Brion Gysin - The Process

At that very moment, Mister Barigou was shaking me out of my torpor deeper than sleep to say that the colonel had a contraband truck waiting for me at the edge of the oasis. It was night and the sandstorm was screaming high in the air over the narrow, whitewashed court in which the colonel stood to bid me good-by. Barigou held up a blazing torch a pace behind him, leaving the Old Man’s face in leaping shadow. His voice betrayed a very thin frosting of politeness, as he bade me: Adieu! Barigou led me out the main gate and down an avenue of wind-lashed palms to where a truck with its lights off throbbed in the crashing confusion of the dark. All of a sudden, the Chaamba boy reeled out of the night to throw himself like a parcel at my feet. The truck ground into gear as I picked him up, kissed him on top of the head and took a deep breath of his perfume before I climbed into the cabin, slamming the door as we moved off into the sandstorm. Thus, I took him with me while leaving him there; a neat trick.

One of the most popular perfumes in the Sahara comes in a bottle the size of your little finger with the picture of a naked Black girl on the label, which reads: “ Bint El Sudan ” in Roman letters. More correctly, it should read: “ Bint es Sudan ,” of course. In very small letters beneath the girl’s feet, it says: Hackney E.8 , I think. All the boys in the desert like to pour a whole bottle over their heads before they go out in the Sahara: they smell very nice.

Impossible to express my feelings when I climbed into that infernally hot metal truck-cabin to find I must share a single seat again and, this time, with a sour-smelling, wiry, old Frenchwoman, wearing a White Hunter’s hat. She was known on all desert trails as the Rock Scorpion. This scourge of the sands traveled everywhere for years under more or less official protection as the widow of one of the First of the Sahara. All winter long she sped from fort to fort, bordj to bordj, like a hornet with gossip, while posing, back in Paris, as a Dissident like the doctor in Tam. Her voice carried over the wind and the hammering diesel as she launched into the history and function of the bright orange jupe-culotte she wore; very visible from the air, she assured me, in case we got lost. It was a sort of combination skirt and shorts, very handy for doing pi-pi on the flat desert, she explained. “I am seventy-two; same age as the colonel!” she screamed: “I’ll show you all!” I winced away from her but that meant I sat half on the diesel in a position so uncomfortable that the heat later peeled all the skin from my left buttock and thigh. Her dry little bones poked into me on the other side until she subsided in a heap as her metabolism, altered by the near-zero humidity, dried up her saliva along with the rest of her mucus.

She had drunk all her own water and began croaking to me for some of mine. Mr. Barigou had handed me up a guerba at the last minute: a whole skin flayed from a goat, used hairy side out with its sleeves tied, as it were, in which water is carried everywhere in the Sahara. I untied the neck and she drank greedily of this water which seems to have been excessively charged with magnesium. The colonel must have ordered it drawn from the most brackish of his wells. The old doll fell back on my shoulder, gurgling. I barely had time to push back the cabin window for her to be sick. She went on retching for hours, until we were all splattered with her vomit and the cabin was whirling with sand because she insisted on keeping the window open. She collapsed by dawn, giving me a little more space, but Black Greaser turned around, insisting: “That Roumia is dead!” They still use the word “Roman” for all of us Christians; even me. Greaser poked her into violent convulsions, during which she screamed that I had poisoned her. Poison is common enough among women, here in the Land of Dissent. She dug into her sack for an antidote, coming up with a Eubyspasme suppository. I turned away, preferring to lean on the red-hot diesel while she struggled to place it: apparently, her jupe-culotte was not so practical for that. When the Eubyspasme took hold, she dropped away into some other world, leaving us her old sack of bones between me and the window, where they took up almost no space at all. I breathed easier.

We sailed on blissfully all that next flaming morning over salt-pans as bright as mirrors, through a sandstorm blowing about like golden chaff in the wind. Driver steered by the compass, shoulders down at the wheel. The Old Girl next to me called out deliriously: “ Driver! Driver! Even though there’s no road, you can’t run away from me …! ” No one else opened his mouth. Greaser taught me to communicate glotally, with mouth closed to save saliva. Driver and he kept up an inane conversation in this engaging baby talk at which they were incredibly proficient until, finally, they began to sing together in a gurgled duet that old desert favorite:

Oh, I got a girl got so much gold

She can’t get ’round

Get up gazelle, ’cause I’se you’ guy!

We’ll swap you’ gold for a taxi, love

I’ll throw in my clutch an’ never stop goin ’

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara an’ never turn back!

We drove on that afternoon, west south west, with the red sun in our eyes until it dropped out of the sky and we steered by the stars.

I woke with a start to find we had drawn up under the half-ruined arch of a formerly fortified refuge. This is the caravanserai at the shrine of Hassan-i-Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain and Great Sandy Waste. A hair of his beard is said to be preserved here at the heart of the tons of desert cement which they have piled up and whitewashed, calling it his koubba , or tomb. Naturally, it is a refuge for Dissidents. Few travelers pass this way, ever. Our Old Girl was asleep and would never even know she had been here. I made an only half-humorous hypnotic pass over the old harridan, to knock out her subconscious recording system, as I climbed over her carcass to force my way out of the cabin. The truck was surrounded by a gang of hoarsely shouting desert-drifters and ragged riffraff of Broken Boys who swarmed over us like pirates taking a prize. A handsome, old, white-bearded man with a turban came out of a dark doorway carrying an iron-shod staff with which he cleared me the way. Driver agreed we would leave in an hour.

“ You may not pass this way again in a lifetime ,” said my guide as he led me through a pitch-black passage. A great blaze of sudden light broke through the tall wooden doors which swung back at his touch to let us step into the narrow Heart of the Diamond , as the inner court of the sanctuary is called. “ Put off thy shoes from off thy feet! ” As I stooped to loosen my sandal, I stumbled for fear I might fall into the intense hallucinatory patterns of the ceramic-tile floor. Each pattern exactly covers the grave of a Brother fortunate enough to lie buried here, just outside the Shrine of the Hair. The tombs are fitted to cover the ground, wall to wall, with a dazzling variety of geometric patterns in combinations of colors which seem to flutter and jump, playing back and forth with perspective and perception. These magic carpets in tile can catch up the soul into rapture for hours. They begin with mere optical illusion in which colors leap and swirl but the effect goes on developing to where pattern springs loose as you move into the picture you see. You step from this world into a garden and the garden is You.

I stood barefoot on a grid of electric-blue while, below me, revolved a firmament of candy-colored flowers through which flowed streams of incandescent stars. I stood on a glowing grid of red while a sea of flames boiled like a caldron of transparent naked bodies bobbing up and down in uncontrollable lust under my feet. I stood on a grid of budding vines, writhing like jeweled serpents whose eyes flashed with all the colors of the rainbow prism. I stood on a grid of melting gold while worlds fell away beneath my feet and I looked up. I lifted up my eyes to the golden honeycomb walls of the court and my heart welled up within me for each cell in the comb was the diamond-shaped pattern of Man as seen by da Vinci and each one set the Golden Number echoing out like a gong. In each identical cell burned a diamond-white kinki lamp set on the clean woven mat of pure gold where a Master sat gazing on the burnished face of his Adept and each Adept was someone I loved: Carlos, Costa, Andonai and Nico; Philippe and Giovanni; John, Mario, Robby, Mirko; Antonio, Juan, Alberto, Julio; Hamid, Targuisti, Ahmed Maati and Ahmed Marrakshi; “Verigood,” Franco, Francis, Benaïssa, Mustache and “The Prince.” … Named and unnamed, they rose up tier upon tier; all the ones I ever had burned for. They truly sat there but they were not Flesh; they were Fire, the color of a burning rose. They sat cross-legged, smiling at me in absolute love and confidence, for they had no bodies but flame. They were not human images in the flesh but the Real Thing, which is Light. I looked up, higher and higher, as the honeycomb rose to the skies, where all the faces were One, melded together in one fiery river of light. I rode on the surge of the Fountain, straight up out of this sphere into the Other, from where I thought to take a good look at the Masters who all turned their backs on me when they gazed at their Adepts — and mine. With all the passion of my earthly mind, I sought to force them to turn and they turned: all of them turned with one familiar, identical smile, for all of the Masters were Black. All of them had chosen to put on the image of Me.