Brion Gysin - The Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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