Brion Gysin - The Process

My guide coughed politely, touching my arm to lead me away down a dark corridor toward a big room full of smoke and the hoarse sound of men shouting; the bawdy laughter and coarse joking of the porters and desert-drifters who had swarmed over our truck at the gate. He just left me there, standing in the arched door of this vaulted room, awkwardly holding my rucksack, startled by the wild faces which gleamed up at me from around a small fire which the Broken Boys had lit in the middle of the room, on the floor. “ Salaam aleikoum ,” I mumbled, conscious that Muslims do not like to hear these holy words of greeting from other than Muslim lips. “Why doesn’t the Merikani take a plane?” shouted one rough voice. “Because he is Black!” answered another. Roars of laughter. “The white Merikanis won’t let him, so he has to travel like us!” I took a deep breath and stepped boldly over some of these people, taking a place in the far corner where I got my Primus stove slowly out of my sack before I replied — giving myself time to say it correctly in Arabic: “This gentleman wished to give himself the pleasure of visiting the Great Sandy Wastes of the Sahara where he knew he would meet such distinguished travelers as yourselves.” There was a general roar of applause and, before I could light my stove, someone had handed me a shot-glass of smoky desert tea and a pipe of keef. I smoked it and refilled it in turn with what I had left from Ketama and handed it back. More pipes were offered out of the dark and refilled.

Behind the circle of smokers, my eyes began to take in a whole squirming choir of husky young Tuareg, blue as the night. A dozen or more unmarried, veiled boys of fourteen to eighteen were scuffling and Indian-wrestling there in the dark with their face-masks bound tight. I could see that a good deal of this horseplay was put on for me. The Tuareg are a self-conscious people, not in the least effeminate but vain and coquettish as well as indifferent, lazy and cruel. They do not smoke keef but their matriarchs do chew tobacco. These boys were elaborately veiled in yards of purple-blue carbon-paper material so heavily dipped in indigo it comes off at the touch but all they wore was a single garment like a sort of shift simply made by doubling a length of material, cutting a hole for the head in the middle and tacking the ends together at the bottom with a couple of thorns. When they raised their arms to arrange their veils, they were naked. They giggled and nudged each other as they folded and refolded the little pleat of veiling over their noses; taking out tiny pocket mirrors the size of a playing-card, which they carry in leather pouches around their necks, along with a stick slim as a match to paint black kohl around their eyes, preserving them from glaucoma borne by the flies. Even from where I was sitting, they smelled very good. Indigo has a musky perfume of its own.

“Who are they?” I asked of the man with a gimbri who had settled down to play a little tune beside me. “The Growlies!” I thought he said. “ The Growlies? ” It sounded like a wonderful name for a football team. “Dag Ralis; Tuareg vassals. They come with the queen of the Tuareg: you like?” In a tired, husky, dissolute voice like the sound of pebbles rolling around in a can, he began to sing:

Oh, I know an Old Man in Buffalo Bordj

Stuffs his asshole with millions in gold

He wanted to play but I said: No!

What’s this dirham for — coffee? Eh, gazelle?

So I reamed him out with my bicycle-pump

Scooped up the loot he had in his pad

And, flagging a cruising taxi down ,

Oh, throw in your clutch — Go on, Go on!

We’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!

The Tuareg boys got up and left with backward glances. Their leader had come to say the queen was waiting outside and wanted to see the Merikani. I followed them out in the dark where a tall, heavy-set, unveiled and unsmiling woman stood with a hurricane lamp at her feet. She looked as if she had been waiting a long time to see one like me. She gave me a real white-lady look and I was surprised to see just how white she was. She looked like a middle-aged Virgin Mary or a Roman matron in slightly soiled marble. Grinning out from the shadows beside her was the familiar toothy black face of her personal slave-woman; a skinny, little, hunched-over, bobbing sort of a Black woman who looked like she knew me all of my life and I sure Lord-God knew her. The queen allowed me almost a nod but said not a word as her slave-woman gave me the message: “The Roumia needs you in the truck.” I bowed and said: “Queen, we are all here to serve the Romans.”

I found the old Scourge of the Sands lying across her seat and mine, fluttering her eyelids. “Have we got to Timoun?” she quavered: “Take me straight to the captain of the fort! This Black Merikani has poisoned me.” I suggested to Driver that we lay her out on the cargo on the back of the truck where Third-Class passengers snuggled down in the sacks under the snapping tarpaulin more comfortably than we rode in the cabin up front. I rolled her up in my burnous to carry her there. She was light as a feather; like carrying Mother to her grave. I rode out there with her to make sure she did not smother as we sped off with the canvas cracking in the wind, like a sail.

We were skirting a shoulder of the Great Sandy Erg so, as we ground up an akba , a rise in the ground, I peered out over the swelling pink ocean of sand, all blond, all dimpled and titted, and I laughed to myself: “Aha! so Ghoul the Ogre is a woman as well as a man, or: Is the desert all woman, the Great Howling Banshee?” When we got to Timoun about midday, this particular old woman jumped up like a fennec, that odd desert fox who hunts the jerboa, and she barked at a startled middle-aged Arab merchant to catch her as she swarmed over the side of the truck. I knew she was off to the fort to say I was there and had poisoned her.

Timoun is a beautiful African town whose bright red mud walls, five times or more the height of a man and three times a man’s length through at the base, rise from a scoured plain, white as a bone. Within the gates is a great sandy plaza broad enough to harbor a hundred rich caravans or an army of trucks — such things have been seen in the Sahara. Today, the arrival of even one truck in Timoun is an event from which other events can be dated. A single rusty gas pump stands in the middle of the plaza like a marine signal wrecked offshore from a crumbling reef of once-handsome arcades for shops, which run all around the vast open space. They say it is so hot here in summer that one cannot cross the square to the gas pump on foot. The town is the usual hard-packed maze of streets narrow as corridors but there are some fine buildings, too. Big family houses like forts whose thick windowless walls of sun-dried red mud are finely sculpted in elaborate geometrical designs of Sudanese origin, enclosing cool patios shaded with trees and running with water. Several broad avenues of white sand are lined by high walls over which one glimpses red mud domes and minarets of mosques stenciled with abstract designs in whitewash. Everywhere, inside and out, there is hard-packed white sand underfoot and, so, the softly hissing silence of the Sahara is heard. All lanes and alleys lead to the palm gardens; the tiered gardens of date palms which shade the blossoming fruit trees from the blazing sun, as they in turn spread their sheltering branches over the thick carpet of irrigated greens; bright with water, quick with singing birds.

All this playing with water and building with mud is old, very old; Mesopotamian in origin, surely, linking this desert with that other called Arabia Felix — not called Felix because it is happy but because it lies al limine (the Yemen), to the lucky right hand when you look back east across the Tigris and the Euphrates, east to the Gobi from whence all the pale-faced freaklinas of history have always swept down on us poor Africans. So, here I was, now, striking west and anxious to get the hell out of town. Somebody said a diesel was leaving and the skinny little Black boys who guided me around the oasis assured me this was, as they said: “An Occasion.” So, remembering Hamid, who always tells me I don’t know my own luck, I took it. We shoved off about midday with an electrical tailwind crackling behind us, driving us, now and then, into little date-palm oases like ports on the Secret Sea where honey-faced boys came up to stroke the side of the truck as if they were touching a spaceship.