Brion Gysin - The Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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