor Nazarenes call the place Cairo, for short. Suddenly, some-where down on the lower middle belly of Hamid’s camel, about four knuckles north of Kano in northern Nigeria, I dowsed out a big carbuncle. With no more warning than that, my whole heart rushed out to this place which was pictured as an out-cropping of extinct ash-blue volcanoes jutting up out of the bright yellow sands. I noted that the whole area was called the Hoggar and it seemed to boast only one constantly inhabited place, whose name I made out to be Tam. I was truly surprised to hear myself calmly boasting to Hamid, as if I were AMERICAN EXPRESS: “I’ll be in this place, here, this time next year.”

“Inch’ Allah! if God wills,” Hamid corected me automatically and then, as if he were indeed the Consul of Keef, who was sending me out on this mission, he went on: “I’ll get them to cut you a green passport of keef to see you through everything. I’ll see that you get the best of the crop from Ketama and I’ll bring it down from the mountain myself with the blessings of Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Father of Grass. On your way, you’re bound to run into some other Assassins.”

“But, Hamid,” I laughed: “I am not an Assassin at all!”

“We are Assassins, all of us,” he gravely replied.

When the time came, I found myself settling back in the train leaving Tanja, gliding slowly along by our magnificent deserted beach on the Straits of Gibraltar. “So, I’m off,” I sighed to myself in my cold First-Class compartment. Just then, Hamid, whom I had not seen for more than a week, swung aboard with all the fine acrobatic ease of an old contrabandista. With a big golden grin, he waved my “passport” under my nose; a parchment sheep’s bladder as big as two fists, packed hard as a rock with the pick of the crop from Ketama, high in the hills of the Rif. We tried a few pipes of the pot as the green winter landscape of northern Morocco picked up and flowed past the window of our train. A few happy hours later, Hamid dove off the train outside of Kebir, before we got into the station. “No money, no ticket: I travel free!” He was going on up into the hills to his village — Jajouka, Mount of Owls — to stay with his uncles the Master Musicians, who practice their Pan music all day on their pipes as they amble out of their little whitewashed thatched houses in their white woolen homespun jellabas and their white turbans to wander over their green Little Hills after their goats. I gave Hamid the money to have a sheep killed in my honor for a feast up there; to bring me luck on my journey, I said. He waved once and blew me a mischievous kiss as he slid through a hedge of giant blue cactus and was gone.

We just sat in Kebir for a long hour in the rain, which I spent fending off children in steaming wet rags who lounged through the train selling green oranges, used razor blades and, for all I know, reclaimed chewing gum and their not very appetizing selves; anything. At long last, the train started up again with a jerk and we soon slid off into the night, but it was hours past dinnertime when we finally staggered into the junction at Sidi Karim, where I learned to my horror that I would have to wait several bleak hours in the dingy station which the stationmaster was even then shutting up, turning off all the lights but one feeble bulb outside in the rain. As he got onto his bicycle to pedal off through the downpour, he regretted that there was no café or restaurant where I could find food in the forlorn village of Sidi Karim. I took out my pipe and managed to light up in the lee of the wind. Quite quickly, I felt very much better, indeed. As soon as I was turned-on again, I caught my breath with a gasp of fearful delight; one single step outside the murky circle of artificial light and I was back in Africa. East wind tore great silver rents in the night sky and slashed an occasional sharp sluice of rain across the shining railroad tracks alongside which ranked choruses of bullfrogs recited the interminable Word they were set a long time ago, now, as their zikr: “Kaulakaulakaulkaulakaulakau …” it sounded like. Sky-diving bats looped about the lamps they lit along the track, presently: “Train coming!” The bats squealed up into their ultra-sonic radar frequencies like the brakes on distant steel wheels. When the train did come, it came in an orgasmic rush of hot diesel-oil odor, trailing a veil of orange blossom like a bride; as a charming excuse for its lateness, no doubt.

The train was strangely empty, almost like a ghost train with only a few sleeping Moroccans huddled under their hoods. Carrying no baggage, ever, I made my way to the bar, where a group of French colonials eyed me coldly, taking me for a Moroccan I rather suspect. I adjusted my shades, forgetting for the moment just how much more Moroccan they make me look. At the bar, the Moroccan barman refused to serve me, at first, pointing to a fly-blown text on the wall which said in several languages: “No Alcohol May Be Served to Muslims,” followed by the text in very small print of a dahir or order-in-council promulgated before the last war. I settled down at a table and got something both to eat and to drink when I showed the barman my U.S. passport but he went on speaking to me in Arabic, nevertheless. The French people got off at Fez, where we barely stopped. The train rocketed on through the night, up to the pass at Taza, and then it ran on to the frontier at Oujda, where trouble had been reported on the outskirts of town but, despite this, no one even asked to look at my passport.

On the other side of the border, I found they had put on a sleeping-car so I paid a supplement on my ticket and got some sleep. In the morning, I lit my first pipe and looked out on a new landscape. The stainless-steel sun glittered through clouds onto the coastal plains where the red tiles on the rooftops of the houses and barns make it look more like Alsace than Africa, giving the tiny robed figures of Arabs in the background an air of people flying past in a dream. I took out my journal and wrote: As no two people see the same view along the Way, all trips from here to there are imaginary: all truth is a tale I am telling myself.

When we got to Algut, late at night, I realized that I was the sole passenger to get off that train. The station, awash in shallow neon illumination, was ghostly and cold. There was no one about but me and the exhausted, panting train breathing heavily beside me in the empty echoing station. I abandoned the train and made for a public telephone to call up the hotel but the phone was dead. Somewhere, I had heard there was a curfew; perhaps that was why no one was about, not even a sentry to challenge me at the gate. I walked out into the street, where there was one single taxi, waiting just for me. I ordered the driver, in my almost impeccable French, to take me swiftly to the Hotel Saint Georges, on the heights of the city, where the suites of rooms in that old Turkish palace are named after the commanders of World War Two, who once stopped there amidst the luxuriant gardens which some long-dead pacha long ago ordered to be laid out and planted with one thousand and one varieties of palm. My driver glanced at me oddly in his rearview mirror, but he may have realized I was merely quoting the old pre-war guidebooks I fancy so much. When I am high enough, I quote almost anything from Aesop to Zarethustra. I judged from the back of my man’s neck that he was, probably, a very white Corsican Blackfoot; a colonial leftover. Nevertheless, I leaned over the front seat to ask him politely what that was — pointing down to a sawn-off shotgun lying beside him. He replied: there were hoodlums about.

The streets we flashed through were shining with rain on the tram tracks along which we skidded as we climbed. Patrols of sodden soldiers huddled here and there under the trees in public gardens; their firearms and the whites of their eyes glinted sharply in our headlights, which the driver blinked only for military jeeps. High above the harbor of Algut, sentinels stood guard at the gates of the Saint Georges; not for the first time in its history, I judge. The hotel itself was locked up like a fortress. From inside, one man opened the door very cautiously to my knock as another man covered the crack in the door with a gun. They had a message for me at the desk to say that two American gentlemen were waiting for me in the Churchill suite. I replied rather grandly that I wanted my room and my bath and a good hot dinner with a bottle of French wine in front of an open fire before I saw anybody. Sponsors be damned, I thought; I was going to be very grand. Positively, I was not about to go crawling up to them, right off the beastly train, on my hands and knees like a suppliant. They had the Foundation money for me; I meant to look good when I accepted it. They probably thought I was being arrogant but I was nothing but tired; and more than a little bit stoned.

As I lay back in my hot bath, I giggled. It was awesome, the matter of fact way Hamid had taken my magical flight. I laughed aloud at the confusion of terms, for what is magical, Hamid considers normal and, besides, he expects nothing less out of an American—his American, at that! Of course, he is right: I have done a very American thing. I’ve forgotten, now, where I first picked up on the Foundation for Fundamental Findings; with an address in Basel, oddly enough. I am not about to explain Foundations to Hamid. Besides, what could I tell him — that a Foundation gives you money if you know how to beg for it and I do? I have taught: I have published. Hamid is not likely to read my History of Slavery in Canada, which served to get me out of the States on my first Fulbright, years ago. My book could have made me a full professor; with tenure, what is more, in almost any good school in the East, and would have, I think, if I had only been white. As I ponder on this, I play with myself in the suds and stand up, creaming my body all over with soap in front of the full-length mirror they have opposite the bathtub in this luxurious bathroom of the General Alexander suite. When I applied for my Fulbright fellowship, I sent them this very white photograph of myself. When we all passed muster at a cocktail party before sailing, I thought some members of the board were surprised to see me in the old flesh, as we call it. It was not a nude photograph; of course not! I laughed and saluted my white sponsors in the mirror, waving my cock at them all, before I rinsed off and became my black self again.

I have been told that Fulbrights are already a legend in the grim groves of American Academe since so many of us are still drifting around the world instead of returning to teach. What could I possibly teach anybody since I have found out how little I know? Why, my first trip to a hammam with Hamid taught me that Americans do not even know how to take a bath! I remember him saying: “It’s a good thing you’re circumcised, anyway; so I’ll not be ashamed to show you to Muslims, at least.” I try to follow the ritual he showed me as I kneel in the spacious tub of the hotel and rinse my mouth out, using only my right hand, which serves me, also, to eat. My left hand, I use only to swab myself after toilet and I never put it in the common dish, no matter how carefully washed. I step out of the tub to drape myself in a giant-size white towel, posing in front of the mirror as Alexander the Great. I figure all these old generals must be regular narcissists if they need these big mirrors to try on their armor. I wonder what kind of bathroom my sponsors must have in the Churchill suite and I wonder if they are busy bathing each other as Muslims would do; or are they just sitting around dressed, listening to the radio, waiting for me?

Then, I struck a very grand Roman pose in front of the pier glass: I am the Great Benefactor endowing poor scholars. Playing both parts, I throw off my toga to grovel naked at the Great Benefactor’s feet. I am the newly manumitted slave who has worked out his indenture to the Great Library of Alexandria. I slobber ecstatically over the Benefactor’s invisible hands and feet, nearly pissing myself on the floor out of sheer gratitude. At that very moment, I heard the hotel servants moving about in my room, so I jumped up to make sure I had locked the bathroom door. A very nice terry-towel bathrobe was hanging on the back of the door, so I slipped into it. I tied up my towel into a towering turban around my head and strode back to the mirror. I felt much more like the pacha ordering his slaves about than the poor stoned wandering scholar I am, waiting for a handout from a Foundation such as the one to which I have, obviously, just sold myself; as they like to say. In my application, I sold them on the idea that it would be of interest for someone with my background to cross the Sahara, taking advantage of commercial transport as far as the village of Tam in Tuareg country. From there, I will strike out back down the old slave trails of the Sahara, which are still being used by the nomads. I will continue right down to the Slave Coast, as it used to be marked on all the maps printed in Europe; because all of Europe was engaged in the slave trade. I intend to find coastal steamers to take me around the big bulge of the continent, stopping along the way at all the old slave markets as far around the hump of Africa as St. Louis in Senegal, north of Dakar. One thing I neglected to tell the Foundation when I applied is that I have left not one foot back in their world, as they think, but a mere fading footprint. This foot I put forward into the Sahara is already firmly implanted in this African world, where my guide so far has been Hamid. I wonder where Hamid is, now?

One Arab hotel servant was on his knees lighting the fire in my drawing room, while another assisted him. Two slightly grumpy young waiters, who looked as if they had been booted out of bed, wheeled in my meal under the direction of a head waiter, while a wine waiter followed him in, nursing the wine, which he set to warm in front of my fire. A fat Arab chambermaid, looking like an animated sack of potatoes wrapped in an old lace curtain, waddled around aimlessly, looking for my bags to unpack my clothes. “This is the way I came: no baggage!” I barked this out in my best imitation of Hamid’s crude country Arabic. They all looked rather horrified and incredulous, as they speak a quite different Arabic here, but they snapped to attention, all right. You can’t treat me like a tourist, is all I was telling them. I settled down to eat my shrimp-salad cocktail and was revolted to find, under the spicy pink sauce, mostly wet lettuce and nameless white fish. I waved without words for my partridge and my bottle of Chateau Latour 1952. Finding it corked and gone a bit thin, I waved it away and back to the cellars for another bottle. I thought to myself: Man, oh, man, if I could only show this to Hamid, he would know it was all an illusion! After all, he and I were living in a leaky two-room house without inside water in the Medina of Tanja, only last week.

A tall, dead-black Sudanese waiter came in with the coffee, all dressed up like the head eunuch of the late pacha’s harem. I had him bring me back the sommelier with a big snifter of poire and asked them to turn out the lights as they went. I sank back in my chair to look at the firelight through my colorless poire in the belly of the glass. What I saw made my hand tremble, for I was thinking of my journey, of course, and there I was in a bright red movie of fire which was being shown like a miniature TV on the convex side of my glass. I peered into the fire where I saw myself like an ant in a torrent of ants, being whirled along by the wind on a burning leaf like a litter or palanquin all in flames, carried on the shoulders of a streaming throng of naked people, themselves all in flames, who ran me along through a country on fire, in which trees, grass and the very sky were blazing around me. We rushed through a river of fire, down which we paddled to an ocean of flames, where I ran up the red-hot iron ladders of a fire-boat under whose grated decks burned a seething, white-hot caldron of Whites. In the flaming red wind, we sailed like an arrow from one burning port to the next fiery town on which we swept down to stoke up our ship’s boilers with a sizzling stream of white Colonials, who flared up and burned like a gem or the core of an atom exploding. I rubbed my eyes, shivering. It was cold in my chair as the fire died away. A second later, I shot up almost out of my skin, utterly startled by the sudden preternatural racket of wakening birds, all screeching at once in the palm trees outside my window. When I looked out it was morning.

Two days later, when I had bought a rucksack and a little gasoline Primus stove, I said thanks and good-by to my sponsors with my hand over my heart. That is where, along with my U.S. passport, I always carry my money. I caught a very early train out of Algut, up country to Blida, and that afternoon I rattled through the high mountain passes to Boghari on the rim of the Sahara where the train track ends. There, I caught a bus to Djelfa in the bare metallic mountains of the Ouled Naïl; a tribe of tinkers whose women are prostitutes, loitering around like painted idols, suggestively clinking with lucky gold coins. Long after dark, I changed to the back of a Berliet truck in a rising sandstorm. In the hours after midnight, we passed through Laghouat, where the French painter Fromentin was the first White to spend a summer, more than a hundred years ago, now. He mistook that one idyllic oasis for all of the Sahara, while we barely stopped there at a filling station, under some palms whose ragged heads were whipped down into the driving sand. The yellow headlights of our truck drilled out a sandy tunnel through the roaring streets of the town as we bored our way back out into the thick of the Sahara. The wind scoured the track we followed, tacking across a vast howling plain until, several hours later, we landed in the lee of the long walls of a desert caravanserai. We charged through a banging, broken gate, stampeding the hundred camels of several caravans which had taken shelter in the vast open courtyard. On the far side of this harbor, light streamed out from the tiny windows of one small room, like a cabin built to huddle against the far wall. Someone in there, on the floor, was making tea by the light of a hurricane lamp. Inside, I came across an old Visitors’ Book without a cover in which there were signatures and comments dating back into the last century. I added my name: Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N.Y. Moroccans tend to pronounce my name like Hassan, so that is what they all call me back in Tanger: Hassan Merikani. I signed that as best I can in Arabic. I had no comment to make.

The following day, we got to the sly and secret city of Ghardaïa, the outlaw capital of the Mozabite Dissident tribes who were driven out into these desert potholes where they found water many centuries ago. From this stronghold, the Mozabites have always ventured back into the orthodox community as small grocers who live in their shops which are real family affairs, crawling with children like mice. They are rapacious, good-looking, inbred people whose tiny children can do sums in their heads, running whole shops before they are ten years of age: experts at false-weight and short-change. For several hundreds of years, at least, they have sent every last penny of the money they amass back to their isolated city guarded all around by the Sahara where it is buried, they say, under their windowless houses. The Mozabite treasure of gold is greater than that of Fort Knox; gold goes in there and never comes out again. A Mozabite woman, on the other hand, may go out of her house twice in a lifetime; once to her wedding and once to her funeral. From the better homes, a woman never goes out: she marries a resident cousin and, when she dies, she is buried in the garden.

I tossed all night in an Arab hotel on a bed so hard it may have been made of gold. An odor of drains came gliding through the room, so strong it glowed in the dark like a ghost and left a faintly luminous trail of iridescent slime where it passed. Black Greaser, down in the narrow court of the caravanserai guarding our truck like a treasure, whimpered away all night on his flute made out of an old bicycle-pump; playing over and over the only windy tune that he could play:

Oh, I got a gazelle in Ghardaïa

She’s rich and loaded with gold

I want to marry but her father says: No!

Oh, we’ll buy a diesel, my love, I swear

They hung three millions in gold on your neck

But you can’t move out of that room!

We’ll purchase a diesel, my love, with the gold

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!

In the morning, I went out in the cool bright air just after dawn to find the whole city already afoot, doing business. In their handsome open-air marketplace, half as big as San Marco in Venice but with whitewashed arcades, I bartered my GI boots, field jacket and worn Levis for sandals, baggy sarouel pants with embroidered pockets and this fine black burnous which has made me feel invisible, here, since it first dropped over my shoulders. Shyly, I bought veiling; five yards or so of fine muslin to wrap my head and face against the dry desert air and the bite of the sun. Since then I go, automatically, more and more deeply disguised through their Country of Fear.

The silky surreptitious silence of the Sahara starts in Ghardaïa, where every soft footfall is shod in sand. A hush hovers over everything like the beating of invisible wings beneath which one hears the incessant hissing of the desert. Men, and even women, speak softly, knowing they will be heard. When desert-dwellers meet, they stand off a few paces to whisper sibilant litanies of ritual greeting, almost indistinguishable in sound from the rustling of stiff cloth, as they bare a long arm to reach out and softly stroke palms. They exchange long litanies of names interwoven with news and blessings until a spell of loosely knit identity is thrown over all the generations of the Faithful like a cloak:

… and ye shall drink no wine, neither shall your sons forever. Neither shall ye build houses nor sow seed nor plant vineyards but all your days ye shall live under tents that ye may live many years in the land where ye sojourn …

Everything crackles with static electricity as if one were shuffling over a great rug. Everyone in the Sahara is very aware; tuned-in to the great humming silence through which drones the sound of an approaching diesel from hours away.

Previously assured transportation suddenly became precarious. We all sat or lay around in the shade of the truck which stood becalmed in the shallows of some new Time-Barrier. Departure was indefinitely delayed while the truck throbbed gently, as if poised like a porpoise ready to take off. Travelers must show their identity papers to the captains of Saharan Security in the Bordj or fort, before leaving; likewise, trucks. Officially timed departures are said to be relayed anead to the next Bordj or fort where the captains are supposed to follow your progress across the floor of the desert, like a cockroach crawling across a carpet in broad daylight. A conspiracy of silence on the part of the Arab truck drivers seemed to oppose this occult power of the captains. Restless and bored and just about ready to take a last turn around the marketplace, I was lucky enough to be still there when the truck suddenly began to take off, unannounced. I scrambled up into the vibrating cabin, screaming like an American tourist, waving the proof of my right to First-Class Transportation under the nose of the new driver, who had simply strolled over to the truck, jumped into the cabin, thrown in the clutch and started to leave. Even now, I sit here looking at the back of his head, wondering if he is not stealing the truck, the cargo and me.

Later that afternoon — no, the next afternoon, we picked up the Hadj back from the pilgrimage; the little old man I had taken, at first for a bush. I recollect, El Hallaj was skinned alive in Baghdad for proclaiming: “If a bush can say: I am the Truth, so can a man.” I have not been comfortable since. We grind along, hour after hour, like a metallic dung-beetle pushing its nose through the sand, probing the Great Howling Waste. Only sand dunes move more slowly than we do. Schools of golden dunes, which vary in size from ones you could ride astride to some twice as big as this truck, cavort like dolphins across the trail. They were not here when the trail was laid and they may be gone on the next big blow or they may grow into a dune as big as a city, they tell me. We break a new trail over the hard black reg in which the dunes seem to lie half-submerged, for we are skirting a giant paw of the Great Sandy Erg which lies athwart the Sahara like a vast rosy-golden sphinx as big as a country, Guardian of the Sandy Wastes.

At times, we roll down steep corridors of rotting stone which take us from one geological layer to another of this spot where Earth looks like a peeling onion. Torrents of water can sweep down these canyons without warning when rains have fallen miles away, gathering on vast impervious plains to rush through here faster than a locomotive. Many a slow caravan has been overtaken and drowned under a wall of water beneath a cloudless sky. An hour or so back, we stopped on a ridge of this giant washboard to exchange news with a group of wild-looking road-workers who turn trails around moving dunes or can lay down such marvels as a hundred miles of flattened-out jerricans pointing like an arrow at the horizon, across quicksands. I suspect them to be forced labor of sorts, for not even a starving nomad would work in such conditions, but they seemed jolly enough for such a pack of jackals bound up in their rags. Their official name is the Genie of the Sahara, but everyone calls them, more simply, the Broken Boys.

We entered and passed through a string of oases called Algol without stopping for anything but water and fuel because Driver wanted to climb onto the high plateau of the Tademait, the Table of Stone, before nightfall. I barely looked out from under my burnous at the monotonous horror of the landscape up there. Long after sunset, we halted in our tracks and, while the others fell out to sleep beside the truck, I stretched out in the cabin where I was glad of the cooling diesel beside me, for the night turned very cold. Late the next afternoon, we rolled down the great military ramp called the Akba, which was built long ago by somebody’s army. The trail ahead looped like a slack fire-hose over an immense charred plain on whose far side crouched distant dunes at whose rosy paws lay the ancient city of Salah. Salan was once a market town known to the caravans of Solomon with whom the inhabitants dealt in gold, ivory, ostrich plumes and, of course, Black slaves: some say they still do.

I went directly to the military fort and, there, I read a notice posted in French on the red mud wall:

EVERY TRAVELER

WITHOUT ANY EXCEPTION

MUST ALREADY HAVE POSTED A BOND

IN ORDER TO ENTER

THE COUNTRY OF THE GARAMANTIANS.

I entered the fort to ask for the officer in command. These men have no particular names of their own but, when the sun rises high in the sky, the natives call them Captain, loading them with reproaches because they burn and lay waste the surrounding country and themselves. Herodotus is my authority for this. I radioed back to the American consul in Algut asking for a letter of guarantee to be sent in my name to the next post south, the red village of Tam. Now, there is a mountain called Atlas, so high the top of it never is seen, clouds not quitting it summer or winter and the natives take their name from it; being the veiled Atlantes of legend. I radioed ahead to the Atlantes to say I was coming, bond or no bond. These people are reported to eat the rock dragon, a species of giant lizard whose meat they scoop out with a big wooden spoon as he roasts on his back over a fire. They call this lizard their “maternal uncle” and they are said not to have any dreams. I am still quoting the first historian, Herodotus, but only by memory of course.

When we debarked in Tam long after midnight, Greaser, who had never spoken directly to me before in all the miles we had spun out together, drew me aside in the dark. “An Assassin,” he murmured, presenting me with a slim Broken Boy in rags, who dropped silently from the back of the truck onto the sand between us. After all, the same word Assassin or Hashishin can be used to denote those who smoke keef, so I took it in this sense, glad enough to have a guide in the dark. My young guide picked up my sack, drawing me off into the night after him as he moved silently ahead of me over the cool, silky sand. We walked down an avenue of feathery tamarisk trees beneath which we sat for a while smoking my pipe without saying a word. Then, he led me to a ruined hut whose cracked mud walls threatened to cave in on us. The goats of the wild wandering people came to glare with yellow eyes at us from the fringe of outer darkness, beyond the square white patch of light thrown by my gasoline Primus stove on which we made tea. We fell asleep in there, wrapped up in my big black burnous, but, in the middle of the night, knee-hobbled camels stumbled into our ruined hut, nearly bringing the walls down on us. I insisted on moving out to a place in the open where, just before dawn, we were almost run over by a pack of tiny wild asses, who pulled up short a few unshod hooves from our heads, like inquisitive schoolboys, scampering away when I clapped my hands at them.

In the morning, my Broken Boy wanted to draw me along his way through the quiet sandy alleys of Tam but I insisted on going straight to the fort where I found a letter addressed to me by Mr. Knoblock, U.S. Vice-Consul in Algut, stating:

The Consulate General has been informed by the Government General that, as far as the Atlantes, the names of the nations inhabiting the Sandy Wastes are known but, beyond them, all knowledge fails.

A bond ought not be required of an American traveler intending to visit the Sandy Ridge as far west as the Pillars of Hercules.

I surmised the vice-consul had been dipping into his Herodotus, too, so I asked for the officer in command. I was taken in to an adjutant, who informed me that the Captain of the Southern Wastes could not see me but, until he would, I was not to leave Tam. I wanted to visit Murmur, said to be a city of silence about two days’ journey from Tam. The adjutant said no. Murmur is said to be built entirely out of slabs of purple and greenish-white gem salt and, therefore, so dazzling it cannot be approached or even easily seen in the daytime: its inhabitants come out only by night. The salt is quarried from an ancient crystalline flow which spills over a broken rim of the Hoggar, on the far side from Tam. The Hoggar is an immense volcanic cup of basalt, brimming with sand. Its jagged rim rises nearly ten thousand feet into the milky sky against which it can look peacock-blue or viridian green. It stands on an eternity of absolute desert, infinitely attractive to those who know those glittering wastes.

Far, far to the south lie the broad savannahs, the shimmering grasslands where naked Black men of infinite beauty and dignity herd their lyre-horned cattle. Beyond, begins the bush and the forest throbbing with drums; the jungle through which broad, calm, dangerous rivers can float you right down to the sea.

I walked out in the bright morning through the silent village of Tam, whose one broad avenue of white sand is bordered by gray-green tamarisk trees from the red mud fort to the red mud marketplace built by the captains in Sudanese Flamboyant style. No wheeled traffic moves except by direct order of the fort. Down by the waterless oued, blue-veiled men were barracking camels; Black men were loading them. I asked for the master of the caravan, intending to go with them when I heard they meant to leave before nightfall. At that moment, a uniformed runner from the fort came up silently over the sand with a coiled whip in his hand to inform me that I was to speak to no one in Tam and that I must move into the hotel before noon under pain of the captains’ displeasure: all Americans of whatever color must sleep under roofs. I shrugged, thinking I could shake him off, but he fell into step behind me, dogging my footsteps so that no one would speak to me or sell me anything to eat in the market. I allowed him to herd me to the hotel, which turned out to be a one-story building of red mud, splashed around the doors and windows with whitewash.

I brushed through a curtain of big wooden beads, stepping directly into a dark room where, behind a primitive bar, the Syrian manager lay drunk on the mud floor in a puddle of urine. Several sullen Black “boys” were skulking about, so I ordered them loudly to wake the white man, who opened his eyes and struggled up on one elbow, staring at me dully. I bent down to help him but, when he saw the color of my face in front of him, he suddenly hurled at me a hunting knife with a six-inch blade. The knife struck me flatly and clattered harmlessly to the beaten-mud floor. Startled, I asked him: “Do you know me?” involuntarily speaking in English. He sat up and demanded my papers. When I handed him my American passport, he looked through it dubiously for quite a long time, trying to run a dirty thumbnail under my photograph; flicking at it for several minutes before he barked to one of the “boys” to show me a room.

My room had mud walls and a mud floor, a split-palm ceiling which dribbled sand onto a gray sheet thrown over a bare iron bedstead: the only other furniture was a battered tin pail of water. Barred windows looked into an open-air kitchen court where food of a sort was being prepared by three ragged old women with tattooed faces who sat on the ground, screaming back and forth at each other over their pots at the top of their lungs, for hours on end. Meals were served by the scarecrow “boys,” who shuffled back and forth between kitchen and dining room, stuffing into their mouths whatever rejected food guests had left on their plates.

There were flies: the “boys” were covered with flies like a living garment. Flies swarmed around them like a veil, supping on the juices of their big, empty eyes, which they rimmed like animated mascara. Flies landed to drink at the trough of their loose lips or got pushed into their mouths along with the food. Naked puff-bellied children begged for scraps outside the dining-room window or just lay there listlessly in the dust, like sick iguanas covered with flies, cramming red earth into their mouths. Flies swarmed so thick on the dining-room tables that I took them for a furry tablecloth until a “boy” made a lazy swipe at them with a filthy rag. Then, they rose for a second into the air only to settle back again in precisely the same order. Flies in the Sahara ride in squadrons on everyone’s back. They show a decided preference for khaki and their remarkable discipline is most clearly observed on a khaki field. They ride around on everyone, nose in the wind in glittering chevrons, flight patterns which lift into the air to shift and reform as their field moves.

I might have been welcome at the hotel, for the Syrian, too, was at war with the captains but, when night fell like ink dropping into water and he called me to drink anisette with him and some other palefaces at the bar, I had to refuse him and so lost a possible ally. I slipped out of the hotel to where my young guide, the Broken Boy, was waiting for me in the threadbare shadow of a tamarisk tree.

Somewhere out there in the dark, someone is singing in a husky quavering voice like the wind:

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara and never turn back!

Eternity flows all about us as we pull at my pipe, utterly silent under the stars. Our feet make no sound as we pass through the shallows of starlight beneath the ghostly tamarisk trees and over the last sandbar on the edge of the village. Where are we going? “To the Sahara,” he whispers in my ear with one arm about my neck. I can hear the pulse jump in his wrist. Suddenly and inexplicably, there is a rough mud wall under our out-stretched palms as we feel our way to the door of this compound out on the outskirts of town. Somewhere within, somebody plucks at the strings of an instrument. The player runs up a shivering chromatic scale and, as our lips break apart, a quick fire of aromatic thorns bursts up snapping, on the other side of the door. Through the cracks between the boards we can see into an African compound glowing red in the firelight. When my little friend softly raps out a rattling code on the door with his knuckles, I hear with a smile the same chuckling word the masterpiece matches say to the box. Animals are stirring in there. Someone is shuffling across to the door. My companion is gone. “Eshkoon?” Who are you? they ask, from inside the door, and I hardly know what to reply. Who am I, indeed?

Someone I think I must know and who surely knows me has opened the door and stands there with the firelight behind her, inviting me in. This black witch-shape against an orange background of fire is familiar to me since the dreams of my childhood, and the sensation becomes more and more overwhelming as she flaps up and down, bowing me into the compound, dancing in front of the flames. I step into an adobe courtyard of sculptured mud the color of a burning rose, glowing like African flesh. Dear little donkeys and a baby camel turn to blink at me from under a palm-thatched manger. Mothers and grandmothers sit smiling around the fire. Everyone who ever has loved me is there: I am in Africa, home.

I bow and we softly stroke palms, murmuring greetings and blessings from the distant hills and plains. A door is flung open to my right, making me blink in the sudden diamond-white glare so many times brighter than firelight which streams out from that room. Holiness shines out from a chamber as bare as a Saharan shrine. Singer is there; sitting cross-legged on a golden straw mat with his big, full-bellied gimbri, a lute he cradles like a murmuring child in his lap. A tiny carbide kinki lamp whistles and flares, illuminating the room less than his smile. Where he sits the ground is a throne.

Singer’s giant shadow leaps up the red walls behind him, overwhelming the light in the room as he stretches out his arms, bending over the lamp on the floor, to welcome me, drawing me in. The wings of his cloak extinguish the lamp for a second; just the time to whisper in my ear as he embraces me: “Dar tariki tariqat: In darkness, the Path.” I set my sandals neatly on the smooth floor of white sand at the foot of an iron army cot with its sheet drawn tight for inspection — the only furniture in the room. Hanging high on the wall over an empty monumental fireplace sculpted in red mud is a rifle; no other objects in sight. My place is beside Singer; on the woven straw mat to his right, facing the door. I throw back my burnous to pull out my parchment bladder, hard-packed and as big as two fists. With some little ceremony, I slowly unwind the thong at its neck to show him the emerald grass of Ketama — my “passport.” His eyes and smile widen: “Ul-lah!” he breathes in a voice almost as deep as Ghoul’s own.

From the depths of the unlit fireplace, he drew out a span of bamboo as thick as a cane and half as long, onto which he fitted a clay bowl as big as a briar pipe for tobacco, packing it full of my keef. We smoked the first pipe together in absolute silence. Hearing the Brothers arrive in the courtyard, Singer clapped for them to come stumbling in, slipping off their sandals in the sand, murmuring greetings and blessings as they shuffled up one by one to snatch kisses from my lucky hand before settling down in a ring. The big pipe was stoked and lit by Singer, who passed it around the full circle, instead of letting each man finish his much smaller pipe as we do in our chapter at home. I was only mildly surprised. Some of those present had come three and four weeks by camel across the Sahara to be with us that night. In such scattered communities as these, small divergencies creep in.

The pipe passed and passed again. I knew they had never smoked any keef like this before. Without thinking, some of the Brothers began to recite. With a smile, because I am not really one of them, I drew slightly out of the circle to let Singer lead them into more intricate patterns of words but he arrested them all with a great clap of his hands before anyone could start to profess. Abruptly, they stopped and rose to their feet as two latecomers slipped into place. Singer, their master, stepped into the center of the circle as the Brothers joined hands. I remained in my corner, seated in their leaping shadows. They stamped and swung hands in order to catch up the rhythm and, then, they began jumping and shouting in unison:

AL-lah … AL-lah … AL-lah …

Exhale on the first syllable, inhale on the second. It becomes:

HA-ha … HA-ha … HA-ha …

And then:

A-a … A-a … A-a …

And, at last, the cyclical, rattling word of our zikr, a pair of unvoiced aspirates, our Key and our Link: what the matches say to the box.

When the master raps out a command, they all go into reverse. The dancers stop jumping; exhale, knees bend; inhale, straighten up. Then, they stand still while they jump with only their chests. Inhale a sharp gasp on the “AL” and exhale at great length on the “lah.” From sixty paired strokes to the minute, they drop to about forty-five. Eight minutes for each. It is always advisable to have one Brother outside the circle to act as an assas or guardian who can pick people up if they fall too soon and put them back in their place.

Singer moved about the inside of the circle, looking sharply into the eyes of each Brother as he strummed rapidly on his gimbri. When he bent down to where I was sitting, I gave him a quick lift of my chin to indicate two Brothers who were faltering and he jumped back to switch them in line. Outside the circle again, I began clapping my hands as Hamid instructed me back in Morocco but Singer shot me a flash of distress for, suddenly, one after another the Brothers stepped forward with eyes completely revulsed, crying out in rapturous tones; bliss and exquisite pain thrilling along on one nerve. I left off as he caught them up to pull them along as he knows them best, on the strings of his gimbri with hands strumming too fast to be seen.

Beyond that, when the word of our zikr has opened them up, they enter into a state where they bark or grunt from the very depths of their entrails. It is a very curious animal sound brought up from the solar plexus. I have heard something like it made by ecstatic women worshipers in storefront churches back in the States. Here, only male voices are used and this is more frightening, for the voice of Ghoul bubbles up from the pool of their depths; a truly subterranean sound in which the Voice, singing throat and the song are all one! At this, the Brothers all drop to their knees, still jumping their chests until they fall in convulsions, flat on their faces in a star formation; beating their heads on the ground in a ring about the feet of Sweet Singer, their shekh.

In this close place, their youngest Brother fell over my knees, so I kissed him on top of the head. He got up at once to take his place tightly wedged in beside me. Singer went on twanging his gimbri over the heads of the others in the orthodox way, making the strings say:

Allahu ak BAR … Allahu ak BAR … Allahu ak BAR …

God is Great … God is Great … God is Great …

over and over again until they began to sit up, wiping the sweat out of their eyes, the foam from their lips. Singer started them swaying to a new lilting tune as I refilled the pipe with my excellent Ketama to send it passing around the re-formed circle on the mat. I told Youngest Brother I had come further across the Great Waste of the World than he — from beyond a great river of salt called the Atlantic, which runs away in the sands to the west. For the River, I quoth, hath more need of the Fountain than the Fountain hath need of the River. I am that River, running away on your Afrique shore where, from your lips tonight, dear Brother, I have heard the Fountain well up; bubbling up from the great fossil underground river where the blind crocodile of our Master, Hassan-i-Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain and Great Sandy Waste, has lurked for centuries in darkness. Youngest Brother nodded eagerly: “Yes, one day he will break out to devour our Enemy the Sun!”

“Ah, so he will, indeed!” I thought: “Mister Ugly Spirit himself, disguised as a hydro-helium bomb.”

Yet, oh, the strange relaxation of it! I alone of all these Assassins had ever been foolish enough to conceive of happiness. The staggering assumptions in my young companion’s calm eyes would make my white American compatriots collapse with a whimper or run screaming for the police. There is no friendship: there is no love. The desert knows only allies and accomplices. The heart, here, is all in the very moment. Everything is bump and flow; meet and good-by. Only the Brotherhood of Assassins ensures ritual continuity, if that is what you want and some do; for the lesson our zikr teaches is this: There are no Brothers.

Sun just crashed over the other side of the oued, trailing no dusk. A copper-green disk rimmed with magenta burned on the back of my closed lids for a minute or two and, when I opened my eyes again, the stars were out. Sunset hit me like this twenty-four times in Tam. There was no way I could go on further south. The man with the whip had summoned me, early one morning, to the fort, where a drunken Arab civilian employee advised me in bad French to go back to America; my visa was cancelled. It turned out to be true. Day after day, the captains remained adamant. I had consorted with undesirable elements: there was no appeal. When I protested too loudly, I was put under “hotel arrest” in my room. I was not to leave Tam until a military convoy was ready to go north. All other carriers were warned not to take me.

As a Black man, a so-called American Negro, I know the meaning of perpetual quarantine: I have been under some sort of arrest all of my life. I ought to be used to it but I am and I am not. Just to breathe is to flaunt authority in some states, so I know how to flaunt authority really quite well. I walked out in the village like a tourist, learning to ride a camel a little further each day. I rented the beast from one of the tall Tuareg slave-owning gangsters who drift around veiled, looking for tourists to “guide.” This one spoke little Arabic and almost no French but, by drawing easily erased maps in the sand, I learned a few things from him about the lay of the land. The village doctor came up on us silently during one of our geography lessons. He was a bit of a cynic and thought, I believe, that the captains were treating me badly. I am sure it was he who persuaded the Tuareg to take me north on his camels to Salah so that, from there, I could strike west to the other trail leading back south. As it turned out, I had to go back all the way to Algol before I could strike west again and south.

My Michelin map showed Salah some six hundred and forty kilometers north by the road. A Tuareg racing camel was said to cover sixty kilometers a day but the doctor assured me this was a legend left over from the days when Tuareg prowess was exaggerated by a universal dread of the bloodthirsty desert pirates. Even so, that made more than ten days to Salah by camel. We had covered the same distance in about thirty hours of continuous driving. An ordinary caravan cannot do more than twenty-five kilometers a day, for camels amble and stray, eating whatever they can as they go. On the road to Tam, we had, luckily for them, overtaken just such a caravan of straggling, badly ballasted animals foundering under the blows of thirst-maddened men who slogged along beside them on foot, day after day. In any case, no such caravan would dare take me with them for fear of running into a desert patrol sent out by the captains. Besides, said the doctor, who understood where I wanted to go, the trail west from Salah to Reggan was closed to all traffic. I would have to go four hundred and fifty kilometers further north to Algol from where I might be able to strike west through Timoun to Hadrar on the other trans-Saharan route, south to Reggan and then over the worst of the worst of the desert, the infamous Tanezrouft, through Bidon Five down to Gao on the Niger. It would be just a short side trip, or so it looked on the map, from Gao to Timbuctoo. From there, perhaps, I could drift down the Niger on a paddle-wheeler or even a raft, for the winter season should provide enough water in the Niger to float river traffic. The Niger rises from torrential rainfalls in the mountains near the Atlantic, from where the waters flow back in a great buckling loop, inland through desert country. Many a raft-load of slaves must have perished on its sandbars.

I crept away to Singer’s compound, becoming each night less and less welcome there as my bladder of keef was burned up in smoke and collapsed. No doubt, my presence may have compromised the Assassins but the worst was an evening cut short by the sudden arrival of a man dressed entirely in white, bound up in yards of turban, veils and flowing robes. From out of this big bundle of laundry stared two black eyes; the most hateful I ever have seen this side of the Klan when they told him I was black but a Christian. I understood what he meant later, when I saw twenty-five or thirty sooty-gray and putty-colored children slither past in a long crocodile through the sandy streets of Algol. The Brother from Aoulef had taken me for one of these Harratin children of abandoned slaves whom their Tuareg masters deem utterly worthless and drive away to be “taken in” by the Christians, where there still are any such creatures about.

The following night, when the blue tide of darkness had raced across the Sahara, bowling over the giant purple shadows of the amethyst mountains like ninepins, I was off and away without taking leave of the captains. In the Sahara, you are supposed to check in and out of each fort, showing your identity papers, stating your purpose and time of departure for what destination, as if you were leaving one island for another under semi-independent authority. I skirted the airstrip in a sandstorm on foot, beating my way back to a black basalt cave where my Tuareg guide was to meet me. I would almost as soon trust my life to the Klan as to these ex-convoyers and hijackers of slave caravans but there was no other way. A group of about twenty Tuareg was sheltering in there from the storm; among them, one hugely fat man, their king, the Amenokal, with whom I spoke through an interpreter. In his presence, they stripped me of my gold class ring and my watch and the old-fashioned straight razor I carry, as “presents” even before we discussed their terms, which were cutthroat. When the storm died down a bit, some of them went out in search of their camels and, as I lay on my back on the sandy floor, I noticed a fine prehistoric fresco on the ceiling. Its ochers and blacks were still lively under a glacis which looked so like a recent varnish that I was foolish enough to ask the fat king if they knew who had painted it. Too disgusted to translate the stupid question, the Arab interpreter snapped: “Women’s work!” I laughed to myself for a while but the hours dragged on so that I had begun to wonder if they had already sold me to the fort when my man came up in the night with the camels. I mounted and rode away behind him in the dark.

The next days went by so quickly I can hardly remember them. We were mounted on two giant camels, more like yachts under sail than four-footed beasts. The first part of the trail was all downhill through volcanic moon-surface landscape which fled past like painted stage sets or, as I rarely looked up for fatigue, a nightmare series of absurdly old-fashioned surrealist lantern-slide pictures projected on the curtains of air, almost solid with wind-borne sand. We paused to catch our breath in a circular valley like a tar barrel five hundred feet deep into which we led our balky, protesting camels through a bung-hole in the stone drilled by the wind. We stopped for a moment to admire the white sand floor of the basalt barrel set out with thorn trees which had been so clipped by passing generations of camels that they look like a topiary garden designed around the gigantic chunks of black stone, some as big as a truncated skyscraper, which have fallen from the cliffs to be sculpted by the blasting of sand into statues of monsters a hundred times bigger and more astonishing than those of Bomarzo. The valley looked and felt old and evil.

As we mounted our camels, my guide pointed with his whip down to the odd arrangement of white boulders, about twice as big as a man’s head, on which we had been sitting. The stones looked whitened, as if they might have been bitten by the acid from a car battery, perhaps. From the height of our saddles, they formed a pattern of letters to be read from the air: S O S. “Seven Roumis,” said my guide. “Seven Romans?” I asked in surprise. “Roumi Merikani,” he assured me with a cruel laugh from behind his veil. “Americans?” He pointed again with his whip to a message spelled out in stones on the ground. I could believe it was in English for I was able to make out the letters forming the word: T H E Y. The word, if it was a word, occupied my imagination many hours and many days for if anyone was to leave his last message in the Sahara, surely he would begin by I, or even We. Why “They”?

From the last high black gate of the Hoggar, we looked out over the Great Seas of Sand across which, I understood, we were to run with our sagging waterskins banging away at our knees, tied to the pommels of our excruciatingly uncomfortable wooden saddles. We would have to make a big circle around most wells for fear of running into a desert patrol; darting in quickly to fill our skins with water, leaving as little trace as possible of our passage. I realized how hopeless this was when the Tuareg read tracks which he claimed were twenty years old near a well which is rarely visited because it yields, in the best years, only a trickle of bitter water the color of urine. It must have been already dry when this last caravan before us got there to find no life-saving water for their valuable merchandise, which they had abandoned in chains to perish at the brink of the deep dry well. Nearby, the wind had uncovered a mass grave dug shallow by a desert patrol sent out by the captains, presumably; almost certainly not by the Arab traders who left their slaves here to die while they ran for the next well. The skin of a Black child had been dried, tanned and mummified; abandoned there in the hot dry sand by its young owner, like a broken doll. My tall Tuareg, laughing behind his veil, played a quick game of football with some dried heads still covered by enough parchment-like skin to make them grimace abominably. He dropped several of them neatly into the dry well. It was a long time before they hit rock bottom: luckily, we still had some water.

Most monuments in the desert are flat on the ground: laid out, stone beside stone, in a place where the wind is least likely to cover them. We came across graves of the Faithful who had dropped from some caravan and, even, whole little camps of Muslim graves marked by stones all pointing to Mecca, showing where an entire caravan had gone down. We came on a mosque which is famous in all the Sahara. It is said to be composed of exactly one thousand and one big stones, laboriously carried to the spot to be laid out in the dotted pattern of a mosque. We halted our camels nearby but neither of us entered this impressive “building.”

I began to have a little trouble with my mind when it started playing about like a mind in the parallel mirrors of a barber-shop. At times, I had sharp visual hallucinations in which I thought I saw myself from about twenty paces behind. As my Tuareg rode on another twenty paces in front of my visionary self, that made three of us out in the Sahara and all three of us seemed to be singing. I could tell which one I was only when he would stop singing. Then, I knew I must be the one who mumbled old Hit Parade songs to drown out the monotonous horror of my own thoughts. I hated the song the Tuareg sang so much that at times I found myself imitating him until my throat ached. He forced a reedy falsetto out of his throat or his head which sounded so much like the wind that I could not tell where his voice left off and the wind went on crying and sobbing. His treacherous tune was nothing like Singer’s black music, which still warms my blood. I could feel this cold, windy air in my bones and I knew I had heard it before. Horror suddenly gripped me like a big monkey jumping up on my camel behind me, growing bigger by the hour until Fear rode my camel, onto whose hard saddle I clung as best I could. Someone kept singing, over and over again, inside of my head: “He is going to sell you. When we get to Salah, he is going to sell you!”

When we did get to Salah, I had lost count of the days. All I wanted was to get into that town where, I hoped, I could give my guide the slip in the marketplace. My most rational fear was that he would denounce me to the fort. We left our camels hobbled out in the Sahara on the outskirts of town and walked together into the market. As we passed a tiny sandal-maker’s shop as big as a telephone booth, I stepped up to the low wooden counter across his door because I knew I had come to the place. This man was a Brother, I can always tell by the signs, and he recognized me. As I gave him my sandals to cobble, he invited me into his shop smelling of leather and feet to sit on a pile of tanned hides in a corner. My Tuareg, sure of me, strode grandly off to visit the town. I slumped down on the skins, pulling out my withered bag of Ketama to fill us a pipe. My Brother let down his shutter, closing me up in his shop while he went to get strong green tea, bread and a plate of beans, which we ate by the light of a kinki lamp, both putting our right hands in the same dish. While he poured out the tea, he told me the Brothers were dancing that night in the dunes far outside the oasis where their drums would not be heard by the fort.

We found the dancers in a big, rolling dimple of sand. They were already in trance; sometimes a dangerous state. We jumped in and joined them, loudly professing and naming the zikr. When the Brothers took me by the hand, I became a Link: I found it pleasurable enough to indulge myself all night. We switched rhythms back and forth faster than ever I heard them called in Morocco where I first fell into a dance of this sort with Hamid. Here, no one knew who I was and, very soon, neither did I.

Our bare feet drumming on the hard, hollow sands made the dunes rumble and thunder beneath us. We may well have been dancing over a foggara; one of those many thousands of miles of underground waterways which the sedentary people of the Sahara have dug, throughout the long centuries of their survival since greener days, to bring water from miles away under the sand. Many thousands of specialized slaves died digging them and, even now, many are lost when the foggara they seek to repair caves in on them. The foggara are deep but, of course, not nearly as deep as the artesian wells sunk by the captains. From their artesian borings more than a thousand feet deep in the earth have spurted congenitally blind fish who lost their eyes during eons of waiting in the dark. From a well of this sort once came a fossil crocodile which has given the drillers of oil wells to think.

As we danced all night with the Sahara vibrating beneath us, I felt through the chain of Brothers in the usual manner, following the usual procedure, but, finding none as inviting as Youngest Brother in Tam, I ventured outside of the circle. This is something I rarely permit myself because it means leaving the body untended. Once out there, I thought: Perhaps, I can get into the network of the foggaras? I was feeling foolhardy that night, almost relishing an encounter with Ghoul. I knew he was out there; no doubt of that, and along the way I must go. The moon rose, rode high and away. Some Brothers began falling to the ground in fits of possession. Two Guardians, called assas, strode about the leaping gaggle of dancers, having made themselves deaf to the zikr. When anyone fell, they ran up to thrust a stick like a bit between his teeth while they reached into his head with their slim, indigo-dyed fingers to fish out his tongue before they dragged him up close to the drum. This must have happened to me for I thought I was out under the sands on a long, eerie chase after Ghoul through endless, whirling tunnels when, abruptly, I heard the drum again as a drum. That finished the zikr for me.

I found myself laid out on the sands under my burnous, not at all sure where I was for a time. My Brother the sandal-maker came up with my Tuareg guide, finding me tongue-tied; afraid to admit I was afraid. They bundled me forcibly back into the tall saddle. As my Brother helped me up, he whispered: “There are no Brothers!” thus revealing his rank. He added: “You will find the Old Man of Buffalo Bordj in Algol.” At that, he slashed at my camel with a whip which suddenly leaped into his hand like a snake. Clinging desperately to my saddle, I was swept along after my inscrutable guide.

For the next eleven days, he rode on before me at that same constant distance; perched high on the top of his giant racing camel like a bundle of indigo rags whipped by the wind. We pushed on all that first night without stopping, over a vast beach as hard as cement glowing blue in the faltering starlight. When day broke, it was not rosy dawn which hung across the horizon but a smooth wall of black basalt seven hundred feet high; the Table of Stone. My truck had crossed the Tademait in a night and a day but my guide counted a day for each finger; ten blazing suns for those who must cross it by camel and stay out of sight of the trucks. We rested “in hiding” that day; flat as stones on the desert near our camels, who lay trussed up beside us like boulders swinging their swan necks as they ruminated. I lay there under my burnous thinking how ridiculous this was but, apparently, nobody came by to see us. There is only one way to get up onto the Table, along the ramp called the Akba at whose foot we waited until night covered our quick dash up the ten miles or more of zigzagging incline which no truck would dare navigate after dark. Just at dawn, we stepped onto the slick surface of the Tademait, burned black as an elevated parking lot in hell. A dusty trail for trucks took the easy way across; we had to take the other.

I had caught the trick of the saddle by then so I could ride all day, reading the only book I carried in the hood of my black burnous; that odd “Report” of our Brother, Ibn Khaldoun the Historian. The Great Desert, according to him, is Life. No one can tell which way he has come into it, for the wind covers his tracks as he moves and the prospect looks, in all directions, as if no man had ever traversed it safely before. There are almost no animals but that winsome rodent, the dancing jerboa or gerbil, and the foxlike fennec who hunts him. No birdsong is heard. This land consists of shattered mountains, rotted valleys and shifting bare plains in an infinite variety of desolations. There is nothing at all to eat and travelers are not allowed their own dreams. Ghoul is Master of the Sahara and his abrasive voice moves the traveler in the very fiber of his being, for Ghoul’s voice roars out like an endless pasture of camels but it is only the hollow and disembodied wind, grinding together the infinite and never-to-be-numbered grains of sand.

When a man rides by night through the desert, he often hears voices, and, sometimes, they may even call him by name. (Hassan is an easy name for the wind.) Calling upon him, the voices may make him stray from his path so he never can find it again. Many, many travelers have been lost and so perished. Even by daylight, a man in the desert may hear these siren voices or the strains of musical instruments; the fainting, dancing voice of a flute or the rattle of drums in a sandy defile, as if some army was coming over the crest to fall upon him and his camels. Many a traveler has been led away or has fled only to die of thirst. Through the endless, echoing silence comes, like the song of an ant, the faraway grinding clatter and throb of a diesel or, sounding more like the swarming of wasps, the whine of an oil driller’s rig — but that is only illusion. Many, many have fallen victim to this last illusion for it, too, is part of the mirage of which all travelers speak but few can explain.

All day long under the white-hot silvery tenting of the sky we advance through the Country of Fear. We march in the eye of the mirage with the dancing and swooning horizon a full wavering circle closing us in. Heat billows up out of the ground like the breath of a glass factory rolling out the mirage. Mirage is that quicksilver stuff you run through with your car on the rise of a macadam road in midsummer but, here on the desert as out on the sea, the round swell of planet Earth is your rise in the road. You and your guide and your camel, or you in your diesel, are shrunk down to the size of an ant dragging a straw — only smaller. The watering eye of the mirage is the great Show of the World. On its dazzling round screen you assist at the creation and destruction of the world in flames. This overwhelmingly present act of erosion, scouring and pulverizing the landscape under your eyes, throws up a demoniacal vision of glittering marshes forever just out of reach. But, this is neither water nor fire. Perhaps, it is a vision through eons of time, back into the unthinkable past hundreds of millions of years, into that long Mesozoic afternoon when protoplasm fumbled with blind fingers through boiling-hot shallows on the baking shores of a planet which cooled. Your camel suddenly lets out a terrible bellow and roars off to take a deep gulp of the stuff.

When you get your camel in hand again, there all of a sudden, are more of those piled-up stones. Who can be piling them up? A black disk neatly balanced on a big white stone carries two red blocks topped by another white stone, round as a ball, on which stands a blade of basalt to twist into a spire — and it does! Mirage bends the air, throwing out long veils to catch up these stones into one little show. While you look, the stones swell into a fortress seen from a distance; a citadel with turrets and towers. No, it is a gaudy temple of Shiva somewhere in Hind and, now, it falls back again into a pile of stones as you approach.

The Sahara is a place of running shadows but no shade. Other white stones are scattered about. Out of the corners of your eyes, you catch them jumping up quick as snipers to drop down again, changing place. White turbans and burnouses the color of sand; yes, of course, these are snipers and wherever you look there is one who has you in his sights and, at sunset, they fire off a shattering volley as day is done. The stones burn all day in the sun and, when night falls, they are so seized by the sudden cold they crack and scale off razor-thin shards of basalt which have become this endless, fathomless heap of broken black bottles we cross.

So end the terrors of the day and, now, the terrors of the night begin. Contrary to what may be true elsewhere, the terrors of night in the Sahara are easier to bear. All day long, I can hold the snipers at bay only by being totally aware of each one. My being is drawn up tight as a bow; the terrors of the day are the terrors of the mind. At night, I know the stones cannot shoot me for they are not my Assassins. It is Ghoul who is putting me out of his desert at the point of a stone.

Another nightfall, with its by now familiar rattle of gunfire, reassures me. I lie in the lee of my camel to unstring the bow of Me; chuckling a little in sympathy with the animal’s ever-so justified moans and complaints. The desert fires off a last broken volley of exploding stones and I laugh. Do they think they are chasing the sun? I shiver under my stiff black burnous, scratching the itch of the sun from my skin. Sun collapsed down in the west like a blazing balloon and is gone. The black rack of night, frosty with stars, clamps down on the Great Desert and me. Now is the Good Time; so, I pull out my pipe and rattle the matches. Night and I settle down to the perilous pleasures we know. Yet, even here, many travelers have been lost and have perished, for they may not have their own dreams to guide them and they hear the voice of Ghoul like the bellowing of a legion of camels, as numerous as the grains of sand. Travelers start up and run off without knowing whither they run and are so lost before sun seeks them out in the morning.

I wake to the greasy glitter of stars mirrored back by the slick, sand-polished basalt sea all about me. My evil-tempered camel bucks and bellows to find his hobbled knees buried in the drifting sand. I seem to be floating above him and a bundle which well may be me; if that can really be my body half-buried there like the dried carcass of some mythological bird. The drape and fold of my woolen burnous is sculpted in sandstone. The lunar Sahara about me is cindered over with a fine blue ash of frost. Time has stopped. A familiar indigo rag flutters out of the sand where I look for my guide to find him, too, buried in moondust. I think we both may be dead. I glance up to see it is six o’clock by the winter stars and a light like a comet comes soaring up from the south. The night plane out of Black Africa, I think first, and, when I realize it must be a cosmonaut, I put that out of my head. My mind boggles at the idea that someone like me could be up there, locked into an Iron Lung of that sort. I struggle back into the ruin of my half-buried body to waken my guide with my voice. A bundle of indigo rags breaks out of the sand-crust, over there by our other camel, and sits up to stretch. From somewhere back in the folds of his tagelmoust, the yards of fine muslin with which we both wrap our faces day and night, I see the light of his eyes and in them I see what I know. I have never seen more than this of his face, for we both go disguised through the Country of Fear. We reach out to stroke palms in the briefest of greetings. It is enough; we can go on together another day.

Early on the eleventh day, we came to the northern edge of the Table of Stone. We crawled up cautiously to peer over, being whipped by the wind; suddenly awed and fearful lest we plunge down hundreds of feet onto the celebrated oases of Algol, lying directly below us like a pool of mirage. On the bottom of a bright sea of air, tapestried patches of feathery palm-garden lay stitched out in green on the rosy-golden sands; pinned down by the silver threads of water which run through them in elaborate patterns of irrigation. The various oases are strung out like a broken necklace of emerald along the former course of a fossil underground river. I could make out the military fort by its flag hoisted over the richest cluster of palms and I plotted my course to avoid it. Some miles up the valley lay a last thinly-planted satellite oasis; a mere handful of palms standing around a group of domed adobe buildings dominated by a squat tower. I took that to be Buffalo Bordj and, starting to speak to my guide, found he had silently turned back with the camels and gone.

I swung my field glasses around again to catch a glint from the sun on another glass which someone on the tower of Buffalo Bordj had trained on me. Trust any Old Man to catch me in his sights! I worked my way down a stone chimney in the side of the table of rock; tobogganed down a long col of scree and struck out across country. I could make out a tiny speck moving out of the oasis across the bare plain; someone running to meet me. Within the hour, Sudanese Mr. Barigou came up babbling officiously, ambassador-wise. He wore a brightly flowered Hawaiian shirt over baggy black sarouel pants and he smelled of sour red wine even at that hour of the morning. He was still pretty glossy but already the plump side of thirty; a bit shifty-eyed, he had obviously taken to drink. His Old Man—“Mon Colonel,” he called him — was already delighted to see me, he said. Even as we walked over the desert, the colonel lay on his iron army cot on the top of his tower following us closely through his telescope, every foot of the way. We could feel him out there with us, while we were still some miles from the house. “He can walk in the souk of my head,” Mr. Barigou gravely assured me; regretting that, therefore, he could not hold my hand as we walked.

We came to some rain-ruined outbuildings and then the imposing main portal of Buffalo Bordj; a handsome gateway of red desert-cement in Sudanese Flamboyant style. “No woman pass here,” said Barigou proudly. “Museum,” he waved grandly at some small buildings like bunkers on either side of the big outer court. At the far end was an arch big enough to drive a truck into a smaller whitewashed court at the foot of the tower. In the doorway, stood the colonel to greet me. I would not have recognized him from the photo which is the frontispiece to his unique literary work: Across the Sahara and Back. He had put on flesh through the years as a disguise; tricking himself out in snowy white hair down to his shoulders, a big curling mustache and a pointed goatee. Under his White Hunter’s hat, he tried to look as much like a plump Buffalo Bill as he could, while wearing a fine white burnous and excessively shiny silver-rimmed glasses which made me distrust him on sight. I could see he like the looks of me only too well.

Barigou disappeared into domestic shadow along with a slim, wild-looking boy of about fifteen, who had, I could see, nothing on under a short, torn tunic, belted by the thong of a slings hot such as nomad Chaamba shepherds tie around their waists. The colonel shouted after them: “Don’t let Ahmed make the coffee, Barigou, or we’ll all be poisoned again!” and, turning to me: “Come, I’ll show you around my museum myself.” I stumbled over my own feet with fatigue but I nodded and mumbled politely as the colonel guided me through his “collections,” which looked like so much desert rubbish to me. As we went from one bare, dusty room to another, the boy Ahmed kept popping in and out opening doors, scowling at me from under his black curls. The last room of all was devoted to high moments of the colonel’s career.

While still only a spruce captain, detailed to the desert after World War I, he became by a singular stroke of luck Half the First Man across the Sahara, all because a very white American, name of Hopkins from Boston, had suddenly started up from a 1925 cocktail party or a café table in Paris with a wild blue stare around, looking for the last white spaces left on the map of Earth. It might just as well have been the Arctic but someone suggested the Sahara, which was very much in vogue with the French at the time. Kissing Scotty and Zelda good-by, he had flown due south in his own Gypsy Moth, armed with a handful of letters to military types in the desert, provided by a French buddy-pilot left over from World War I. Landing at Algol, Hopkins blurted out to the super-dapper captain: “Will you take me across the Sahara?” The captain screwed in his monocle: “When I saw how that Amerlou threw out his stale socks instead of having them washed, I knew he was rich. I proposed: ‘Half a million gold francs to cross the Sahara: you bring the trucks and equipment: I’ll bring you back.’” They made it, discovered a prehistoric skull and brought out a book, badly printed, with maps. Captain became colonel with enough money put aside to buy the oasis and build Buffalo Bordj. Houses are sepulchers for the living, the nomads say. It takes more than an Adept or two to set yourself up as an Old Man of the Sands.

I glanced with some amusement at fading photographs of Sudanese boys naked by a river with their cocks hanging down to their knees. That’s what we’re good for, I guess. Next to these hung a pre-World War I cabinet portrait photo, as I believe they were called, of the young officer in his first dress uniform, I judged. He wore pince-nez glasses and a sharp waxed mustache in those days. Beside this hung another from the same Parisian photographer showing him still with glasses and mustache but, astonishingly enough, dressed as a rich bourgeoise French lady of about 1910 in an evening gown with feathers and beads beneath a huge plumed hat. An armor-plated necklace covered his plunging décolleté. “My mother’s jewels,” the colonel breathed in my ear. I was taken aback to find he was pressing my hand. I snatched back my hand before he could kiss it as Ahmed Chaamba came in with the coffee. The colonel looked moved.

Barigou was clucking around the courtyard like a seminsane African comedy version of an imported French wife; his body presumably occupied by the ghost of the colonel’s mother, now playing Friday in the Sahara. We were served semi-French food in a curious underground room which had old Perrier bottles from France set into the low vaulted ceiling, pouring down on us a liquid green light. The Old Man expounded the rule of his house: “No eggs, no milk. I buy cheese from the nomads. I won’t let a female animal enter my house!” I nodded in sympathy: “The rule of Mount Athos.” I hate chickens, myself; cannot bear their cackle and feathers and get little enough pleasure out of smiling: “Bismillah!” while slitting their throats. “My house is my fortress!” boasted the colonel: “Will you give me a kiss?” I begged him to excuse me and, as Ahmed Chaamba came back at that moment to clear the table away, I asked: “Could I just lie down for a few hours in his room, perhaps? I am terribly tired.” I pulled out my pipe to turn on but the colonel snapped: “Please! Not in front of my Adepts!” Who the hell did he think he was, anyway?

Mister Barigou showed me into a bare little room with mud walls where I threw myself down on the iron army cot, rolling up in my own burnous. Barigou hung his black moon-face in the crack of the door, playing me his desert version of “Poor Mister Bones.” I can hear that sound, so I slipped him a bill as I told him to close the rough plank door. I was in a hurry to light up and, as soon as I did, I began to pick up the Chaamba boy’s low-frequency delta waves pulsing through the bed. The rhythms set up by such a young creature are just what I need. Here was a wild young postulant under a bad master who seemed to be learning the ropes by himself as any young Adept should. A bright shaft of sunlight fell through a chink in the door directly onto my closed lids. I fanned out my fingers, flickering them through the ray of light at something like the delta rate. Deep waves of migraine red, blue, purple and green pounded through my head in the heavy color-language in which Deltas talk to themselves.

My interior screen was swept by psychic static like a color 3-D TV screen in a blistering electrical storm. Some people, finding these visions as intolerable as real sandstorms in the desert, run screaming for a doctor at this point; for me, to know these wastes is to love them. Limitless bright pastures of light exploding on the never-to-be-numbered grains of sand flashed through my skull until, somewhere out there on a great burning beach, I picked up his tiny, cowering figure. Chaamba nomad herdsmen call such barrens a pasture when one spindly, rapidly-flowing plant every fifty paces springs up after a rain. And it did rain across my screen; rain like driven shards of glass under which the boy, Ahmed Chaamba, huddled against the goats of his mother’s tent. Then, as a tiny jeep raced like a maddened mechanical beetle across the scoured and polished floors of my visionary Sahara, the boy started up like a gazelle but in less than a minute they ran him down with the jeep. There he was, broken and panting; slung over the fender. Black Mister Barigou and the colonel, all in white including his ten-gallon hat, tied the boy up in a sack and threw him into the back of the jeep. “Caught me another one live!” the colonel exulted. I suppose these were the first words in French on the boy’s new sound track. That is the way I really like to see them; when they bring one in fresh. I wish I had been there. My ways are not this Old Man’s ways, of course; nor, I expect, are they yours.

There was a long period of mending and brooding in one of the colonel’s dark underground rooms. I thought I caught a glimpse of the boy’s astral pattern in the buzzing pinpoints of light; his path in the stars, learned since childhood through the seasonal migrations of his tent. When Mister Barigou pushed him up the ladder to the colonel’s iron army cot for the first time, the boy Ahmed saw by a glance at the stars that his tent had moved far away after fresh pastures, almost certainly counting him dead. The Old Man took him there night after night while he stared at the stars and, plotting the position of his tent, bided his time. As the tent moved back toward Algol with the returning season; nearer and nearer, from pasture to pasture known only to the Chaamba nomads, he counted the nights until his escape. Yet, when the time came, and the False Southern Cross rode high overhead as he lay under the stars with the colonel, he could not raise a finger nor move a limb but lay there impaled while the voice of the Old Man rumbled in his ear like the voice of Ghoul himself: “I can see you, Ahmed Chaamba! I can see you from here on the top of my tower through my telescope. You run in the wind.… I can see where you run … I follow wherever you go. You may run, Ahmed Chaamba, and leap from dune to dune like the tender gazelle I bring down with one crack out of my rifle but, now, you are falling … panting and sliding down a whirlpool of sand. There is nothing in front of you, Ahmed. You are falling, falling, falling.…”

If I am yours, you are mine. The boy began stealing into his Master’s head, now he saw how the thing was done. He lay there, taking it all in night after night as they linked under the stars. He slipped into a garden called “Lafrance”; garden after garden over the whole land with no Sahara between the gardens. He stole like a thief into cold rooms, schools, barracks and bars where Christians drank the forbidden Arab poison called Al Cohol in public while they stumbled about to music with their hands on almost naked women; held, unbelievably, to be their wives. He glided with a knowing smile through a world of shadows who pounce on boys in underground lava-tories and shabby Parisian hotels where the dapper young captain ogled them through his pince-nez as in a series of old curling yellow photos which faded when he took them in his arms. The Old Man’s life died as the Chaamba boy took it over. The Old Man’s life will soon all be mine, he gloated: when I have the very last gasp of him in me, he will be dead. He took the colonel with growing pleasure, starry night after starry night. I’ll soon be the colonel and all this will be mine, he thought, but Black Mister Barigou still ran the house.

At that very moment, Mister Barigou was shaking me out of my torpor deeper than sleep to say that the colonel had a contraband truck waiting for me at the edge of the oasis. It was night and the sandstorm was screaming high in the air over the narrow, whitewashed court in which the colonel stood to bid me good-by. Barigou held up a blazing torch a pace behind him, leaving the Old Man’s face in leaping shadow. His voice betrayed a very thin frosting of politeness, as he bade me: Adieu! Barigou led me out the main gate and down an avenue of wind-lashed palms to where a truck with its lights off throbbed in the crashing confusion of the dark. All of a sudden, the Chaamba boy reeled out of the night to throw himself like a parcel at my feet. The truck ground into gear as I picked him up, kissed him on top of the head and took a deep breath of his perfume before I climbed into the cabin, slamming the door as we moved off into the sandstorm. Thus, I took him with me while leaving him there; a neat trick.

One of the most popular perfumes in the Sahara comes in a bottle the size of your little finger with the picture of a naked Black girl on the label, which reads: “Bint El Sudan” in Roman letters. More correctly, it should read: “Bint es Sudan,” of course. In very small letters beneath the girl’s feet, it says: Hackney E.8, I think. All the boys in the desert like to pour a whole bottle over their heads before they go out in the Sahara: they smell very nice.

Impossible to express my feelings when I climbed into that infernally hot metal truck-cabin to find I must share a single seat again and, this time, with a sour-smelling, wiry, old Frenchwoman, wearing a White Hunter’s hat. She was known on all desert trails as the Rock Scorpion. This scourge of the sands traveled everywhere for years under more or less official protection as the widow of one of the First of the Sahara. All winter long she sped from fort to fort, bordj to bordj, like a hornet with gossip, while posing, back in Paris, as a Dissident like the doctor in Tam. Her voice carried over the wind and the hammering diesel as she launched into the history and function of the bright orange jupe-culotte she wore; very visible from the air, she assured me, in case we got lost. It was a sort of combination skirt and shorts, very handy for doing pi-pi on the flat desert, she explained. “I am seventy-two; same age as the colonel!” she screamed: “I’ll show you all!” I winced away from her but that meant I sat half on the diesel in a position so uncomfortable that the heat later peeled all the skin from my left buttock and thigh. Her dry little bones poked into me on the other side until she subsided in a heap as her metabolism, altered by the near-zero humidity, dried up her saliva along with the rest of her mucus.

She had drunk all her own water and began croaking to me for some of mine. Mr. Barigou had handed me up a guerba at the last minute: a whole skin flayed from a goat, used hairy side out with its sleeves tied, as it were, in which water is carried everywhere in the Sahara. I untied the neck and she drank greedily of this water which seems to have been excessively charged with magnesium. The colonel must have ordered it drawn from the most brackish of his wells. The old doll fell back on my shoulder, gurgling. I barely had time to push back the cabin window for her to be sick. She went on retching for hours, until we were all splattered with her vomit and the cabin was whirling with sand because she insisted on keeping the window open. She collapsed by dawn, giving me a little more space, but Black Greaser turned around, insisting: “That Roumia is dead!” They still use the word “Roman” for all of us Christians; even me. Greaser poked her into violent convulsions, during which she screamed that I had poisoned her. Poison is common enough among women, here in the Land of Dissent. She dug into her sack for an antidote, coming up with a Eubyspasme suppository. I turned away, preferring to lean on the red-hot diesel while she struggled to place it: apparently, her jupe-culotte was not so practical for that. When the Eubyspasme took hold, she dropped away into some other world, leaving us her old sack of bones between me and the window, where they took up almost no space at all. I breathed easier.

We sailed on blissfully all that next flaming morning over salt-pans as bright as mirrors, through a sandstorm blowing about like golden chaff in the wind. Driver steered by the compass, shoulders down at the wheel. The Old Girl next to me called out deliriously: “Driver! Driver! Even though there’s no road, you can’t run away from me …!” No one else opened his mouth. Greaser taught me to communicate glotally, with mouth closed to save saliva. Driver and he kept up an inane conversation in this engaging baby talk at which they were incredibly proficient until, finally, they began to sing together in a gurgled duet that old desert favorite:

Oh, I got a girl got so much gold

She can’t get ’round

Get up gazelle, ’cause I’se you’ guy!

We’ll swap you’ gold for a taxi, love

I’ll throw in my clutch an’ never stop goin’

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara an’ never turn back!

We drove on that afternoon, west south west, with the red sun in our eyes until it dropped out of the sky and we steered by the stars.

I woke with a start to find we had drawn up under the half-ruined arch of a formerly fortified refuge. This is the caravanserai at the shrine of Hassan-i-Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain and Great Sandy Waste. A hair of his beard is said to be preserved here at the heart of the tons of desert cement which they have piled up and whitewashed, calling it his koubba, or tomb. Naturally, it is a refuge for Dissidents. Few travelers pass this way, ever. Our Old Girl was asleep and would never even know she had been here. I made an only half-humorous hypnotic pass over the old harridan, to knock out her subconscious recording system, as I climbed over her carcass to force my way out of the cabin. The truck was surrounded by a gang of hoarsely shouting desert-drifters and ragged riffraff of Broken Boys who swarmed over us like pirates taking a prize. A handsome, old, white-bearded man with a turban came out of a dark doorway carrying an iron-shod staff with which he cleared me the way. Driver agreed we would leave in an hour.

“You may not pass this way again in a lifetime,” said my guide as he led me through a pitch-black passage. A great blaze of sudden light broke through the tall wooden doors which swung back at his touch to let us step into the narrow Heart of the Diamond, as the inner court of the sanctuary is called. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet!” As I stooped to loosen my sandal, I stumbled for fear I might fall into the intense hallucinatory patterns of the ceramic-tile floor. Each pattern exactly covers the grave of a Brother fortunate enough to lie buried here, just outside the Shrine of the Hair. The tombs are fitted to cover the ground, wall to wall, with a dazzling variety of geometric patterns in combinations of colors which seem to flutter and jump, playing back and forth with perspective and perception. These magic carpets in tile can catch up the soul into rapture for hours. They begin with mere optical illusion in which colors leap and swirl but the effect goes on developing to where pattern springs loose as you move into the picture you see. You step from this world into a garden and the garden is You.

I stood barefoot on a grid of electric-blue while, below me, revolved a firmament of candy-colored flowers through which flowed streams of incandescent stars. I stood on a glowing grid of red while a sea of flames boiled like a caldron of transparent naked bodies bobbing up and down in uncontrollable lust under my feet. I stood on a grid of budding vines, writhing like jeweled serpents whose eyes flashed with all the colors of the rainbow prism. I stood on a grid of melting gold while worlds fell away beneath my feet and I looked up. I lifted up my eyes to the golden honeycomb walls of the court and my heart welled up within me for each cell in the comb was the diamond-shaped pattern of Man as seen by da Vinci and each one set the Golden Number echoing out like a gong. In each identical cell burned a diamond-white kinki lamp set on the clean woven mat of pure gold where a Master sat gazing on the burnished face of his Adept and each Adept was someone I loved: Carlos, Costa, Andonai and Nico; Philippe and Giovanni; John, Mario, Robby, Mirko; Antonio, Juan, Alberto, Julio; Hamid, Targuisti, Ahmed Maati and Ahmed Marrakshi; “Verigood,” Franco, Francis, Benaïssa, Mustache and “The Prince.” … Named and unnamed, they rose up tier upon tier; all the ones I ever had burned for. They truly sat there but they were not Flesh; they were Fire, the color of a burning rose. They sat cross-legged, smiling at me in absolute love and confidence, for they had no bodies but flame. They were not human images in the flesh but the Real Thing, which is Light. I looked up, higher and higher, as the honeycomb rose to the skies, where all the faces were One, melded together in one fiery river of light. I rode on the surge of the Fountain, straight up out of this sphere into the Other, from where I thought to take a good look at the Masters who all turned their backs on me when they gazed at their Adepts — and mine. With all the passion of my earthly mind, I sought to force them to turn and they turned: all of them turned with one familiar, identical smile, for all of the Masters were Black. All of them had chosen to put on the image of Me.

My guide coughed politely, touching my arm to lead me away down a dark corridor toward a big room full of smoke and the hoarse sound of men shouting; the bawdy laughter and coarse joking of the porters and desert-drifters who had swarmed over our truck at the gate. He just left me there, standing in the arched door of this vaulted room, awkwardly holding my rucksack, startled by the wild faces which gleamed up at me from around a small fire which the Broken Boys had lit in the middle of the room, on the floor. “Salaam aleikoum,” I mumbled, conscious that Muslims do not like to hear these holy words of greeting from other than Muslim lips. “Why doesn’t the Merikani take a plane?” shouted one rough voice. “Because he is Black!” answered another. Roars of laughter. “The white Merikanis won’t let him, so he has to travel like us!” I took a deep breath and stepped boldly over some of these people, taking a place in the far corner where I got my Primus stove slowly out of my sack before I replied — giving myself time to say it correctly in Arabic: “This gentleman wished to give himself the pleasure of visiting the Great Sandy Wastes of the Sahara where he knew he would meet such distinguished travelers as yourselves.” There was a general roar of applause and, before I could light my stove, someone had handed me a shot-glass of smoky desert tea and a pipe of keef. I smoked it and refilled it in turn with what I had left from Ketama and handed it back. More pipes were offered out of the dark and refilled.

Behind the circle of smokers, my eyes began to take in a whole squirming choir of husky young Tuareg, blue as the night. A dozen or more unmarried, veiled boys of fourteen to eighteen were scuffling and Indian-wrestling there in the dark with their face-masks bound tight. I could see that a good deal of this horseplay was put on for me. The Tuareg are a self-conscious people, not in the least effeminate but vain and coquettish as well as indifferent, lazy and cruel. They do not smoke keef but their matriarchs do chew tobacco. These boys were elaborately veiled in yards of purple-blue carbon-paper material so heavily dipped in indigo it comes off at the touch but all they wore was a single garment like a sort of shift simply made by doubling a length of material, cutting a hole for the head in the middle and tacking the ends together at the bottom with a couple of thorns. When they raised their arms to arrange their veils, they were naked. They giggled and nudged each other as they folded and refolded the little pleat of veiling over their noses; taking out tiny pocket mirrors the size of a playing-card, which they carry in leather pouches around their necks, along with a stick slim as a match to paint black kohl around their eyes, preserving them from glaucoma borne by the flies. Even from where I was sitting, they smelled very good. Indigo has a musky perfume of its own.

“Who are they?” I asked of the man with a gimbri who had settled down to play a little tune beside me. “The Growlies!” I thought he said. “The Growlies?” It sounded like a wonderful name for a football team. “Dag Ralis; Tuareg vassals. They come with the queen of the Tuareg: you like?” In a tired, husky, dissolute voice like the sound of pebbles rolling around in a can, he began to sing:

Oh, I know an Old Man in Buffalo Bordj

Stuffs his asshole with millions in gold

He wanted to play but I said: No!

What’s this dirham for — coffee? Eh, gazelle?

So I reamed him out with my bicycle-pump

Scooped up the loot he had in his pad

And, flagging a cruising taxi down,

Oh, throw in your clutch — Go on, Go on!

We’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!

The Tuareg boys got up and left with backward glances. Their leader had come to say the queen was waiting outside and wanted to see the Merikani. I followed them out in the dark where a tall, heavy-set, unveiled and unsmiling woman stood with a hurricane lamp at her feet. She looked as if she had been waiting a long time to see one like me. She gave me a real white-lady look and I was surprised to see just how white she was. She looked like a middle-aged Virgin Mary or a Roman matron in slightly soiled marble. Grinning out from the shadows beside her was the familiar toothy black face of her personal slave-woman; a skinny, little, hunched-over, bobbing sort of a Black woman who looked like she knew me all of my life and I sure Lord-God knew her. The queen allowed me almost a nod but said not a word as her slave-woman gave me the message: “The Roumia needs you in the truck.” I bowed and said: “Queen, we are all here to serve the Romans.”

I found the old Scourge of the Sands lying across her seat and mine, fluttering her eyelids. “Have we got to Timoun?” she quavered: “Take me straight to the captain of the fort! This Black Merikani has poisoned me.” I suggested to Driver that we lay her out on the cargo on the back of the truck where Third-Class passengers snuggled down in the sacks under the snapping tarpaulin more comfortably than we rode in the cabin up front. I rolled her up in my burnous to carry her there. She was light as a feather; like carrying Mother to her grave. I rode out there with her to make sure she did not smother as we sped off with the canvas cracking in the wind, like a sail.

We were skirting a shoulder of the Great Sandy Erg so, as we ground up an akba, a rise in the ground, I peered out over the swelling pink ocean of sand, all blond, all dimpled and titted, and I laughed to myself: “Aha! so Ghoul the Ogre is a woman as well as a man, or: Is the desert all woman, the Great Howling Banshee?” When we got to Timoun about midday, this particular old woman jumped up like a fennec, that odd desert fox who hunts the jerboa, and she barked at a startled middle-aged Arab merchant to catch her as she swarmed over the side of the truck. I knew she was off to the fort to say I was there and had poisoned her.

Timoun is a beautiful African town whose bright red mud walls, five times or more the height of a man and three times a man’s length through at the base, rise from a scoured plain, white as a bone. Within the gates is a great sandy plaza broad enough to harbor a hundred rich caravans or an army of trucks — such things have been seen in the Sahara. Today, the arrival of even one truck in Timoun is an event from which other events can be dated. A single rusty gas pump stands in the middle of the plaza like a marine signal wrecked offshore from a crumbling reef of once-handsome arcades for shops, which run all around the vast open space. They say it is so hot here in summer that one cannot cross the square to the gas pump on foot. The town is the usual hard-packed maze of streets narrow as corridors but there are some fine buildings, too. Big family houses like forts whose thick windowless walls of sun-dried red mud are finely sculpted in elaborate geometrical designs of Sudanese origin, enclosing cool patios shaded with trees and running with water. Several broad avenues of white sand are lined by high walls over which one glimpses red mud domes and minarets of mosques stenciled with abstract designs in whitewash. Everywhere, inside and out, there is hard-packed white sand underfoot and, so, the softly hissing silence of the Sahara is heard. All lanes and alleys lead to the palm gardens; the tiered gardens of date palms which shade the blossoming fruit trees from the blazing sun, as they in turn spread their sheltering branches over the thick carpet of irrigated greens; bright with water, quick with singing birds.

All this playing with water and building with mud is old, very old; Mesopotamian in origin, surely, linking this desert with that other called Arabia Felix — not called Felix because it is happy but because it lies al limine (the Yemen), to the lucky right hand when you look back east across the Tigris and the Euphrates, east to the Gobi from whence all the pale-faced freaklinas of history have always swept down on us poor Africans. So, here I was, now, striking west and anxious to get the hell out of town. Somebody said a diesel was leaving and the skinny little Black boys who guided me around the oasis assured me this was, as they said: “An Occasion.” So, remembering Hamid, who always tells me I don’t know my own luck, I took it. We shoved off about midday with an electrical tailwind crackling behind us, driving us, now and then, into little date-palm oases like ports on the Secret Sea where honey-faced boys came up to stroke the side of the truck as if they were touching a spaceship.

Hadrar, our next stop, turned out to be in the hands of the Water Police, as they chose to be called at that time to hide their real purpose. I turned myself in at the fort, reporting to the captain what had passed between me and the old She-fox of the Desert. He listened to me with a courteous smile and assured me again that I would not be allowed to go further south. I was free to wander about the town, stopping here and there to do some little color sketches in my notebook. This is an excellent way to get to the children who are all natural-born Dissidents and, therefore, possible allies. They crowded around me in absolute silence as I sketched the picturesque walls of Hadrar. I picked a young Adept to hold my water bottle and exchanged a word or two of pass before I interrogated him. He reported briefly: The fort was hollow; the captain straw. I began to understand the man’s easy jocular courtesy: behind him was the real force, the Heavy Water Police who had made a great orange flash to the south. One day, there had been a great wind which swept away the tents of the nomads and a Pillar of Cloud had risen from the sands of Reggan in the form of an immense mushroom, bigger than Ghoul. Many people were sick: no one was allowed to go south.

A one-armed lieutenant came up on us, cracking a whip to scatter the children. He bent over my notebook: “Nice little watercolors you do. My wife had the same talent. We have just seized your rucksack. Have you any raw opium on you? Balls about the size of your first? …”

No, luckily not. I remembered how Singer had smiled when asked about that: “Aphioun? Why, yes; there was a ball around here, somewhere. … Now, where can it be?” He looked about smiling, helplessly stoned. That room of his was scoured clean as the Sahara: where could he hide anything? Under the fine white sand floor or up in the split-palm rafters, perhaps? Singer rustled around for quite a while in the flue of the fire-place but nothing showed up. A round ball of opium in the raw, about as big as your fist, would be the very best crop you could possibly draw from a patch of poor soil near a trickle of water out in the middle of nowhere. You sit by your poppy-patch a few feet square with a couple of goats to keep you alive while you wait for your poppy to blow. I can’t wait that long. No, I do not have any O.

In the bar of the Hotel Hadrar, I heard one French colonial officer say to another: “As soon as we leave the Sahara, this bar will dry up.” I was too shy to go over and ask him just what he meant. The other one laughed as he replied: “The day after we leave, the Sahara itself will be taken over entirely by Ghoul!” Just then, a jolly dissident captain of transport bought me a drink. He was bowling through on his way north to Bechar in a Dodge command car with a tall technical sergeant from the Legion to drive it. I told him of my plight. “Come on!” cried the captain: “Come on, come on! We’ll leave the Sahara and never look back!” We left together within the hour, tearing north through the night five times faster than the diesel could do it and we stopped to piss in the wind or make tea wherever we chose. Tech Sergeant crouched over his wheel as he sang:

Oh, I know a garage in Ghardaïa

Got every model of taxi-girl

I want to tarry but Madame says: No!

You pay on the landing and not on the stairs

Nothing’s as good as a jeep, gazelle

On any flat bed I’ll ride you down

I’ll pump you so full of my lead, tonight

That, when I’ve shot the bolt of my gun

Oh, I’ll leave the Sahara and never come back!

We slept out and it was cold.

We drove rapidly north up the sand-drowned bed of a fossil river and, by the following dawn, had covered more ground than a camel does in a week. At sunset that day, we came to the casis of Targ, where a troop of young soldiers on their way north for evacuation had gleefully cast off their khaki uniforms to bathe in the trickle of red water forming a pond under the palms in the oued. The boys were all right, with merry brown faces and half legs and arms tanned by the sun and the rest of their bodies snail-white, but the truth of it is that albino freaks are attractive only to their own kind. The soldiers were, also, mucking up the irrigation system for the gardens and in the Sahara water is money. The raggedy locals hung about under the palm trees, grumbling but not daring to throw stones. My transport captain averted an incident by ordering the soldiers out of the water before we took off for EI Bit, where we spent the night in the government guesthouse, a tumbledown place.

Late in the afternoon of the following day, we got to Bechar; last town on the Sahara going northwest toward Morocco. In Bechar, the news was official: the last of the French were to leave the Sahara by the end of next week. No one knew what was going to happen to the atomic center of Reggan and there was an armpit odor of panic in the air. I, too, wanted to get the hell out. From Bechar run the few miles of rail they were ever able to lay across the Sahara; from there to the shores of the Mediterranean, the Great Salt Lake, but no one knew when there would be a train. Nor was there a room to be had in the town. Every bed in Bechar was occupied by military advisers, atomic consultants, deep strata geologists, contractors, contacters, plain hustlers, three-card men, dingers, dippers and dead-ringers for all the pale-face freaklinas this side of Metropolitan France. Bechar was one wide-open and shut town. Water diviners dressed like tough Klondike sourdoughs tore through the unpaved streets in armored jeeps with shotguns over their knees. The entire oasis strangled in a bright cloud of sulphur-yellow dust. Armed patrols enforced a curfew at nine when all lights went off at once from the main switch, simultaneously plunging the town into darkness and setting off the barking of what sounded like thousands of dogs chained up in all the courtyards against night attack. Arab dogs, tied up in mud huts deep in the oasis, barked back antiphonal choruses of vainglorious boasts and insults to the dogs locked up in the grim, blacked-out, barricaded European houses of the New Town on the edge of the desert. As the moon came up, waves of hysterical threat and counter-threat rolled across the desert like a visible haze of hatred engulfing the town. Wild yellow dogs, more than half jackal, hunted in swift-padding packs through the sandy lanes. Everyone walked with a big stick in Bechar.

My captain offered me a driver’s bed in the Legion garage, so I bought provisions and lived in the bare, cell-like room with only a single iron army cot on which I began to dream again.

On the third day, at noon, a little toy train stood on the bright bare sweep of the desert floor at the end of the line. There was neither station nor ticket office nor anyone to stop me from getting on the train. I slid into a seat at the far end of the only passenger car, huddling there under my burnous. An Arab conductor came by and poked me, thinking I was an Arab: “No baggage?” I drew a deep breath: “No, no baggage. This is the Way I came and this is the Way I shall return, Inch’ Allah!” He was startled to hear the password from me, so I grinned at him broadly. “Ya Sidi!” he grinned in reply. I fumbled about in the dark under my stiff, crusty burnous, which wrapped me from head to foot like a cocoon, as I fitted together the two sections of my slim keef-pipe with a handsome brass band at the link. Around the link is engraved the cyclical, endless word of our zikr. As I took out my masterpiece matches, I rattled the box. “Nam, Sidi; I hear you,” the conductor replied, smiling even more broadly.

At that moment, a group of French people bustled into the other end of our car, calling him: “Here, boy!” It took him some time to settle them in. They were very loud. “We have come to eat!” shouted a really big, middle-aged woman with a mustache, waving a hamper of food and a bottle of wine. “To eat, to eat!” they all shouted in chorus. Within a few minutes, they had a tremendous meal spread out on their knees in front of them. It was time to go. I leaned out the window to see a whirlwind whipping across the desert in our direction. An armored jeep tore straight up to the train. “The Heat!” I thought to myself, automatically breaking my pipe to hide it, as I patted my passport over my heart. Four sourdoughs dressed like the posse, yanked an elegantly costumed Arab out of the jeep; planted him there, jumped back in their jeep and tore off in a yellow cloud of dust. I let out my breath. The young sheik shook out his movie finery, flapped the dust out of his gold-embroidered cape and stepped aboard the train. Without any warning, we left that place.

You may not pass this way again in a lifetime. Our very modern train seemed to be suspended in air, as silent as a crystal box, while they pulled the Sahara out from under us. The dazzling desert sped past the big picture windows like the vanishing tail end of an enormous golden rug, now, more and more thickly embroidered with the snarled and yelping thickets of thorn and thistle which spring up like a catfight whenever they find a drop of water. I filled pipe after pipe of my good Ketama to share with my Brother the Conductor in his swaying broom-closet at my end of the train. “Who is that Muslim in the burnous covered with gold?” Conductor spat on the floor: “The Caïd of Bogdour, may he rot! Bogdour is a garrison town on the pass just ahead. The captains taught him to drink: to lie and steal he knew already. Beyond his town lies Oujda and the border. If you have no baggage, you can easily go around it. The World is a Market …” and he faltered politely as I had explained I was American. “The world is a Market for Muslims!” I finished it for him triumphantly as I passed him over the pipe.

The caïd, intrigued by our conversation, came staggering along the aisle looking for water, he said. He waved away a pipe and sighed like a man with a terrible hangover. He had very bad breath. He had gone to Bechar, it turned out, to do a little business and, there in Bechar, he had fallen in with some prospectors who taught him how blackjack differs from baccara. Their fee for this lesson had come very high. He had been carrying the entire budget of Bogdour with an eye to speculation on a big scale and he had nothing left. He tried to borrow a hundred francs from each one of us in turn. I listened to this dreary old tale with only one ear, for the fat French-woman at the other end of the train had burst into a richly detailed denunciation of Lourdes, where she had been the previous season. As the caïd’s oyster eye fixed on the bottle she waved, he left us to insert himself into their group where they received him with condescension. The conductor beside me spat on the floor.

Now, we were speeding through the long, knotted fringe of the desert. Clumps of oleander bushes covered with candy-pink flowers, the color and odor of circus floss, and thorn trees unclipped by the grazing of camels, whipped past like burrs caught in the last torn shreds of desert running up into rising country until we stopped beneath an escarpment of rock which is the true rim of the desert. A battered tin sign on two posts announced Bogdour. The caïd stumbled down the length of the car to fall dead-drunk from the steps of the train into the deep white dust of a deserted trail which runs from the train track up to his town. Silently, the little train began to rock again as we picked up speed and as the Caïd of Bogdour, lying back there like a fallen vulture, was drawn away into the improbable past.

In Oujda, I slept with a Brother who was the night watchman of a filling station. He laughed as he bedded me down on the floor of his “Shell Hotel.” In the morning, he took me to the house of a brother-in-law, where, by passing over a few adjoining roof-terraces, I crossed the frontier into Morocco. I slunk around to the railway station on the Moroccan side of Customs and bought a Fourth-Class ticket to Tanja. The wooden railway carriage was rather like an old-fashioned streetcar and there was nobody in it but three young Moroccan soldiers on the benches playing Ronda, a card game almost as simple as Snap! Filling my pipe with some crumbs of Ketama, I handed them over a smoke. They joined me in good spirit and, in no time at all, we were laughing together like lunatics. The youngest of these was a sturdy country lad from the very fairy-tale landscape near Taza through which we were running. He was so moved by the sight of the hills of home that he leaned dangerously far out of the window, shouting up at the mountains of Morocco. He spouted poetry until we had to hold him in by the legs. Then, he chanted bellicose verses from an old Berber epic called The Love of War:

See those oueds?

Those dry stream beds?

They flood

With blood

See the Laurel rose?

It blows

With Roman blood!

Gravely, I filled him a pipe. “I love you!” he cried. “I love you like a brother! You are the first Roman I have ever loved.” I replied as best I could with some doggerel picked up from Hamid:

I love these rills

Whose ripple fills

The Little Hills …

Perfectly spherical tears popped into the round eyes of my new little friend. I saw the entire moment, flying landscape and all, mirrored for an instant in their trembling crystal.

“I am a soldier!” he cried, snapping to attention, “and soldiers have nothing to give but their lives. So, I give to you three days of my life! Here, take my dogtag. When I report in without it, my lieutenant will give me three days in jail. This is my gift to you.”

I had to accept.

In the glare of the noonday sun on the railroad tracks, my soldier stands forever to attention where I left him on the platform of the station-yard in Fez, beneath a flowering cloud of magenta bougainvillea climbing into the enameled blue Moroccan sky through which the clouds go running to the Little Hills. In Morocco, it is spring and the hills wash in torrents of color, all the mountains patched out with vast tentings of flowers. One mountain is blue, the next mountain is red and the mountain behind is bright yellow with borders of purple. White valleys below are great lacy aprons of waterwort meadow, smelling even more hauntingly rotten-sweet than the orange-blossom odor of honey that sets my head spinning as it pours through this train.

Will Hamid be up in his village, Jajouka? Can I leap from this train when we get to Kebir and run straight up into those blue Little Hills where Hamid and his uncles, the Master Musicians, loll about easy all dressed in white, practicing Pan music on their pipes as they always have done these last twenty centuries and more?