Brion Gysin - The Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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