The Process

2

Yes, Jajouka is always itself; a secret garden on top of Owl Hill. Of all the green regions of earth, I know of none more beautiful than Hamid’s leaping Little Hills but I had forgotten just how impossible it is in this pastoral place to be alone, ever, for more than a minute or two. To be left alone, strictly, is almost the supreme punishment up in Jajouka, so only the magic act of writing can excuse my eccentricity to my hill-village hosts. Hamid, however, has to know exactly what I am writing and why.

“Well, you might call it my desert diary, Hamid,” I tell him. “It’s my trip. It’s my account of my trek from here to there and back again. That’s part of the trouble, you see; you’re not supposed to come back the way you went. This desert, you know, can take a lifetime to make it from one end to the other. I feel I only zipped in and zipped out again, like a panic-stricken American. I might as well have been AMERICAN EXPRESS. I only tasted the Sahara, Hamid.”

“Who tastes knows,” nodded Hamid. What makes him so wise?

“Oh, I got beyond Barbary thanks to your passport of keef but, when once you hear the Sahara, Hamid, when you’re actually in it, why, the desert’s in you! You know that song the Sahara is singing right now this minute, down there on its long windy flute? ‘Oh, you’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!’ it sings. But I did, Hamid! I came back and I still haven’t seen what I seek: my Black Africa!”

“Mektoub,” he shrugs. Hamid could hardly care less about anything Black. “It was written,” he drones in his pat Moslem way.

“The next time around, I’ll write my own ticket!” I hotly reply. “The Sahara still owes me a lot. The next time that I’m down there, I’ll take the place over from Ghoul! I’ll whip over the desert in my jet and I’ll piss on Ghoul’s head from thirty thousand feet up!”

“Inch’ Allah!” Hamid nags after me nervously: “If God wills.”

Hamid is, after all, my Baba, my Bab, my little back door into Islam through which the hue of my hide helps me slip in disguise when once I slough off my American cultural color.

“I’m an accidental Occidental, Hamid,” I assure him. “I’m an African: same-same, like you. You say so, yourself,” I insist, slipping into the loose Arab robes I brought back from the desert. Naturally enough, I have never been able to pull my Occidental mind along inside Islam after me but Hamid knows that and makes all sorts of allowances. After all, it was he who first brought me up here into these gamboling Little Hills where I am both a trespasser and forever at home. I remember, I once asked the caïd up here just how far his authority runs and he swung me around the grand circle of mountain and valley with an expansive gesture of welcoming pride as he stated, quite simply:

“You see that line where it is very very blue?”

The Master Musicians, all dressed in immaculate white woolen jellabas with their hoods up over their turbans, are grazing their flocks on the green and gold mantle of the hills. They are playing their flutes and the crystal-clear current of piping runs in rills down into the lush valleys below, watering and fructifying the crops. Yet, however much I may love their music, the only windy tune I can hear them play is “Over the hills and far away across the Sahara and back!” Once found, the words run around in my head with all the maddening reproach of a needle caught in my memory-track. Hot green tears spurt into my eyes and, when I clench them, the desert burns forever on the back of my lowered lids. For one haunted moment, I bathe again in the great Sea of Solitude, for whose barren shores any man who has once not only sighted but surveyed them must sigh forevermore.

“I’ve got to go back to the Sahara again,” I tell Hamid. “There’s so much to see and so much to learn. That’s why I’ve got to finish this copy of my Sahara notes and send all these papers off to the people in Switzerland who gave me the money to go on my trip. It’s what they call a sort of report: where I went, what I saw. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t break through the roadblock at Tam. Tam is a very magnetic, mysterious place. What you see there is one thing and what really goes on is another, You know very well what I mean. I seriously suspect Tam must be the enchanted castle of Ghoul. When the Foundation for Fundamental Findings gets wind of this, they’ll send me more money, maybe, to make another trip.”

“Thass good!” Hamid states firmly, instead of muttering: “Inch’ Allah.” He firmly approves of my having money when I spend so much of it with him. “Next time, I go too. No man should travel alone. Thass no good.”

Hamid, happily, has not yet got a passport and passports are hard to get. So far, he travels only on the magic carpet woven of his imagination and mine. How many times have we sat here sharing his sebsi, his keef-pipe, sailing to the States in the ship of Hamid’s head. Sure as shooting, that is one trip I am in no hurry to take in cold blood, so I tell Hamid I have no money.

“Thass all right!” he assures me. “You sell me to someone as soon as we get to New York. When you get the money from the bank, I run away and come back. I don’t care: you can sell me whenever you like but I’ll always come back.”

“But you can’t do that any more in the States,” I weakly insist. “Slavery is dead.”

“‘Burn baby burn!’” quoted Hamid, lighting a sebsi of keef. “Thass what the matches say to the box.”

The day after that, I went down to Tanja alone and took the ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar to Gib to send off my manuscript from there for security reasons. Right opposite Her Majesty’s Post Office on Main Street, I saw in the window of an Indian shop just the very tape recorder I have been wanting all of my life — a UHER! An end to all this painstaking writing and rewriting of words. When the bearded Indian sage in the shop demonstrated to me how well the UHER both records and wipes out the words, my heart went out to the machine and I bought it with what was left out of my Fundamental funds. Now, I am never without my UHER wherever I go. Up in Jajouka, I sling my UHER over my shoulder like a mountaineer’s purse. There is so much wild music running through Hamid’s Little Hills that I am as anxious to tape it as a tripper is to slaughter wild flowers. Here, for example, I have a recording I made almost by accident on one of those occasions when Hamid, maudlin with keef, mumbled away as he does about how I am ruining or have already ruined his young life: