Brion Gysin - The Process

Hadrar, our next stop, turned out to be in the hands of the Water Police, as they chose to be called at that time to hide their real purpose. I turned myself in at the fort, reporting to the captain what had passed between me and the old She-fox of the Desert. He listened to me with a courteous smile and assured me again that I would not be allowed to go further south. I was free to wander about the town, stopping here and there to do some little color sketches in my notebook. This is an excellent way to get to the children who are all natural-born Dissidents and, therefore, possible allies. They crowded around me in absolute silence as I sketched the picturesque walls of Hadrar. I picked a young Adept to hold my water bottle and exchanged a word or two of pass before I interrogated him. He reported briefly: The fort was hollow; the captain straw. I began to understand the man’s easy jocular courtesy: behind him was the real force, the Heavy Water Police who had made a great orange flash to the south. One day, there had been a great wind which swept away the tents of the nomads and a Pillar of Cloud had risen from the sands of Reggan in the form of an immense mushroom, bigger than Ghoul. Many people were sick: no one was allowed to go south.

A one-armed lieutenant came up on us, cracking a whip to scatter the children. He bent over my notebook: “Nice little watercolors you do. My wife had the same talent. We have just seized your rucksack. Have you any raw opium on you? Balls about the size of your first? …”

No, luckily not. I remembered how Singer had smiled when asked about that: “ Aphioun? Why, yes; there was a ball around here, somewhere. … Now, where can it be?” He looked about smiling, helplessly stoned. That room of his was scoured clean as the Sahara: where could he hide anything? Under the fine white sand floor or up in the split-palm rafters, perhaps? Singer rustled around for quite a while in the flue of the fire-place but nothing showed up. A round ball of opium in the raw, about as big as your fist, would be the very best crop you could possibly draw from a patch of poor soil near a trickle of water out in the middle of nowhere. You sit by your poppy-patch a few feet square with a couple of goats to keep you alive while you wait for your poppy to blow. I can’t wait that long. No, I do not have any O.

In the bar of the Hotel Hadrar , I heard one French colonial officer say to another: “As soon as we leave the Sahara, this bar will dry up.” I was too shy to go over and ask him just what he meant. The other one laughed as he replied: “The day after we leave, the Sahara itself will be taken over entirely by Ghoul!” Just then, a jolly dissident captain of transport bought me a drink. He was bowling through on his way north to Bechar in a Dodge command car with a tall technical sergeant from the Legion to drive it. I told him of my plight. “Come on!” cried the captain: “Come on, come on! We’ll leave the Sahara and never look back!” We left together within the hour, tearing north through the night five times faster than the diesel could do it and we stopped to piss in the wind or make tea wherever we chose. Tech Sergeant crouched over his wheel as he sang:

Oh, I know a garage in Ghardaïa

Got every model of taxi-girl

I want to tarry but Madame says: No!

You pay on the landing and not on the stairs

Nothing’s as good as a jeep, gazelle

On any flat bed I’ll ride you down

I’ll pump you so full of my lead, tonight

That, when I’ve shot the bolt of my gun

Oh, I’ll leave the Sahara and never come back!

We slept out and it was cold.

We drove rapidly north up the sand-drowned bed of a fossil river and, by the following dawn, had covered more ground than a camel does in a week. At sunset that day, we came to the casis of Targ, where a troop of young soldiers on their way north for evacuation had gleefully cast off their khaki uniforms to bathe in the trickle of red water forming a pond under the palms in the oued . The boys were all right, with merry brown faces and half legs and arms tanned by the sun and the rest of their bodies snail-white, but the truth of it is that albino freaks are attractive only to their own kind. The soldiers were, also, mucking up the irrigation system for the gardens and in the Sahara water is money. The raggedy locals hung about under the palm trees, grumbling but not daring to throw stones. My transport captain averted an incident by ordering the soldiers out of the water before we took off for EI Bit, where we spent the night in the government guesthouse, a tumbledown place.

Late in the afternoon of the following day, we got to Bechar; last town on the Sahara going northwest toward Morocco. In Bechar, the news was official: the last of the French were to leave the Sahara by the end of next week. No one knew what was going to happen to the atomic center of Reggan and there was an armpit odor of panic in the air. I, too, wanted to get the hell out. From Bechar run the few miles of rail they were ever able to lay across the Sahara; from there to the shores of the Mediterranean, the Great Salt Lake, but no one knew when there would be a train. Nor was there a room to be had in the town. Every bed in Bechar was occupied by military advisers, atomic consultants, deep strata geologists, contractors, contacters, plain hustlers, three-card men, dingers, dippers and dead-ringers for all the pale-face freaklinas this side of Metropolitan France. Bechar was one wide-open and shut town. Water diviners dressed like tough Klondike sourdoughs tore through the unpaved streets in armored jeeps with shotguns over their knees. The entire oasis strangled in a bright cloud of sulphur-yellow dust. Armed patrols enforced a curfew at nine when all lights went off at once from the main switch, simultaneously plunging the town into darkness and setting off the barking of what sounded like thousands of dogs chained up in all the courtyards against night attack. Arab dogs, tied up in mud huts deep in the oasis, barked back antiphonal choruses of vainglorious boasts and insults to the dogs locked up in the grim, blacked-out, barricaded European houses of the New Town on the edge of the desert. As the moon came up, waves of hysterical threat and counter-threat rolled across the desert like a visible haze of hatred engulfing the town. Wild yellow dogs, more than half jackal, hunted in swift-padding packs through the sandy lanes. Everyone walked with a big stick in Bechar.

My captain offered me a driver’s bed in the Legion garage, so I bought provisions and lived in the bare, cell-like room with only a single iron army cot on which I began to dream again.

On the third day, at noon, a little toy train stood on the bright bare sweep of the desert floor at the end of the line. There was neither station nor ticket office nor anyone to stop me from getting on the train. I slid into a seat at the far end of the only passenger car, huddling there under my burnous. An Arab conductor came by and poked me, thinking I was an Arab: “No baggage?” I drew a deep breath: “No, no baggage. This is the Way I came and this is the Way I shall return, Inch’ Allah! ” He was startled to hear the password from me, so I grinned at him broadly. “ Ya Sidi! ” he grinned in reply. I fumbled about in the dark under my stiff, crusty burnous, which wrapped me from head to foot like a cocoon, as I fitted together the two sections of my slim keef-pipe with a handsome brass band at the link. Around the link is engraved the cyclical, endless word of our zikr . As I took out my masterpiece matches, I rattled the box. “ Nam, Sidi ; I hear you,” the conductor replied, smiling even more broadly.