The Process

5. HE

He who tastes knows; so Mya and I have decided to give you a taste. Just to prove how serious we are, here is the text of the telex we sent to our operational headquarters in Africa; to “Malamut,” the house Mya built way down south on Cape Noon: WITH HASSAN IN PRESENT TIME STOP CHANGE START OPERATION SCARAB PHASE FOUR SIGNED MYA AND THAY. You met Amos Africanus and Rolf Ritterolf in the Hotel Saint Georges in Algut. They manage our whole Stop Change Start device; of which Operation Scarab is, of course, only a part. Since your famous first interview with them, we have detailed them off to you as your personal staff. In Present Time, you are the Operator of Operation Scarab yourself. We hope you will be pleased with their work. They are two of our very best men in Africa or anywhere else, so, you see, we mean business. This is pretty big business even for Mya, who has irons in the fire all over Creation. What we mean to do is to snatch the Sahara right out from under that handful of prune-faced white bastards and their evil monopolistic double-criss-crossed corporations, who are already crunching into the desert like crocodiles cutting up a live camel! We intend to save the Sahara and give it back to itself. Now, you have to admit, a woman can’t be expected to swing a deal like this all alone, Hanson: Mya needs help.

One look in the mirror will tell you why Mya needs someone like you in Africa. The whole trouble with me is that I look just too damned white for Phase Four. I could make it in Mongolia, maybe, but we haven’t got there yet. I dream of the Gobi desert, don’t you? I can make the yellow scene somewhat, having been born out that way and, besides, I’ve been a Brahman as well as a Buddhist in my day but, hard as I’ve tried, I just can’t make Black. Go Black, Jack! Well, short of massive melanin injections, I tried up in Harlem like everybody else in my day but I can’t say it worked. I remember once being at somebody’s piss-elegant Easter cocktail with canapés on Morningside where, from across the crowded room, I caught sight of one nasty pasty-white face. “How did that whitey get in here?” I asked indignantly. It was my own reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. Imagine campaigning to be “accepted” by the human race after that!

Well, I did try again, later, to get into some skin other than my own; right here in North Africa where the problem is not, essentially, color. Back in those days when Tanja was really Tanja, long before you ever came here, I was, in a way, “initiated” as you have been but much less successfully than you, of course. Perhaps because of my whiteness, I always stuck out like a cop. However, do let me tell you briefly who we really are and how we got onto your trail and saw your light rising like that of a Mahdi long before you ever turned up: the man whose name is not Hassan, yourself. When I tell you the story, you’ll see why I feel it was “written,” of course.

* * *

At the time I am speaking of, Mya and I were just jetting around Africa getting to know people. This African trip grew out of my therapy for Mya’s very first husband; Peter Paul Strangeblood, the Richest Kid on Earth. Poor PP, he was only twenty-one but he’d had it: there wasn’t really much anyone could really do for him except take all that money away from him and he knew this. It made him as nasty as hell. Mya had done all she could since she first picked him up but by the time she called me in professionally — I’m a Doctor of Grammatology as well as Hereditary Bishop in the First Farout Church — poor PP was already pretty well beyond help. We did our best to get him to respond to Africa but he merely shambled along after Mya and me until that day in the hotel in Bukavu when the big cardboard box caught up with us, dropped in by parachute: we were under siege in a terrible poured-concrete hotel at the time. Mya and I started ripping the box open like two kids at Christmas, hoping it was food. I’d been giving Strangleblood various occult exercises for his “havingness” and one exercise we’d almost forgotten about had been making him send to his bank for one million dollars U.S. in cash. When PP saw all that money spread out on the bed, he turned as green as the bills: he was all choked up. I felt very sorry for him because I suffer from asthma myself. He had to be flown out by the Swiss Red Cross, eventually; they called it an “évacuation sanitaire.” Somehow, Mya and I lost sight of him until the divorce.

Eventually, Mya and I landed here in Tanja together but not as lovers; not yet. Mya wasn’t ready for me: a great many things had to happen to both of us, first. I merrily went my own mad mystical way, which has led us at long last to you, as you see. For a time, Mya went quite another way. Mya is no Lady Bluebeard, no matter what the papers may say. When she first flew in to consult me in New York, Mya still had a lot of the original starry-eyed cowgirl from Medicine Hat or some such awful place which I have never had to visit, being a native South Sea Islander myself, but I know all about it from Mya. Mya is part Indian on both sides of her family and she comes of an awe-inspiring matriarchy of potent old squaws who, for seven generations in one single century, have taken mates upon themselves as they pleased. These mates were French-Canuck trappers and rugged Scots Hudson Bay Company factors or, like Mya’s own father, fifteen-year-old Tom Bear Foot, simply the hottest moccasin cousin at the time and the place. Mya was born with the aurora borealis dancing around her birch-bark crib and she is the Great Queen of the Crees in her own right. Mya can take on the whole white and the whole yellow race.

In Tanja, as I say, we went our own ways and, here in Tanja, Mya first tangled with Dr. Pio Labesse. Pio was what people used to call “a bad hat.” They told me Mya was singeing her wings but I knew she was only burning the pin-feathers off her pinions to grow her own eagle spread. I let her have her head, naturally, and she got a lot, eventually, from even Labesse. They had their ups and downs, of course. At one time, Mya claimed Pio was poisoning her with pills and he did have that sort of reputation but she found a way to poison him back so they made it up. She’s terribly clever at all that. Then, she decided to sue Strangleblood for divorce in Switzerland, in Basel where she’d first picked up her lawyer Rolf Ritterolf; he’s Swiss. She separated PP, legally, from so much of that loot that he began to feel a lot better right away, and left for Tibet. Mya, at loose ends and alone in Europe for a moment, absentmindedly married a prince. In First-Class on an airliner to Brussels, of all places, where she was going to pick up her new Lear jet, she was set upon by this dazzlingly handsome Himalayan, who was so persistent that Mya felt she owed it to herself to be swept away, just this once. Before she knew quite what was happening to her, she found herself marrying him in his embassy. In the air over Afghanistan, he explained the marriage customs of his country.

“Polyandry,” he told her.

Mya was only nineteen at the time. She said: “I’ve had my Salk.”

“No,” he explained, “you are now married also to all my brothers who are Khans like me — you can translate that as prince.”

She looked at the fuel gauge and she looked back at him. “How many brothers have you got?”

It turned out they were four and that wasn’t so bad but they all had other wives, too. When she was left alone for a minute with the women, they all flew at her like harpies, beat her and stripped her of her money and her clothes. When they poisoned her, she got hold of some of the stuff they were using and smuggled it out to be analyzed back in Basel. Mya will tell you herself about her deep and abiding interest in pharmaceutical folklore. It was quite an adventure but, all in all, it took Mya less than a week, flying both ways in her own jet, of course. Back in Basel, Rolf was still so hot from the Strangleblood case that he got her divorces from the four princes through — I was going to say; in a trice. Divorcing four princes in one swell foop was quite a feat, don’t you think? One permanent scar: Mya insists on being a princess ever since. With me, she’s a white-Ranee, if she wants to be, but she made Labesse, her fifth husband, build the base of an African empire for her and she wouldn’t marry him until he managed to have himself made a pontifical prince.

Poor Prince Pio, the day he got a crown he lost his head. He began acting like the caliph of Cairo soon after he rammed through the deal, with the Spaniards who claimed it in those days, for Mya to buy up two million bare acres of sand in the Sahara, including Cape Noon and the ruin of the Portuguese fort they found on it. Out of that pile of rubble, Mya made “Malamut,” which she built, as they say, in her own image and likeness and Mya thinks big. It was a draw, for a while; who could think bigger, she or Labesse. “Malamut” was meant to cost six million dollars but, so far, it’s cost nearly twenty times that and it’s not finished, yet. Can you imagine something between Mont Saint Michel and Gibraltar but set out on the blazing Atlantic coast of the Sahara right on the Tropic of Cancer, the one and only rock bigger than a pebble in thousands of miles of unmapped blue lagoons? Inland from “Malamut” is absolute desert, whose hard surface is stamped with giant moving dunes of amber-pink sand and each dune is carved by the wind into a perfect crescent with horns running due south. “Malamut” means megalomania to people like Pio and in that palace Prince Pio became a real prick.

But I’m running ahead of my own story because, all the time “Malamut” was a-building, I was down below the Socco Chico in Tanja, deeply involved with the Brotherhood of the Hamadchas, only coming up as far as the European Boulevard now and then for air. My encounter with the head-chopping Brotherhood was ordained by the fact that, from the first moment Mya and I drew breath in Tanja, we were under a spell. We were so sick of those poured-concrete shells they call hotels all over modern Africa that we asked for an old-fashioned place and they took us to the Hotel Africanus, hanging over the port on the edge of the old Arab quarter. Amos Africanus, whose grandfather built it around the turn of the century, said the old man had designed the hotel to accommodate the pig-sticking trade from Gibraltar. It seems that Her Majesty’s Lancers, lacking a good gallop on the Rock, used to sail over for long weekends in International Tanja to hunt wild boar from horseback with spears in the Diplomatic Forest. If you’ve ever been in the place, you’ve seen their ghosts still lingering in the long lawn curtains of the old mirrored dining room and the leather-lined bar. If you’ve ever stayed there you know how enchanted we were with our vast suites of rooms with every last Edwardian tassel still hanging, the big brass beds with their mosquito-net canopies and the long shuttered windows down to the floor.

But, when you open those windows, what strange sneaky smells come crawling up from the surrounding streets! And what noise! I almost fell off my various iron balconies, leaning out to see where such a din could be coming from and, let me tell you, we were used to the African drums. I tried ringing down to the desk to complain but, of course, no one answered the phone, so I ventured into the long stuccoed halls and down the marble staircase covered with dusty red carpeting into the Moorish lounge: no one about. I rapped on the ground glass of a mahogany cubicle and out stepped a very tanned man with prematurely white hair, who said: “I am the management. Can I help you?” That was my very first meeting with Amos and you heard what he said: “I am the management.” We have learned always to take people precisely at their word. Amos Africanus is a big help, you’ll see; he still manages things for us and he will, now, for you, Hassan, too.

When I asked him where all that weird racket of Arab music was coming from, he laughed: “Some American beatniks next door, as a matter of fact. They’ve settled into an Arab house and become Adepts of one of the local ecstatic brotherhoods.” I knew the sort of thing he meant because we have that in the Farout Islands where I was brought up. The servants all used to get psychic relief by chanting and dancing all night until they passed out. My amah, my nursemaid, took me to their secret services almost as soon as I could waddle and I became an initiate at a very early age. I introduced myself to Amos Africanus: “I’d like to contact the local mysteries,” I said, offering him at the same time a grip which I thought he might know and he did, apparently, for he refused it with another laugh, saying: “I’ll introduce you if you like, but I’ll not go inside with you.” I knew what he meant. The Sephardim are exceptionally careful, even coy, about the magic which surrounds them in North Africa although they have always been practically the only authorities open to us on the subject. Amos took me through the outer cubicle of his office into a vast old library built in ornate Moroccan style and filled with books on North Africa in six or seven languages. “This is the French section,” he said; “added by me. I would have taken my degree in anthropology under Levy-Levant at the Sorbonne if the war hadn’t interrupted all that.”

“How about a little fieldwork next door?” I suggested.

“On Lenny and Lorna? Or on the Hamadcha they’ve called in to dance in their house? I’m afraid the Levines are getting in a little over their depth with the Brotherhood, as a matter of fact. The Hamadcha think they’re just Americans and, what’s more, the Brotherhood wants to go on thinking the Levines are just Americans because of the money involved. Lenny plans to take a clutch of Hamadcha back to the States, to get people trance-dancing in the East Village basements before he takes over Madison Square Garden and the Fairgrounds and the West Coast, Gulf Coast and Canada; until he’s got the whole continent dancing. Mexico, Central America, Honolulu, Japan.… They tell me that kind of fantasy comes from shooting amphetamine in the mainline or do they call it: ‘mainlining amphetamine’? Well, anyway, Lorna comes here from time to time to confide to me that she’s afraid in the house because everybody seems to be trying to poison them. Their Moroccan maid, who is not a Hamadcha and disapproves of having the Brotherhood dancing in the house at all, told them that the only antidote was to eat a bat’s liver. So, they went out to the Caves of Hercules on the Atlantic beach about fifteen miles from here and paid a small boy to kill them two bats. They ate one of them fried.”

As Amos was telling me all this, he piloted me through a maze of dark corridors to the back door of the hotel, which opens, as you know, right onto the gate into the teeming Arab alley that leads to Dar Baroud. As I slid off the narrow step, I was almost sliced in two by a bicycle-boy flying past like a steel bat with a knife-edged tray of bread balanced on his head. Underfoot was slippery with veiled women and litters of nearly naked children everywhere even at midnight. I remember feeling that one false step might send me slithering into a roaring bake-oven fire, wide-open on one side of the narrow lane, or into a medieval urinal on the other. I looked up to see Amos was knocking on a handsomely studded door in the blank wall of a sordid cul de sac. A tall dark young man as handsome as a Hindu god in a nightshirt splashed us with light as he opened the door inviting us in. That was Lenny. Amos tried to wriggle away from the invitation, insisting he’d come only to introduce me but I could see he was fascinated by what the Levines were up to so, when Lorna came up behind Lenny in a flame-colored Moroccan caftan of silk, looking exactly like the beautiful Rebecca in Ivanhoe, we all went inside; almost pushed in, as a matter of fact, by the growing crowd of little snotty-nosed Arab kids in the street behind us.

The house itself was enchantment. Maybe you know the house I mean or have been in one like it: until then, I never had. The colored tiles in the patio and the lights and the flowers and, above all, the people in their gorgeous robes! People furnish a house in Morocco, I could see that at a glance. There were over fifty Moroccans present, including more than ten musicians in spotless white robes and turbans who sat apart on a golden straw mat to one side of the marble patio, looking peculiarly picturesque and what I call “historical”—as if they were floating there in some sort of golden jelly of the past through which one could really reach into the past and touch them. I guess some of the effect was produced by clouds of keef smoke and gum-Arabic incense, which they kept tossing into the pots of red charcoal over which the musicians warmed and tightened the skins of their drums.

Everyone was grinning at me as if I’d just come home. I grinned and bowed back at them as I took out my little asthma inhaler, my Bronchomister of isoprenaline, which I get from France. You’d think it was the trick of the century, the way they all reacted. Applause! “They think you’ve got pranna in there!” Amos hissed in my ear as he drew me aside to give me an extramural lecture on what the Paris school of social anthropology led by his Professor Levy-Levant thinks of ecstatic practices. I know quite a lot about all that myself but I’m always ready to listen if there isn’t some simply great music going on at the same time. When the beat picked up, I began joggling and jiggling, much to the annoyance of Amos. When they began swinging in earnest, four or five barefooted men and one woman, whose long mane of black hair fell over her eyes, began hopping and flapping their arms to the beat of the drums, swaying and bowing to the long shuddery raucous railing of the big bamboo flutes. I began jerking myself, losing Amos completely except for the supercilious sneer on his face, full of sheer disapproval. My elbows were thumping up into my armpits while my calves began pumping something into my knees to give them a little more jump. Before I knew what was happening to me, I was up in the air and over the heads of some fat Arab ladies all wrapped up in white on the floor like a row of bundles of laundry and I was clearing them all. I looked down at them from my orbit to catch their broad smiles of approval as I hurtled past over their heads toward the drums. When I landed, I landed in a new world: I was out there front and center, leaping and twisting for the Hamadcha music along with the best of them. A break eventually came when someone beside me fell to the floor with froth on his lips and had to be carried up close to the drummers for shock treatment. I went back to slump down on the floor beside Amos and the Levines. I could feel Amos beginning to bristle as some old gink with one eye leaped up in the orchestra and started apostrophizing us. When all the Moroccans began swaying and bowing and chorusing back: “AAAAAmen! Aaaaaamen!” I knew right where I was in the service, I’m a bishop after all, so I brayed: “AAAAAAmen!” along with the rest of them. For, did not the Prophet say: “He who does not cry aamin with the Sufi is recorded as one of the Heedless”?

Out of the corner of one eye, I did begin to notice that my hosts, who understood a good bit of Arabic, were looking less comfortable by the minute, while even my ear could catch an ominous edge on all these invocations of “Allah!” which swelled up in almost hysterical chorus around us. I got to my feet. They didn’t have to urge me to edge along around the outside of the crowd along with them toward the door but before we got there the old gink in the long gown and turban fixed me with his one good eye and suddenly shot a long skinny finger right under my nose as he shouted or screamed rather: “Ha houwa! There he is!” You don’t need the language to understand that: There he goes! That’s the man! That’s the one! and you expect the whole pack to be launched in full cry: “After him! After him! Don’t let him go!” I just stood there with my shoes in my hands and a sickly white grin on my face as the old man pushed his way through the crowd to throw himself at my feet, calling me “Hakim!” When I caught his eye, Amos translated: “Hakim’s a common name for a magician. Let’s go!” A whole lot more people were suddenly slobbering over my hands and my feet, so I gave them my most solemn Episcopal blessing until I remembered I shouldn’t be making the sign of the cross. Lenny and Lorna were delighted by the drama but Amos wanted to leave. Lenny insisted on walking us back to the hotel, pestering Amos all the way to tell us who Hakim was. “He must have looked just like Mr. Himmer, don’t you think?”

“Well, he may have at that,” Amos allowed. “Hakim was the caliph of Cairo about the time of Charlemagne and history says he was a blue-eyed Berber or, even, a descendant of Vandals with red hair. Hakim was a ferocious puritan who slaughtered so many thousands of his subjects by his own righteous right hand that he is said to have reduced the population of Cairo by nearly nine-tenths. The survivors revered him, of course, swearing that Hakim was the embodiment of divine justice on earth: the caliph became a cult in his lifetime, inevitably one might say. In the end he got tired of it: simply walked out. He got so disgusted with all these spineless Cairoites that he walked away alone out of an empty street into the desert one moonlit night, dragging his cloak behind him to efface his footsteps as he went. He never was seen again from that day until, maybe, this.”

“Oh, no, Amos!” I cried. “I am not Hakim nor was meant to be. Maybe the first rajah-bishops of the Farouts behaved a bit like that with the early islanders but I’ve always thought of myself as someone out of Russian rather than Arab literature — Aloysha the bore or the idiot prince Myshkin.”

“You know what that means in Arabic, don’t you?” laughed Amos. “Meskeen means ‘poor thing.’”

When we got back to the hotel we found that Mya had moved out in the middle of the night, leaving word that because the noise was too much for her she had gone bag and baggage up to the Hotel Mingih, on the Boulevard. Crawling up out of the Medina next day to get up there was like leaving one world for another. In her hotel, the desk sent me right up to her room without ringing and I found Mya in bed, with the doctor. She hadn’t been feeling well so she told them to send up a doctor. Dr. Pio Labesse was this Catalan specialist who ran his clinic in the bar of the Mingih where he could keep a close tab on his drinking patients; among them, some of the richest women in Tanja until Mya blew in. Mya may still have been just a backwoods Canadian girl in those days but she had a lot of other things besides several hundred million dollars and about thirty years on those other babes. Pio psyched Mya out immediately: in a way they were really twin souls. When Mya divorced PP, who had just turned twenty-one and come into his money, she walked out with everything he had in Africa, just for a start, and Pio knew exactly what to do with it. But that’s Mya’s tale and I know she expects to audit it all directly with you tonight at the picnic. By the way, I’ll not be there in person.

So, I went back down to the Hotel Africanus, had two stiff whiskies, and told Amos I intended going through with this Hakim thing. When he saw I meant what I said, he agreed to go along with me as a guide. He just dropped his hotel like an old overcoat to show me the ropes in Morocco, so, at first, I offered to take over the whole hotel as our headquarters; but when the Hamadcha, looking much less magical and even a bit shady by daylight, came trooping in to claim me next day I could see That Look on Amos’s face. When Arabs appear on his very-near horizon, Amos’s faculties are inclined to fog over in front of your eyes. Amos sees all Arabs through a glass darkly or through the wrong end of the telescope down which he can snap at them in perfect Arabic if you ask him to translate but he doesn’t necessarily hear what they say back; not real communication, you see. For example, I tried to find out from the Hamadcha about the old man who’d cried out: “Ha houwa!” at me, calling me Hakim. Nobody seemed to want to know what anyone else was talking about until I suddenly remembered the microphone dangling from the balcony. “Lenny must have a recording of his voice!” I cried. So we all went looping back over there to Lenny’s house and banged on his door. Lorna opened the door just a crack, fearfully at first, looking more beautiful than ever when she revealed herself dressed like one of those girls from Dogpatch in a pair of tight blue jeans sawed off at the knee. She was, obviously, not quite awake yet and the sight of us all in broad daylight seemed to paralyze her. “Lenny’s not back from the port,” she murmured in hopeless protest as we all swept inside. I thought she was going to faint at the mere mention of the microphone because it seems that they had been making a recording unbeknownst to the Hamadcha. “They’re acting kind of funny on us,” she muttered. “We thought maybe we should split.” The upshot of that was that Lenny came in with two tickets for New York on a Yugoslav boat leaving immediately and somehow, in the shuffle, I found myself the new tenant of the house in Dar Baroud with a full company of Hamadcha Brothers ready to sit around eating and smoking and dancing until Lenny got back. I never did get hold of that tape, by the way, and it had some pretty potent words on it.

Anyhow, I plunged into my new life and, as my trance-dancing improved, my asthma cleared up. I thought it had disappeared entirely by itself, until one day the little old one-eyed man showed up wheezing at me about money so I accused him of stealing my asthma, gave him my inhalator and sent him away. I could see that such an act of authority on my part was much appreciated by the Hamadcha. As their hopes of Lenny coming back from America vaporized in less than forty-eight hours, the Hamadcha Brothers came to look on me more and more as their leader, proposing to make me meet the grand chiefs of various different brotherhoods in Morocco. I began to learn Arabic, counting out money: “Food for four is food for six is food for eight …” More than twenty people and sometimes as many as fifty sat down to food twice a day in my new house. Allah was providing in the person of Thay Himmer and as I was just as delighted with the arrangement as they were, there were no complaints in the household. Instead, there was music running like a river through the house all day and all night as the Hamadcha practiced their peculiar beat to which I danced like a doll on a string — not that I didn’t know what I was doing all the time, of course, and loving every minute of it, too. I’ve been through every branch of Eastern mysticism, always finding it rather glum. I came to the conclusion, finally, that its meager telepathic fundament is only the result of centuries of overpopulation and overcrowding. Everyone knows just what everyone else is doing and thinking all the time, of course. Even as a child, I had felt suffocated by it. All the women in my family, for the last three generations in the Farouts at least, have been ardent Theosophists, followers of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, in close contact with Swami Vivekenanda and Krishnamurti; aunts, great-aunts always talking about Gurdjieff, “pranna,” and the hallucinatory effects of superaeration — and all that sort of thing — or trailing around in trances at home. Even Grandfather, who was the last Rajah-Bishop to officiate in the Farouts, used to meditate in the lotus position wearing only a G-string. So you see, I knew both the practical and the theoretical side of the business, since childhood you might say, and in Eastern philosophy I found no hilarity. For a while, I almost let myself become interested in Saint Teresa of Avila because I heard she kicked up her heels and went into long peals of ecstatic laughter, but when I found out she took deep whiffs of the incense pot into which she had probably thrown a handful of hemp, I left her flat. My asthma had always turned me against smoking but with the Hamadcha I ventured, now and then, to take a little whiff of a tiny pipe and after one particularly insane session I proclaimed to one and all that Morocco was the Wild West of the Spirit. I think that just about hits it on the head, don’t you? Every day — every minute — we did something hilarious.

The Hamadcha saw to it that I danced until my feet were raw and every bone in my body so sore that when I finally fell in front of the flutes I thought I’d never get up again. But just let me hear one long sobbing tremolo blown hoarse and husky on the long bamboo chebaba, and my soul kindled, caught fire and leaped up in me to send me hopping and whirling out there again in front of the music. It was all pretty tiring, I have to admit, and I was very glad I had kept on my room at the Hotel Africanus to which I used to creep away when I could, to toss down a swift Scotch or two at the bar with Amos, who kept his back door locked in case the Brothers came calling after me. Amos was and is a real darling, you’ll see; although he has a quite different world-view than we do, naturally. Deep down in his heart somewhere, he thinks we’re just Tourists. He lectured me, gave me books to read, was helpful and kind but he always disapproved utterly of what I was doing. To study anthropology was one thing, to practice it quite another. But I was constantly calling him in to translate, so, sooner or later, he got mixed up in everything we’re doing and he’s really invaluable, you’ll see! However, don’t be fooled for a minute, Amos simply doesn’t get the message that comes from Beyond — either he thinks it’s sinful or just not practical and he honestly doesn’t feel that he needs to make any spiritual progress other than that involved in protecting himself from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Lest this sound too harsh let me add that I, at least, think Amos can be brought to see a bit of Beyond. Mya denies it. Oddly enough, Amos dearly loves me, but Mya he admires, fears and respects.

She, by this time, had begun shacking up with Pio Labesse on the Boulevard. I phoned her up there from the depths of the Socco Chico, once or twice a day, to see how she was getting on, but it was such an almost unthinkable effort to haul myself out of that hole in the Medina that I didn’t see much of her. Over the phone, Mya was a bit snippy about Amos, pretending to think I must be having an affair with him but nothing could have been further from my mind. I was all wrapped up in the Hamadcha, with whom I was advancing step by step into their labyrinth of initiation, or, so I thought. When I tried to tell Mya this, she said she was coming down to see for herself but I said No, I’d go up to her at the Mingih. When I got there, her room was still unmade but there was no sign of the cardboard box in which we’d been carrying PP’s million dollars in greenbacks. We never gave it to the hotels to take care of because the box was too big for most vaults and besides nobody looking at it ever would think it was money because we had EXPLOSIVE written on it in big red letters with a big exploding pop-art bomb for people who can’t read. It frightened the hell out of hall porters and Customs men, too. As I bent down to kiss Mya on the bed, the communicating door opened into the next suite and there was Labesse in a gold brocade Arab caftan down to the floor. In his room, I could see the box torn wide open with green bricks of hundred dollar bills spread like a mattress over the bed he’d been lying on. Somehow, before I knew it, just out of habit I guess, I’d invited them both to my party, which I hadn’t known until that minute I was giving. It was a catastrophe, of course.

Labesse had a genius for enraging Arabs which a former French governor general might have envied. The sneer, with Labesse, was a scimitar with which he whittled all Arabs down to what he considered their proper elevation, grass-high. He reserved the other side of his blade to shave Americans, all rich Americans: North, Central and South. I’ve made quite a study of Dr. Labesse: we’ve got a huge Labesse archive down in “Malamut” which I hope you’ll have a chance to consult when you get down to Cape Noon. It’s all in audio so you can have it played to you while you’re asleep, if you like: we have all the equipment. Amos, it turns out, is an electronic genius amongst other talents and he’s seen to the wiring of “Malamut” under Mya’s direction, although like most women she really hates sound unless she makes it herself. The house, as you’ll see when you see it, is meant to amplify her. Mya built it with Pio while I was away on my stumbling spiritual quest so you’ll hear the story of “Malamut” better from her lips.

Mya still thinks Labesse was a cross between Talleyrand and Machiavelli with a dash of the Borgias thrown in. It was that last dash she found irresistible. Her greatest childhood experience had been being poisoned by mushrooms out on the Canadian prairies, so when she got to college that took her into toxology and, eventually, genetic biochemistry before she married poor PP and got interested in money. As an Old Moroccan Hand, himself, the first story Labesse ever told her was about some mysterious substance which Moroccan women are said to give their husbands to make them complacent. You must have heard of it, of course; “Borbor,” it’s called. You see, when Mya and PP first moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Basel, it had been with the idea of studying with Professor Forbach: you know, the man who discovered the hallucinatory principle of all the new drugs.

Actually, in the end Forbach threw Mya out of his laboratory when he learned that she had launched a mutual fund scheme from Basel. You’ve heard of Fundamental Funds, haven’t you? Well that’s Mya’s baby or was in those days when Professor Forbach dismissed her because he could no longer consider her a “seriously dedicated scientist” if she insisted on making millions or hundreds of millions of dollars like that on the side. So she offered to buy him out from his pharmaceutical combine, which paid him only some annuity, but that was a mistake, waving her dollars around. Professor Forbach was furious, naturally! She called him a “kept chemist!” and swept out to the sounds of breaking glass test-tubes, slamming the door.

Mya was running a North African fever that first night with Labesse and it must have been wild, something like the mating of a basilisk and a gryphon. Afterward, she’s always sworn to me that it was by pure feminine intuition that she dug Pio for a poisoner but, of course, it had been in all the papers when it happened. She still swears she hadn’t read a thing about it and didn’t even know who he was when he got into bed with her. When I tried to tell her, she snapped at me: “That’s just the type of nasty tale people in Tanja are forever telling about each other and, besides, I never even heard of Lindissima Reuther either … until last night!” I’d been foolish enough to advise her to watch out because everyone including Amos Africanus lost no time in telling me how Dr. Labesse had spent ten months in jail in Barcelona, accused of poisoning or trying to poison Lindissima’s adopted son for her. One word out of me and Mya always does just as she pleases, naturally. As soon as they got the Pio thing settled between them, the ladies went into business together; mines in the Sahara — for the next couple of years. You can imagine how popular I was with everybody concerned! I simply made myself scarce for a very long while as I went on about my own business of spiritual progress: which includes learning how to button one’s lip, of course.

I guess the way Lindissima Reuther first figured it was, she could afford to spare Labesse as long as Mya would put up the cash to help her get her Saharan mines into operation. Both girls thought they knew all about mines, concessions and subsoils rights; things I know nothing about, heaven knows! Mya got this from her oil-well childhood in western Canada and Lindissima from her young if not tender years in South America, where she is said to have burned down two Latino presidents and their republics along with them. As I said, everyone in Tanja was only too ready to fill me in on the legendary aspects of Lindissima’s lurid past even before she’d married this Reuther, who was, as she always said, a clean old man, half-Swiss and half-Spanish, who’d spent years of his life wandering around the Sahara before anyone else got there in a helicopter. He’d lived like a nomad and became a Muslim, buying up subsoil rights from local desert sheiks under binding Coranic contracts which any Arab government would be bound to observe. Reuther got the Spanish government to ratify all this at a time when the really big boys in Madrid and Barcelona hadn’t even got the smell of oil and phosphates in their nostrils yet. Reuther passed for a very rich man during those years that cash was so hard to come by in Spain and, besides, he lived the life of the mysterious recluse who doesn’t like to spend it. He must have been over seventy when Lindissima hit Madrid hard, flying in from an overextended tour of the Middle East, where she had cleaned up quite a bit of loot, including some gorgeous jewels from grateful oil sheiks, which hid the fact she was slipping from everyone but herself. In Madrid she had herself quite a fling with some major movie star for a while and a couple of fairly expensive young bullfighters before Reuther met her and invited her down to the desert to show her his mining concessions by helicopter. Lindissima fell in love on first sight with the Sahara; so much so that she wanted to own it. She married Reuther and went into business with him, handing him over her stash, which amounted to almost one million dollars, at that time; all she had including the jewels. Her money set them up in one of the last big palaces on the Castellana, about a hundred yards from the Hilton, where she started entertaining the right people, whoever they may be in Madrid.

Anyhow, everything was going along fine when the old man died on her, plunging her into the usual hassle with lawyers and even that was working out not too badly when some idiot Spanish boy of nineteen was arrested for pimping on the Gran Via in the middle of Madrid. From jail, he started screaming that he was Reuther’s natural son who was being gypped out of his inheritance and the whole thing with this girl could be explained. He was innocent and even suggested that he had been framed. One of the newspapers, since suppressed by the censor, got hold of the story and printed it to the delight of whatever other interests hoped to pick up Reuther’s fortune. Lindissima went to see the boy in jail, managed to get him out of jail, moved him into the big house on the Castellana and, eventually, legally adopted him. She’d have done a lot better to marry him and be done with it, the hell with the thirty years’ age difference between them, but she didn’t. Her basic mistake was her vanity. She thought she could hold the boy as a lover and lord it over him as a mother at the same time. It turned the boy very nasty. When she caught him fiddling around with her medicines in her bathroom one day, she didn’t say a word but made the basic decision—snap! — just like that.

They were invited out in the country to some Spanish duke’s estate on a hunt with over a hundred guns and twice as many beaters, the old-fashioned kind of slaughter of birds piled up in the courtyard of the castle. Lindissima knew some desperate young captain whose debts she was ready to pick up if it worked out. But the boy, the adopted son and lover, was too quick for them or simply by accident he tripped at the right moment, throwing himself flat on his face on the ground. He got only a little lead in his backside but, duke or no duke, they had the police in and the captain began to talk. The first thing they did was to arrest the boy, naturally, in the hospital. A high police official visited Lindissima and found her most charming. Lindissima was still a striking-looking woman even when Labesse left her for Mya. Labesse was her doctor who certified she was far too nervous to answer any further questions except in bed. The result of all that was the boy came back to floods of tears on all sides; a typical Spanish denouement, I’m told. Lindissima persuaded everybody including herself that the stupid captain had done it for love of her fine eyes, as they say in Spanish, and, for a while, that was that.

But the boy kept slipping away to the girl on the Gran Via, who by this time really was a whore even if she hadn’t been in the beginning. Lindissima got so nervous that she had Doctor Labesse in day and night. Labesse apparently gave her something to keep the young man at home. To keep up appearances that he was really living in his own wing of the big house on the Castellana and not with the girl, the boy showed up for very grand candlelit dinners served by butlers and footmen in white gloves. Almost right away he began to suspect that they were putting something in his food so, in a sort of slow-motion yawning scene, he began to denounce them as poisoners at the dinner table. Then, he dragged himself slowly out of the house like a snail, leaving a trail of vomit behind him. They let him go, because in front of the servants they were afraid to stop him and anyway as Labesse guessed correctly, the boy went not to the police but to the girl. There they had him arrested in her bed for proxenetism, pimping, living off the immoral earnings of, etc.; throwing the book at him. The thing was already much too public, someone had to hear his squeals from inside even one of those Spanish jails. Labesse was arrested and held in Barcelona where he’d been foolish enough to flee but it may not have been as foolish as all that because inside ten months he was out again scot-free and the whole thing forgotten. The boy’s still in jail, of course, and while I’ve never met him, I send him some money now and then — concessions money, I suppose — because Mya plucked the Reuther concessions off Lindissima one by one during the following years — Labesse aiding, of course.

Lindissima and Pio had come down to Tanja to get near some fresh capital, not guessing, poor innocents, that there hasn’t been any fresh capital in Tanya for eons! When the Mingih manager mumbled that Madame Strangleblood needed a doctor, you can imagine how they both jumped. You see, I got to know this crowd when I managed to crawl up from the Medina, leaving the Hamadcha still jumping down in my Arab house with Amos Africanus standing by to keep an uneasy eye on his neighbors. Living between two worlds, as I did, I got provoked by Mya into doing the one thing one should never do — introduce one world to the other. That’s how this famous party of mine happened. Before I knew it, the whole crowd from the Hotel Mingih bar on the Boulevard were suddenly standing out there in the open sewer of my Medina street in their minks and their diamonds, being pelted with fish heads by the Arab urchins. I simply had to let them in to the house to save their lives. Actually, I’d absolutely forgotten that I’d invited them because I’d been dancing that evening with a big black sailor’s belt someone had given me.

I’d begun by giving myself a few little slaps with my new belt as I danced to the music and it felt so tingling good, like a shot in the arm to my dancing, that I gave myself quite a few more belts when I found that I liked it. “Belt! Belt! Belt!” the drums kept belting out, so I gave myself quite a belting until the blood came before all the guests arrived. I just pulled somebody’s shirt on so as not to catch cold when I went to the front door to greet them. Their entry stopped all the music dead in its tracks, of course, but when I turned around to get the musicians to play again as if nothing had happened, a couple of Mingih barflies began to shriek at the sight of the blood oozing out of my shirt in the back, it seems. I was quite unaware of it. Dr. Labesse, like an officious medical fool, insisted on putting a dressing on my back right then and there so I was made to feel an idiot; badly humiliated, they put me to bed. Mya insisted on staying to nurse me but when I explained to her that I needed quite a big sum of money for my initiation in the mountains which the Hamadcha had promised me, I caught her exchanging such a look with Labesse over my prostrate body that I knew right away that Mya was going to be stuffy about money from now on out. I was so furious I never mentioned the word “money” again until the day we got married, years later this spring. Then, I made over all of my money to Mya and that’s the way it still stands, today. I don’t want to have anything to do with money any more than PP did. Just counting One Two Three used to make him nervous. I began by shutting up about money and my next move is going to be shut up about everything else.

But back to the Brotherhood! You may know that in those days their political situation was so unstable that they had to draw in their horns a bit and be careful about public demonstrations. All that was of interest mainly to Muslims and I found that I’d gotten in deep with the Hamadcha before it really dawned on me that all my new Moroccan friends took it for granted that I was a Muslim or was about to become one. As I once said to Amos Africanus, the Himmers always were pantheists — it made no difference to me. When someone intoned slowly for me to repeat after him: “There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is His Prophet,” I said it, why not? One great-aunt of mine actually became the abbess of a Shinto convent in Japan after the war. My next goal was Moulay Youniss, the holy city where no Christian or Jew had ever slept until I did. The millennial ban was lifted by the late king I believe, but the town has no hotel and none of the inhabitants would think of socializing enough with non-Muslims to invite them into their houses to spend the night. I’d stopped drinking alcohol entirely and gotten quite handy at Moroccan manners and ways but as I didn’t speak Arabic and still don’t, really, I didn’t say much. My feet were killing me but my asthma didn’t come back even when I traveled along with the Brothers on foot through Morocco in harvesttime. We were climbing up to Moulay Youniss to spend the night before going on to the Hamadcha feast at Sidi Hassan on the other side of the mountain.

It was one of those celestial African days in June when you could look back down the steep ravines full of spiky cactus candelabra shooting up as high as telephone poles from the acid-green aloes. The ruined marble columns of Roman Volubilis stood higher still on the tremendous sweep of the green-golden plain far below. The whitewashed cube-houses of Moulay Youniss hung over us, capping the hilltop. Quite apart from the celestial beauty of the spot there was the thrill of climbing up into a forbidden city on foot. We were quite a woolly-looking little group with only one pack-donkey for twenty or thirty of us as we scrambled along, but when we caught our breath, our drummer picked up and our wild wailing music skirled out under the big green silk banners of the Hamadcha flying in the crystal clear air. We stormed into town hopping and howling in a pack with me in the middle, quite unnoticed. I was looking as wild as any poor postulant could be expected to look, barefoot, with my head shaved, bonethin and hollow-eyed from our practices, hung about with some picturesque Arab rags I’d bought very dear from a Brother. The townsmen received us with honor, leading us off to one of the most imposing houses in town, which the late Cadi had built to hang out over the chasm so that he could see from his deep-set windows everything that was going on in the town. The Brothers, with me last as a postulant, filed into the big cool square room which had been the Cadi’s judgment hall and sat down quietly all around the floor against the walls. It was very like being inside a giant lantern into which the fierce Moroccan light bounced back up from the white terraces of the surrounding houses where the volubilis-purple morning-glories cascaded over the trellises of cane. While the Brothers muttered their long litanies, I leaned back exhausted, gazing up at the marquetry-maze of the inlaid rafters which fitted together like a giant wheeling Indian mandala overhead, holding up the high hollow pyramid of the roof.

At that point, an intense young man bristling with hostility plumped himself down beside me in a synthetic city suit. “Never in one thousand years, no Christian except a slave ever spend one night here in Moulay Youniss holy city.” I looked him straight in the eye, pronouncing in Arabic as well as I could: “There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is His prophet.” He went away sulky but apparently satisfied and, in a short time, they brought us in food which we ate where we lay on the floor — at least, I did: the others sat up around little low tables and dug in with their hands. During dinner, our host, a young man under thirty in slick city clothes who did not eat with us but surveyed the service, came over and sat beside me, feeding me little choice bits by hand. I was really exhausted but, gradually, I picked up when he told me that his grandfather had built this room hanging out over the precipice at such an angle that he could predict what was going to happen in town. You can imagine how I drank in that kind of talk! He said: “Oh, it was all very easy in those days! Until less than ten years ago, now, time simply stood all but perfectly still, here, for more than one thousand years. When Grandfather saw a man coming down one street with a knife in his hand and another man coming down another street carrying a club, he knew they were going to meet and to fight and, that in less than half an hour the whole affair would be brought here to him for him to mete out our justice. He knew everything: past, present and future, you see.”

True enough, there in Moulay Youniss for a momentless moment I saw life in the simplest terms of a man with a knife and a man with a club, inevitably bound to meet in the market-place, but I saw no one around, not even my host, on whom the old cadi’s mantle might have fittingly fallen. They were all rather city-soiled young men in ready-made suits and plastic sandals. Yet, I had to argue back with myself that, if they had not been, they would never have let me in here at all. The old man with the beard, whose enlarged hand-tinted photograph still dominated the hall, would never have seen fit to receive me, I was sure, but the last of the patriarchs had been killed off by the change into Modern Times. That night I slept in the spruce little whitewashed house of one of the young married men of the holy family of saints of the place. He lived down a long crooked lane hugging the inside of the old walls of the sanctified city but his tiny upper windows, mere peepholes like eyes, looked out over the battlements, down another plunging gorge choked with all the greens of myrtle, olive and aloes down to the distantly burnished newly-harvested plain. The moon came up, turning it all into one great silver tray before I could sleep because all the dogs of Moulay Younis were insanely barking the incredible news down to the astonished dogs in the faraway farms that someone who smelled like a Christian was spending a night in a house. “Ha houwa” they barked in hysterical choruses: “Ha houwa! Ha ha! Ha ha!”

When we got up just after dawn, one could look out over the holy city and see the heat already beginning to make the rosy-golden air tremble over the flesh-pink hills set out with gray-green olive trees. We sipped tall glasses of rather chocolatey-tasting coffee with milk and ate some leathery fried doughnuts still dripping with hot oil. All of these things were carried in to us by a solemn sloe-eyed toddling child who teetered in with a tray from the unseen part of the house where the women lurked. Only our hosts, the husband and his infant son, could freely go back and forth. We left without ever setting eyes on the women of the household but with that common uncomfortable feeling one always has of having been spied on in every detail of our persons by them.

Even as we started out up the dusty lane, my left sandal began biting into my foot. It needed a cobbler but it was much too early to find one already by his bench in his shop, and no question of waiting for the heat of the day to come up, so I had to set out bravely trying a little mental manipulation on my foot. We crossed through the silent streets of the white-washed town as the cocks crowed and the gray and white doves took to the air, looping stupidly under the unwavering eye of an earlier hawk still higher up. Preoccupied as I was by my effort to ward off the pain in my foot, which I was busy switching from extreme heat to extreme cold, I was startled to look down at least one hundred and fifty feet into a gorge right under our path, gazing down for another timeless second onto what I learned later was the original Roman hot spring, a circular stone bath which is still in operation. A man entirely naked was somehow suspended there directly below me in exactly the pose of Michelangelo’s Adam creating God and the World, fainting back in the bath at the effort as he reached out to touch Nature and make the world Be. All that lacked was to hear him speak the Word but, of course, we were much too far away, so I just hung there like the hawk hung above me, not knowing whether I looked down on him or whether I was back in some other life looking up at a painted ceiling through my binoculars. For that momentless moment, I was suddenly everywhere at once. My man slowly lifted an earthen jar of water and poured it over his own glistening head, in the very act of creating himself. I stumbled over my own sandal, almost falling, but was pushed on ahead rather roughly by one of my Hamadcha Brothers. I held my picture of that man firmly in my mind all the time we were crossing the mountain in the gathering heat of the day.

We toiled on up a long dusty path through the fragrant pines and under the olives and cork-oaks until we came to the heights of the bare ridge covered with thyme. The heat all around us hammered hard on the stones. Suddenly from the summit, the plateau of Meknes spread out a good many miles in length below the ridge we had crossed. The sky rippled over the plain like a pale blue silk tent but the floor of the valley seethed. The jumbled blocks of Meknes’ houses and factories burned white-hot on the distant horizon hazed over with heat. A green gorge, gashed into the brick-red earth, split the mountain right under our feet. Sidi Hassan lies there in his white-washed tomb at the bottom of this ravine, which reminded me later of the cleft the Hamadcha make in their heads with an ax. Directly below us was a steep slanting meadow where the thousands of pilgrims had strung up their tents, tying torn sheets and old ragged rugs together with pieces of string, pinning them down with rocks or spinning them onto twisted trees and scrub, until the whole camp covering them and their women looked as light and as strong as cobwebs in the sun. Hobbled pack animals and sheep slated for slaughter; all wide-eyed, all nervously nibbling down their last useless meal, all jumped at once and skittered away as a wild pack of Black drummers padded up the path in scarlet silk tunics and black cone-shaped hats covered with cowrie shells, pounding on big-voiced African drums. The Black Brotherhood of the G’naoua gathered a group of Adepts in a minute but we came slithering and sliding right down on top of their crowd with our hysterical pipes blowing full blast. I just slumped down under an old wrecked cedar tree and collapsed.

A child offered me water in an earthenware cup but just as I was going to put my lips to its rim, the mother dashed the cup out of my hands, smashing it on the ground. I never did figure out why but I thought at the time that it must have been because she sniffed the Christian in me through my disguise. A cold shiver ran through me because I could see things were beginning to really hot up. A group of Aissaoua had begun to dance in a circle beside me: beside me, I say, but there they were almost on top of me, trampling me. As you know, they claim the Aissaoua once ate a Swiss tourist right after Independence; I don’t know if it’s true. Others say he was a German photographer who was filming them from the ledge of a crumbling wall when he fell into their whirling circle at the moment they usually throw a live sheep up in the air to catch it on their thumbs. Then, they tear it to pieces to eat it up raw before the sheep touches the ground. They ate the poor man, camera and all one supposes. Do you think that could really be true? Well, I did at that moment and I was even more scared when I saw that six or seven of them were brandishing live snakes in both hands as they flung off their turbans to let their long locks writhe about like a headful of hissing serpents.

The Aissaoua were hissing and kissing their snakes on the snout when a woman broke into their circle with a couple of live frogs or toads in her grip. She waved the poor things wildly about by their legs, showing them off to the crowd before she crammed one into her mouth and half-swallowed it, gagging on it a while. One long-fingered webbed-foot still kicked, trailing out of the corner of her mouth. With another big gulp she got the thing down but the frog in her stomach set her jumping and screaming more than ever before. While trying to cram the second frog down, she vomited up the first one and was ignominiously dismissed as a charlatan. For a moment I thought they might tear her to pieces for wasting their time. I watched her trying to fight her way back into the circle of trance-dancers but her place was taken by some other wild women with eyes revulsed back into their skulls. Their long wild black hair was lengthened by ankle-length ponytails of braided black wool, which whipped the faces of nearby spectators who began clapping along in unison to the hysterical beat of the music. When this whirlwind moved on away from the foot of the tree against which I was resting, I noticed crowds of young country yokels and boys a few feet away, packed tight around several pitchmen under rusty umbrellas running three-card games or the old shell and pea game on flimsy little portable tables which they could collapse and clear out when their lookout man called the Arab equivalent of “Hey Rube!” But, of course, at this sort of a feast there were no policemen about and no trouble. The locals apparently loved to be robbed for they threw their poor pennies away with more frenzy than I ever have seen around the expensive green tables of Monte. I got up painfully and staggered over to look closer at what they were playing. The charlatan running the deal squinted up with a grin: “Hi, Hakim!” he wheezed.

It was the same little old geezer with one eye to whom I had passed on my asthma. I began to show him my teeth as politeness and self-preservation demanded but before I could gasp out: “Isoprenaline Bronchomister Inhalator,” he picked up the board made of a worm-eaten plank over two thousand years old as dated later by carbon 14 at Cambridge in England and cracked it over my head. I would like to claim I had satori at this point but I don’t remember a thing until I woke up under my tree again with my half the board still firmly in my grip. A half dozen Hamadcha Brothers were intently watching me as they hunkered down in a circle a few safe paces away. I realized I was still under my blasted cedar tree looking out over the factories of distant Meknes. When I put up my hand to my head, my hand came away from my shaved skull covered with blood. My scalp had been split open as the first step of the initiation demands.

The Brothers got to their feet, picking up our silk banners whose tall gold-knobbed poles were leaning against my tree. Other Brothers helped me to my feet, making me totter over to join in the pilgrim crowd. Adepts all over were beginning to jump to our music as the Hamadcha cut loose. Groups formed on the narrow paved causeway leading down the worn stone steps cut into the side of the gorge; leading further down into the tomb of the saint. Somehow, I knew just what to do without being told but my feet hurt so much that it took me some time to get swinging along with the gang. The honky-tonk side of the fair had picked up and was going full blast under the temporary tents which were a straggling line of ragged restaurants belching out greasy smoke from the lamb kebabs roasting over open fires. Smoke trailed through the wailing music. The Adepts swirled about their drummers, hopping and whirling as they moved slowly down the narrow defile. The air thickened and apostolic fires sprang from the tops of our poor broken polls, I could swear it. Wide-eyed youngsters lined the walls, dangling their feet over our bloody heads. Now and then, apparently tranquil people who had been merely milling about in the crowd, simply sailed into trance as suddenly as if they had not expected to be swept up in it. We wound down the causeway past a battery of young Arab candy-butchers who were crying: “Grass Green! Paris Green! Pluperfect Pink and Ultra Mellow Yellow!” They were hawking bright-colored country candy from trays swarming with mountain bees out after quick honey. Rather like me with my Instant Enlightenment, I thought wryly, as I flapped even harder to beat off the bees.

Dancers around me began splitting their heads with big earthen pots which they broke on their skulls with a sound like coconuts cracking. One spinning woman kept wheeling until her long hair stood out like spokes stiff with blood, splashing everyone around like a lawn-sprinkler. We kept leaping and whirling, jumping to the music as we made it down two or three broad steps every hour. It took us from just before sunset until well after midnight to get down to the tomb illuminated by flaming torches. I had long lost all contact with my feet; they were just bloody stumps by that time. I started slipping in and out of my body to cut down the pain but I went on hopping more madly than ever. Suddenly, someone dressed in white seemed to step out of the stone wall right beside me. A glow of light blazed up behind him. His eye caught in mine and I felt that my soul had been grabbed in its gut by a long-shoreman’s steel hook. No need to tell me that this was the Living Saint of the place, the descendant of Sidi Hassan buried below. He materialized in the arch of a shrine halfway down the stone conduit, as if he’d stepped out to inspect me. He glanced sharply at my bloody board with which I’d been beating my brains out and shot me a look of approval. I was so sure I had heard him say to me: “Later!” that I hopped away beating it out on my brain with my board. “Later, later! Initiator!” I banged away on my head.

A big woman, whose broad face was all wrapped and wimpled up like some medieval nun’s, abruptly shot me a keen look over the Initiator’s shoulder. I tagged her for the head of the local Ladies Auxiliary but, for a long second it was Mya who looked at me out of her eyes. As it turned out later, Mya and Pio Labesse at that very moment were already steaming around the mountain in Mya’s new Bentley, determined to rescue me from myself. By that time I was practically out of my skull from bashing my brains with my board and then—Whoosh! — and I was really out of my skull but just for the pico-second it took me to slide into what seemed to be quite another skull. I was now sitting quite calmly, high on the hillside with a group of young Moroccan students who were telling me about their exams in faulty French. Ordinarily, I don’t know French well enough to tell the difference. We were so precariously seated on a pinnacle of rock overhanging the ravine that I looked down about a hundred feet and fifty, directly onto the cortege of torch-waving, howling and hopping Adepts cascading down to the tomb of the saint right below me. The courtyard of the tomb was lying brightly lit and open to the night sky, like a box of rubies between my knees. A skinny brown cow as agile as any mountain goat suddenly crashed out of a thicket and crossed over in front of me, blocking my view and nearly smothering me in her soft smell of sweet grass and manure. I almost pushed her down the precipice in my frenzy not to lose sight of the dancers below. “Dancing is only for people who don’t know any better,” one of the Moroccan students was assuring me. “None of us ever dances. No. Of course not.”

Lights twinkled and torches were flashing red and green amongst the branches in the dark canyon below me. For some seconds of super-sensibility, I felt I could read the message written in the landscape, spelled out in every little nervure and veining of every last leaf breathing beside me. My very own juices were pouring in torrents through the infinite hydraulic maze of green life-tubes linking the vines over the valley, tying down the dusty red-brown face of the earth. The dancers below me were running down the stone stairs into the sanctuary like a rope of ants which I confused with a migration of “real” ants apparently scurrying hurriedly somewhere under my feet. I was aware that the young students were bored with the scene and anxious to distract me away from it by inviting me into the big whitewashed windowless block of a house immediately behind us on top of the rock. They were practically dragging me away by force. Regretfully, over my shoulder, I caught a last glimpse of Sidi Hassan down below me, looking like a bright box full of tiny toys come magically to life.

I had the dreamlike impression that the fortress-style house had turned on a pivot to greet us rather than that we had gone around it to get in. There was all the usual lengthy Arab palaver about getting into a house; the knockings, the callings back and forth and the delays and even the mutterings as we crossed a fierce-browed old man with a white beard and turban who glared balefully down at my shoes. I looked down, too, to find myself dressed in a European suit and a pair of brown suede shoes which I felt sure I had never owned. We went through a dog-leg entrance into a big dimly-lit square patio with marble pillars looming up on all sides. A bright light blazed out from the far side as two tall doors swung back to let all the women of the house troop out and disappear grumbling into the dark again, vacating the principal salon for us men. A quick clatter of wooden clogs on marble paving, the crackling cackle of catty laughter, a derisive snort in the darkness and the women were gone again, trailing the scorched smell of resentment through the hot summer air. The desirable drawing-room was the usual Arab affair; long and narrow, lined with divans on both sides like a subway car in the Bagdad of the Arabian nights. My new friends were a self-conscious lot; stiff in their slick city clothes, sitting facing each other with their shoes on in order to be thoroughly “modern.” As I stared at them in fixed fascination, something gradually went wrong with the focus of my eyes. Boyish faces shriveled and faded slowly away into starving old men pinned to the walls. I made signs I would suffocate unless I got to the only tiny window at the far end of the room where I clung to the grating, gasping not only for air but for a view of the dancing down below.

I learned later from Mya that this was the window through which she caught her first distant glimpse of our dance. There was a forged-iron grill across the casement in order to keep everyday robbers out but the curly calligraphic design included a magic inscription from the Koran to keep demons out as well and, in this particular case anyway, also to keep them in. Gritting my teeth and crossing my fingers in a way I know how, I plunged through the screen and plummeted directly down into the candlelit court of the shrine where thousands of packed people were wallowing in a conglomerate puddle of trance. The beautiful stuff really was running like a river. It swept me in and swirled me seven times around the shrine before the little low door opened for me in the wall behind the tomb. My cell-brothers were already in there, stooped under the low vaulted ceiling as they strained to flatten themselves back against the curved walls. They were stripped to their skivvies and I noted that one wore homemade drawers from a flour sack still stenciled with Gift of the American People. I wanted to laugh and reject the whole thing but, Hassan, I really was scared.

“Later” was Now. The Brothers were all pinned to the walls by long kebab skewers thrust right through the gut and hammered on into the wall. With my hands at my back, I felt for the door but there was only smooth wall behind me waiting for my nail. I caught the sharp smell of fear from my own armpits and crotch. Under the eye of Initiator burning at me over a candle flame, I dropped off my bloody rags and stood there in my boxer shorts, hiding my rising erection. As Initiator put down the candle and stepped over it to thrust a long icy-cold finger into my abdomen, finding the place, everything went black and I woke up in a clinic on the outskirts of Tanja.

What had happened was that Amos told Mya that I’d gone off to the mountains to sink an ax in my head with the Hamadcha and she’d asked Labesse if he thought it was serious. They’d just bought a new Bentley with bread from the cardboard box and, besides, the car had to be broken in anyway so they decided to drive it about thirty-five miles an hour around Morocco, stopping in to see the feast at Sidi Hassan on the way. It was pretty late when they got there and they fell in with a group of young Moroccan students who invited them to a big house on the hill overlooking the saint’s tomb. There, they had been overwhelmed by Moroccan hospitality, lots of sweet mint tea and sticky cakes, but no mention at all of the frantic festival going on right below. They could catch, now and then, the wild ecstatic music as it came swirling up from the ravine but it was effectively drowned out by not one but two transistor radios blasting and battering them with two simultaneous cacophonous programs of plastic Egyptian music from Radio Cairo. Mya insisted on being allowed to sit at the far end of the room where, through a small grilled window, she could catch a glimpse of what was going on below. Labesse had brought along a new pair of very fine night-glasses, which he had bought for the new yacht they were getting. Through the glasses, Mya caught sight of me as I disappeared, all bloody, swallowed up by the shrine. She simply raised hell until their hosts went down and rescued me. Pio went with them and, on the way down, he ruined a new pair of fine suede shoes.

I came to, days later, in a run-down clinic on the outskirts of Tanja, out beyond the foundering bullring which hasn’t been used since Independa when most of the Spaniards left. The clinic was in a collapsing villa belonging to Dr. Estoque, a colleague of Pio Labesse. Dr. Manuel Estoque y San Roque was a bullfight doctor and, therefore, just the sort of man I needed for my peculiar wound but Estoque was inclined to let himself go like an espontáneo, wild with excitement to throw himself into the ring. He would enter my room whirling a bright saffron-yellow bullfighter’s cape lined with magenta. Whipping out his scalpel, he would make a pass over my bed as he spun around, his steely black eyes glittering as he launched into staccato Spanish of which I caught only the general drift. He dressed all in black, with no shirt over his hairy belly and chest but candy-pink silk socks and bullfighter’s ballet slippers on his feet. Tossing his flat Córdoban hat on my bed, he would launch into a lengthy account of every move in some bullfight which had brought him a client, always taking the side of the bull. A few words of English would spurt out of him as he lunged at my bed: “Cornada, right up his rectum!” he’d scream. Then he’d grab up one of those wickerwork bull’s heads they use for practice and he’d ram it down over his ears as he charged up and down around my bed, snorting like a bull. Every time he passed me, Dr. Estoque would toss up his horns at my bedclothes and me like a fresh bull sniffs at the mattress padding alongside the picador’s horse. As he swept over the night-table with a clatter of broken glass, I reached over and cracked him across the horns with my board. When I saw him laid out on the floor, I knew I was getting better but the noise brought in the night watchman.

The night watchman turned out to be my Initiator down from the mountain. He put his fingers to his lips and, with the aid of the Moroccan male nurse, carried the doctor away for good. He wasn’t much loss, for the only thing Dr. Estoque knew how to do was to give people shots of morphine with hairy fat fingers wearing gold rings. He was an old professional sidekick of Pio’s but I must say one thing for Pio: he did come around to check up on me. Mya, herself, was terribly busy those days, out getting together the things for their first trip south together to the Spanish Sahara — still a difficult place to get to and almost impossible in those days. “Mya wants to buy a sort of headquarters,” Labesse told me: “A big place for all of us!” Labesse seemed to think Estoque’s exit quite normal and told me I’d be all right with the night watchman to look after me. He’d spoken to him at the gate, he said. I’ve always wondered about that. Did he know who the watchman was? Pio was a deep one: I never found out.

There was no more electricity in the clinic and the house began to crack apart in earnest. One day, while I was lying there looking at the ceiling, a plant poked its head in through a crevice and unfurled a green leaf. I thought it might be time to leave the clinic before the plants took over but my nurse, the night watchman, merely shook his head: No. By day, he took me for walks through the overgrown jungle of the garden or I would lie for hours in his little bamboo hut while he cooked delicious food for us both over charcoal. It was quite an idyllic time because we never had to speak a word. There was the language-barrier between us, that’s true, but we didn’t need words. At night, he sat at the foot of my bed with a candle at which he made me stare until I saw visions like a few feet of film, flickering on and off. One I kept getting showed me a vision of myself getting on a plane for Cairo, I didn’t know why. Finally, because he was so persistent, I realized that I was supposed to go there and bring something back for him. These people always want presents, you know. Frankly, he ended up by being as much of a pest with his visions as a shoeshine boy is with his shoeshine box on the Boulevard.

Mya and Pio came back from their first trip to the Sahara looking tanned and fit. They were still flying that old DC-4 that poor PP had picked up off the airport in Basel, the day we first set out for Africa. When I began to get around again, I managed to catch Mya in the bar of the Mingih. I let her persuade me that I needed a short trip to Cairo to catch up on myself. She cashed a check for me, passing me a packet of money just before they took off for Villa Cisneros on the Tropic of Cancer, where they had an eye on this extraordinary piece of property they could buy on Cape Noon. That was — or is—“Malamut.” Strangely enough, it was Amos Africanus who gave it the name.

To get to Egypt, I had to take Air France by Madrid, Rome, Athens before I got hung up for six hours in the airport in Beirut along with Mr. Moise Tshombe, who never did have much luck with planes. I sank into deep meditation, staring at him through a hole in my newspaper from where I sat in a very comfortable airport lounge chair. This bugged him so much he got up and ordered a taxi to drive him around the city until plane-time. I sat on there awhile, savoring my little triumph as I said to myself: “No! That’s not the man!” Finally, I was picked up by the local Lebanese postal clerk in the airport who came sidling up talking of hashish, in which I’m less interested than you, dear Hassan! I couldn’t care less! You can imagine my utterly unfeigned boredom when I realized he thought he was leading me on, if you please, with his tales of postal sacks full of hashish in cubes, spilled out on the floor behind his high desk everytime there was a police seizure in a plane. Then he began expounding on the utter ineptitude of all Egyptian pilots when I told him I was flying United Arab Airlines to Cairo. The plane was finally called long after midnight and we got into Cairo airport about 4 A.M.

I managed to knife my way through their panicky, practically wartime customs, grab the only cab into town and check in at the old Hotel Semiramis down on the Nile by dawn. That creaky old caravanserai is on its last legs. When I threw back the fitted mahogany shutters of my non-air-conditioned room in which Lawrence of Arabia might have caught forty winks between missions, I was hit by an eyeful of pharaonic Horus hawks swimming like tea leaves in an amber sky through which scudded little gold and mauve, turd-turreted clouds like scrambled eggs with ketchup which kept spilling over the old British Embassy down on the banks of the gray-green greasy Nile. In my young days there, Cairo was the Garden of Allah with a coating of Turkish Delight but what I looked out on now was, apart from the Embassy, whose front lawns to the water had been sliced away by a very necessary new boulevard, simply a stack of new skyscraper-slums standing like a wall to cut off the Nile breeze from the city. I could barely bring myself to look at the new streamlined Shepheard’s next door. I slammed back my shutters to get a few more hours of sleep before I shaved, showered and slid down the old marble staircase into the lobby as I had first done when I was thirteen years old. Anyway, the old elevator in the form of an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus still hangs out its sign in seven languages: Out of Order. The lobby looked like a stripped tomb in which a couple of very old and creaky Greeks were still shuffling around waiting to be buried. I tiptoed across the marble floor, feeling like a ghost of myself, too. Then I braced myself just inside the curtained swinging door beyond which I knew was the blazing street and the raging rabble of dragomen, the all-too-famous Cairo guides.

Pausing to button down my inside pocket over my passport and my Express checks, I put one paw on my wad of Egyptian pounds in my left pants pocket and pushed through the door. I fully expected to be overwhelmed, as always; simply bowled over by a howling pack of the most ferocious guides on earth. Nothing happened: nothing at all. A few fine old men, their deeply-lined faces refined by the wisdom which comes from having manhandled many a generation of tourists, were quietly sitting or standing against the wall, looking like magnificently well-costumed and made-up extras from Central Casting waiting for their cue. Some of them even nodded almost like old friends, as if they remembered me only too well from the old days. Hailing a taxi out of the rank and not one of those touristtrap limousines, they just let me slip through their clutches but, as I got into the cab, a little man not much bigger than a wizened fourteen-year-old, with a toothpick mustache, opened the opposite door and slid in with me. In two seconds flat, as I gave the street address of the Arab Museum in Arabic, I guessed he was the Little Man the Austerity Egypt regime details off to foreigners these days. He and I got talking, and, in the time it took us to get across Cairo, he was well launched into the story of his life with a wife whom he had divorced when he got home one day to find she had clipped all his twenty-four suits into scraps with a pair of nail-scissors. He was still with this tale when I led him into the Arab Museum, which, I felt sure, was the one place in Cairo where he had never been before. I was right: I managed to lose him in the Fatimid fretwork. Pretending I had to go take a leak behind one of the screens, I slipped out through the side door into Nasrudin Street, where I hopped onto the running-board of a crowded tram bound for the Citadel section, feeling just like James Bond. I had one person to see in Austerity Cairo and that was my old Ismaïli Imsak instructor. I meant to make that visit alone.

My mother first pricked up her ears at the mere mention of Imsak when she heard Aly’s mother talking about it years ago, in the old days at teatime on the terrace of the Hotel Semiramis when I was still in short pants. Aly’s mother said that Aly’s father had sent him to a venerable old sheik who ran a school near the Citadel of Cairo, where he taught Imsak. She said the word meant “withholding” and my mother thought that meant continence, which it has nothing to do with, and asked if I could be sent. Now, Imsak is the art of love as an art and, eventually, a spiritual exercise for getting out of the body, right past the possessive demon of the flesh. At that age, the demon between my legs did not have to be provoked or, even, evoked. With training, this demon can be forged into a precision tool to satisty every last woman on earth. Love as lust can be icy-cool or used cruelly, eventually destroying the lover himself. The great Don Juans, like Casanova or my friend who could take a woman in a carriage or a taxi while running between two other dates, have been the matter of much reflection in Western society whose verdict, apart from dissensions, has been that theirs is not an entirely enviable fate. Their trouble is that they, the Don Juans, all left before the end of the course and, because of the war, so had I. I felt I simply had to go back and attain the degree of the Permanent Peak. We hope to be able to arrange a full course for you one day, Hassan, although after twenty it is usually thought to be too late.

I may tell you, my old Master was more aghast than agoggle to see me. I thought it very decent of him both as a man and as a magician to admit that I was the very last person he had expected to see. Anyone else I have ever come across in that line of business would have said solemnly: “I’ve been waiting for you, son.” Not he: we got down to business at once. Because of Austerity, he no longer had his charming young assistants on hand — they had been drafted — so he took me through into the next degree of Imsak himself; poor old man. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything useful about that, not at the moment, but I must tell you what happened when we were through. When I asked him if he wanted his money in dollars, he said: “No, dollars are dangerous!” so I handed him over all the gold I was wearing around my neck. Then, the most extraordinary thing happened for, of course, the Master must not ever give the Adept anything but his instruction: it is quite against the rules, but the old man solemnly handed me over the huge emerald you now hold. He hastened to add: “This is not for you. You must give the Seal of the Sahara to a man whose name is not Hassan! When you meet him, you’ll know.”

I got nothing more out of him except that he drew my horoscope for me rapidly with a long bony finger in the sand and, before he wiped it out again, he peered at it a moment and said: “With your new degree of ability, you will become the seventh husband of a princess.” I’d already made my mind up about Mya but he didn’t know that. “The seventh husband,” he said with a sigh, “and the last!” He was most anxious I get out of Cairo immediately with the Emerald because he didn’t want it to fall into the hands of the colonels. Every real ruler of the past has held the Seal of the Sahara at one time or other. Frankly, I cut out of Cairo with the Green Bug — for safekeeping from Customs — shoved right up my ass!

BOAC gave me tea — English nursery tea out of a thermos and wet jam sandwiches — over Aphrodite’s island of Cyprus; let me down for several hot hours in Glyfada near Athens, where I caught Alitalia for Rome. There, I switched planes for Tunis. In Tunis, some anonymous nervous airline lifted me gingerly after a lot of chatter in Arabic about my American passport and dropped me into Algiers. In Algiers, I was expected: the sharklike young cop in a plastic trench-coat had my name on his list. There was an official government car to meet me, sent out to the airport by the Ministry of National Guidance. I was invited, you see, by the twin sister of Amos Africanus; Affrica Fard. She is called Freeky by everyone but her famous husband the Black Doctor, at that time still Minister of Culture: Dr. Francis-X. Fard. He always gave her her full name: “My wife, Africa!” or, “Affrica, my wife!”

You know who I mean; Fard the Father of Fardism, as he’s called throughout the Third World. Fardism is Black Power pressure applied to all those who, up until now, have always liked to think of themselves as ranging only from delicate old ivory to delicious cinnamon brown. It’s hot stuff. Brother-in-law Francis is from Guadaloupe originally and culturally French but he became nationalized in order to take a portfolio in the First Revolutionary Government — what they call, now, the First Wave — right after their National War. Because he was already a world-famous psychiatrist and the internationally Prize-winning author of Paleface and Ebony Mask, Fard was a natural for Minister of Culture and National Guidance, too, except he wasn’t a Muslim and still isn’t, yet. His marriage to Freeky on top of that and the fact that there is, or he always says there is, color prejudice working against him there as much as anywhere else, including Black Africa where they find him too white. “My father sold your father!” It has given him a complex, poor man.

I’ve always steered clear of the psychoanalysts myself, and what I looked into of the good doctor’s works has left me gasping for air. In Islands of Night, his memoirs of a tormented West Indian childhood during which the sun seems not to have shone even once, he has a page-long footnote on transvestites in Trinidad whom, he solemnly assures us, cannot be queer because no so-called Negroes ever are. I wish I could quote it to you verbatim: it’s the most preposterously and absurdly unscientific statement I have ever read in my life. One must presume, therefore, that Francis is a great deal less bright than he looks. As a man, he’s a maniac. At fifty, he’s still out-standingly handsome on the outside but, on the inside, he’s a molten mass of scar tissue stitched together with raw nerve: a matted maze of contradictions, in fact.

“And when is the genuine Egyptian revolution about to take place?” That was the first thing he threw at me. “Are the Fellaheen ready to rise and throw their white Arab oppressors out of Egypt, yet? In all the time you were in Egypt did you ever see a black or even an aubergine-colored Egyptian driving anything but a donkey? Did you ever go into a government office and see any true Egyptian with any job better than sweeper? Cairo has a color bar higher than American Alabama!” I was taken aback. I’ve been going to Egypt since the family first took me there for my asthma when I was a kid and I’ve never looked at it that way, I guess, but I had to admit there was a lot of truth in what he said. “Even in Africa,” Fard insisted, “the real Africans haven’t stood up yet for their names to be called and their numbers to be numbered. There are great peoples, great nations, all over Africa and millions strong, of whom newspaper history has not yet heard even the name, the bare name! But they will! These great peoples, they who have been nothing, they will one day be all! At a cultural conference in Dakar, I met the UN ambassador from Lake Chad who tells me he can read the rock paintings in the Tibesti like a comic strip. Malraux once showed him some enormous facsimiles made at great expense for the Louvre and His Excellency had laughed. You understand, don’t you? What is pre-history for you whites, sure enough, is plain History, now, for us Blacks!”

Francis is an ancient African orator. If you remember that, you’ll know how to use him, I think.

“In the Beginning was the Word, say the white Semites, but the Word was ours; not yours or theirs. Dates prove it: the words written on the rock walls of the Sahara are admitted to be ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years old. The thickness of the desert patina over them is the measurable proof. Perhaps all that Biblical babble does recount the short shabby story of six thousand years of White man on earth but all the recent discoveries of genetic chemistry spell out the fact that Man with undamaged genes and chromosomes is a Black Man. All you whites and yellows and browns are genetic freaks!”

I wondered how that kind of talk went down with his government because, at the time of my visit, the Fards were still living in an official government residence, a confiscated villa overlooking the harbor with presumably socialized servants doing the housework, leaving Freeky with nothing to do at all all day but entertain me. Supremely comfortable guest rooms, good food and, besides, Freeky and I got along right away like a house on fire: I could see poor Fard’s point of view. You come home from that day at the office to find your wife all flushed and glowing as she confides her life-story to some intimate stranger.

In this case, me, with my new degree of Imsak under my belt. The poor thing needed comforting. Freeky’s tale was a sad sibling story which had hatched in a overly comfortable cocoon of Moroccan-Jewish middle-class life that simply doesn’t exist in the Magreb any more. Behind the imposing façade of the Villa Africanus in Anfah, the elegant Casablanca suburb down by the sea, two girls and their brother were being brought up by traditionally doting parents. Amos and Affrica are identical twins and that was hard enough already on Freeky, who at twenty-four must have looked like Diana the Huntress, good at golf and tennis, a bit of a blue-stocking intellectual and not much interested in the boys. But Mister Right did come along at last and was highly approved by the family. The complex engagement and wedding arrangements were solemnly and joyfully got under way. Launching that kind of a marriage takes months, of course, so the young man was around the Villa Africanus like one of the family for the best part of a year. He was on good terms with everybody; even difficult little sister Ana Lyse, who was only fourteen, precocious and pretty as a young cat. In an old-fashioned family like that, young girls were considered to be still of nursery age until they actually “came out as young ladies,” at debutante balls. Dinner in those houses was still served at Spanish hours like ten or eleven at night so, after a drink or two of an early evening, the young man often dropped up to the nursery to kid a while with young Ana Lyse because all the others were running around about something to do with the wedding.

On the great night, when the engagement was to be publicly announced to all the foregathered families and friends, young Ana Lyse was supposed, as usual, to be up there in bed. At a couple of minutes to twelve midnight, the fiancé perchance was nowhere to be found. Everyone set about looking for him everywhere, calling his name all over the house. Someone ran up to look in the nursery but Ana Lyse had slipped out of bed and run down into the garden, spying on the party from the dark. Did he see her? Did she signal to him? That one doesn’t know, but Freeky — followed by a bevy of darting maidens, alas! who screamed, spreading the news — Freeky found them both in an arbor of jasmine; Ana Lyse on her knees in a nightie, giving the fiancé a blow-job. Freeky shrieked and was carried to bed where she managed to stay for the best part of the ensuing seven years, insisting she couldn’t get up because her legs were made of glass; imperiously demanding that her whole room be made pink and nothing but pink down to the very last object she could bear to have in her sight. Even all the food she ate had to be pink or tinted pink with cochineal before she would look at it on a pink tray. “Freeky analyzes all the analysts and baffles the doctors!” her mother would proudly explain to the other ladies for years.

Ana Lyse grew up utterly devoted to Freeky. For weeks at a time, Freeky would allow no one in her room but Ana Lyse and one Moroccan servant all dressed in pink caftans down to the floor and a big pink bandanna handkerchief bound around her head. Ana Lyse had a photographer’s developing tray in which she dipped all the newspapers in pink cochineal solution every morning and then ironed them out dry. Freeky always read Le Monde flown down from Paris, the London Financial Times because it prints on pink paper, the old Herald Trib from Paris and all the local papers, of course, like España from Tangier; La Vigie Marocaine, Le Petit Marocain and the little semi-legal flyers that used to float around in those days before Independence. Ana Lyse got Freeky passionately involved in nationalist politics, psychoanalysis and all the fashionable paraphernalia of the day. She even dragged in some young Moroccan student rebels, who, like all visitors including members of the family, had to sit behind a pink silk folding-screen because Freeky insisted she was too old and ugly to be seen. They gave her Fard’s books, which she took like sacraments administered directly to her: Awake Mother Africa! Obviously she thought he meant her. Then she read, Fate and Fetishism and, of course, Paleface and Ebony Mask with Fard’s famous analysis of the Othello legend: The Moor and the Maiden. That was pure Freeky, too. I don’t know whether the books were dyed pink for her or not but she found it such heady stuff she started writing to Dr. Francis-Xavier Fard, care of Gallimard, his publisher in Paris.

I’ll leave it to Freeky to tell you one day how she eventually got him, because, in those days, he couldn’t have been further away from her world. Dr. Fard had an ultra-fashionable practice in Paris as permanent psychiatrist to a group of dazzling celebrities, who all called him God; Docteur Dieu. The fact he was Black had everything going all for him in that milieu and besides he was so overwhelmingly good-looking that it hurt. Over the years, he had a series of seven icy-blond wives, many of them quite well-known women: a Danish countess, a Polish woman writer, a French bombshell-type movie star, the racing-pilot daughter of a well-known political figure and a couple of other wives I seem to forget. And throughout all the wives, he had a Black mistress called Catherine de Saint Kitt, whom a lot of people claimed was really his sister or half-sister from Guadaloupe. People said, too, they slept three in a bed. I don’t know about that: never saw it, myself. Catherine ran a dance group called “La Chapelle de Sainte Catherine,” giving Black Mass cocktails in the garden of Fard’s hotel particulier in Neuilly; absolutely the most chic thing in Paris. Everybody was there. Authentic voodoo initiation ceremonies were performed for the fashionable ethnologists and the social anthropologists and all their publishers who came with the literary lions of the day and their ladies. There were always lots of well-dressed women about and plenty of starlets ready to drop all their threads as soon as the fashionable beatniks present led the way into the fray with the members of Sainte Catherine’s choir. Even middle-aged intellectual French Protestant pederasts plunged into the fun. Photographers were barred. Dr. Fard, always dressed all in white, moved through this scene like the Master with his current cool blond wife on his arm. Fard could whip it up, freeze the action or cool it all into slow motion with just one nod to Kitty de Saint Kitt, who stood there black and bare-assed in the bushes with a knife in her hand ready to sacrifice a kid or a cock.

Fard picked up a lot of politically powerful friends at his parties or got through to them through their wives on the analytic couch. Right from the start, he gave it to them straight and he gave it to them hard: “Pour Voir Noir!” “To See Black!” and a cunning pun on Black Power! They loved it. That was the title of his long poem he read to Malraux and the rest of them when he won his first prize. Along with Senghor and Césaire, Fard is certainly one of the Nabobs of Negritude. Aragon has him in his anthology — had to have him in there because Francis won the prize, too, from his old pal Chou En-lai in the East. His psychiatric practice took him all over the French-speaking world; consulted by a sterile empress in one Moslem land, he was immediately called to handle an outbreak of hysteria in the harems right after premature political emancipation in another. Contacts made that way eventually took him to the Casablanca Conference, where Ana Lyse waylaid him in the lobby of the Anfah Hotel, begging him to cross the street with her to the Villa Africanus, where Freeky was lying, after seven long years still in bed. Dr. Fard was on his way to the airport where he was to enplane with Ben Baraka and the other members of the First Revolutionary Government in Exile but he remembered her letters forwarded to him by Gallimard, so he agreed to see her for a few minutes. As they tell it, Francis simply walked in kicking over the pink silk folding-screen and snapped his fingers at Freeky to get out of bed. She would have followed him to the airplane if he’d let her, still wrapped up in her pink sheets.

You remember what happened to that plane? How it got off course over the International airlanes over the Mediterranean and was scouted into Algiers by French military planes? ’Way back in the fifties I’m talking of. Well, that was his first contact with the boys he eventually threw in his lot with politically. After the revolution, he became naturalized in order to enter the government; what they now call the First Wave. He was still a First Wave minister when I first knew him. Both he and Freeky were trying to persuade me to fly down to Tam to stay with the younger Africanus sister, Ana Lyse, who was down there married at the time to a young Polish deep-strata geologist on contract to the government to look into their subsoil for them. He would provide transportation to take me to see Pigeon Gorge, the name the French had given to the great canyon that splits the Tibesti.

Pigeon Gorge is a cleft running nearly one hundred and fifty miles through the mountains, entirely covered on both sides of the rock face with prehistoric paintings infinitely bigger than any billboard in America; hundreds of feet high; advertising the Foulba Way of Life: pastoral, peaceful and moderately prolific for the past ten, fifteen or twenty thousand years. The Foulbas first got the Word. Needless to say, this is news to the Foulba, at this point. After all, the last Foulba of the day pulled out of there at least a couple or more thousand years ago, as the Sahara dried up behind them. Few Foulba, if any, have even ventured back there ever since. Nor would they ever have dreamed of claiming it back, as they do, or demanding precedence in the UN, even, as the First on Earth with the Word, if Fard hadn’t put them up to it first. Fard first demanded the limits of pre-history be moved back to accommodate them: that’s Fardism at work.

“Black Man,” preaches Francis-X. Fard, “must sweep away forever that white man’s fable of Genesis and all the curt, brutish history of the last six millennia. All that rubbish may, indeed, be the history of a sub-race of white freaks first produced by genetic mutation about six thousand years ago but that is of no concern to us. In the Beginning was the Word? Right! Word came, therefore, before Light. Ergo: the Word was Black!

“Go take a look at what’s written all over our mountains down beyond Tam. I’ll have my girls at the office make you a copy of the material I’ve gotten together on this, along with a preface I’m writing for the first book to come out on the subject in French.”

I clearly remember, Freeky looked frightened and said something like: “Don’t you think I should type it, dear; here at home?” Francis simply snapped back. “No!” and that was that. Some spy in his office ran off a Xerox for the eyes of the colonels who were already preparing their coup. That was part of the evidence used against Fard when they overthrew the First Wave government and arrested him, too. Jailing the ex-ministers was simple but, for reasons of international cultural prestige, even the junta jibed at Francis. In the end, they sent them all down to Tam and put them in prison but with Dr. Fard nominally, at least, in charge of the place. The fort is new since you were down there; a military marvel delivered by the Chinese and assembled in a star-shape of stainless-steel sheets designed to bounce back the rays of the sun: I don’t know that it works. The joke of it all is that Fort Tam was ordered by the very same First Wave ministers who find themselves prisoners there in Present Time. Francis is a prisoner, too, really; although his title is splendid enough: Doctor in Charge of the Desert and Civilian Governor of Tam. The fort is now named Tam Psychiatric, but everyone calls it Star Citadel. The junta colonels announced to the world press: “Our revolution does not devour its children: it sends them to hospital!”

We’ve seen this hospital, from thirty thousand feet up; before we were warned off by their radar. It was very clear and we got some good pictures. In them, the fort looks more like a crinkled pop-bottle top at the bottom of the ocean than it does like the Chinese twenty-four pointed star. It can look, if the light hits it right, like a gem on a spar of black glass set out on a tray of fine sand in a jeweler’s window. Due west of there lies Reggan, the atomic center set up by the French. Beyond that, even as the jet flies in a couple of long hours over nothing but idle desert, you begin to see the blue wash of the Atlantic where it separates out from the blue of the sky. Below it, the endless gold bar of the beach bends over a whole arc of the earth and, in the middle of that like a stone set in a ring, stands “Malamut,” alone. Hassan, that’s heaven: that’s home! You’ll see what we’ll do together down there; we’ll start a new world.

Now, what we want to do with you is … or, rather: what we want you to do with us is …

Thaaay!

Yes, Mya; I’m out here recording …

Sorry, Hassan, but that was Mya for Imsak, again; it’s a regular ritual with us like prayer. We like to sustain at least an hour of Ultimate Orgasm several times a day, every day, you see. Or, rather, you don’t! No need at all to put on a show, is there; my dear man whose name is not Hassan? It’s perfectly simple: I won’t. You’ll have to work out your own ratio with Mya when you meet her: I can only tell you again that I am her seventh husband and last. You can see, can’t you, how easily life itself could become just one more fretful fantasy for Mya, as it often has done for many a girl a lot less rich. Mya packs so much power herself that the trick is to keep making it real. What is real can be real only in Present Time, you’ll admit, and that — I’m sure you follow me — is what Imsak is about. The consort “withholds” the Queen “Be” in Perpetual Present Time on the prong of his prick. Without her phallic plungings several times a day into real reality and beyond, she could not be what she is. I’m not her Pygmalion: I don’t claim to have created her deep-strata geology but I have staked it all out. If she should start singing you siren songs about becoming Sultan of the Sahara or some such, just throw it out of your mind: steer clear of that reef. Mya will not, indeed cannot, remarry unless she comes across a man higher in Imsak than I am and I am about to take the Fourth Degree, now.

We are, all of us, about to enter Phase Four, as our cable to “Malamut” ordered today; but each one of us, naturally, has his or her own move to make in the game. I abhor the word and hate having to use it to refer in any way to our activities, but Mya, being a woman, has to be “played with,” of course. Do not make the mistake of playing the Seal over to her; no matter what she may do to try and get it away from you, under any pretext. The moment Mya is in full possession of the Seal of the Sahara, she’ll drop you and it so fast that she’ll shatter both of you: you’ll think the whole thing never happened at all. Imsak, call it “Withholding,” if you like, that is the only control. Withhold the ultimate object from Mya or you are lost. Mya’s ambitions are, like Mya herself, potentially limitless. it would not be good for her or for anybody else if she became what she wants to be: the Ace of Space!

As the man who first uncocked this power-release in Mya by thrusting Present Time perpetually into her, my own next move can be accomplished only in silence — utter and absolute silence. I mean this quite literally, Hanson; don’t laugh. I am about to become as mum as a monk. Time is running out and so is this side of the tape. I have little more to say beyond what I feel I owe you as a fellow-male who has been drawn abruptly into this tale of ours. Mektoub: It was written! The rest is up to you. Be as cautious as you can, of course, for you know that as soon as you have anything like a kingdom, enchanters and conjurers will always drop in from all over Creation to take it away from you, naturally enough. The Saharan Scarab you hold in your hand is the pre-hieroglyphic Emerald Beginning and Ending of Word. So, spin out the rest of the story with Mya. She will be only too glad to give you a glimpse of what our common future holds in store for us all in the Sahara.

One thing. If it should ever become too much for you, Hanson, and you really want out, I’ll tell you one thing you really should keep to yourself: the World is contained in that Word. If you have understood, there is no other mystery. The Way Out is to permutate the zikr: “Rub out the Word …”