Brion Gysin - The Process

The little old man twitched aside the yards of gray-green muslin piled on top of his head and swathing his bearded face: “No baggage. This is the way I came and— Inch’ Allah! — this is the way I shall return.”

I push back the window of opalescent glass frosted by the blasting of sand, to thrust the whole length of my slender pipe out like a periscope into the bouncing air of the dazzling desert through which we churn night and day no faster than a funeral. When I lean out the window, the light out there hits me like a blow. Shading my eyes, I look down into the granular shallows of flowing sand on whose current we ride until I am dizzy and sick. Everything visibly crawls; even the cloth of my sleeve when I look at it close. I glance up and out with my eyes clenched against the all but intolerable brightness of the blazing desert where the mirage sizzles across the horizon like a sweep of glittering marshes, thickly grown with tall rushes whipped by the wind. Air ignites and flames up around the truck like the billowing breath of a blast furnace searing my lungs. The water should lie not more than a half hour’s distance away — or so you might think. Hour after hour, day after day, we bore on through the sands without reaching those marshes.

All this ululating emptiness aches in my ears like the echo of a shell. Now and again, I swear I can hear the lowing and bellowing of invisible herds of longhorn cattle but, of course, there are none. When I listen even further down into myself, I contact something else which shakes my whole intimate contact with Me. When I try to tune out the constant moaning roar of the wind, my whole being vibrates to a sound down below the threshold of hearing. My sinuses, antrums, the cords of my throat and the cavities of my chest, the very hollows of my bones hum in a register too low for my ear but, for no known reason, I tremble, I quake. This, so they tell me, is the voice of Ghoul and Ghoul is the Djinn of the Desert, Keeper of the Land of Fear. Grains of sand in their incalculable billions of billions are grinding, grinding together, rolling and sliding abrasively in dunes as big as New York and as high, vibrating this ocean of air through which we paddle like sick fish on their flight from some distant dynamite blast. At that, a very American thought suddenly strikes me: they do have an atomic center out here in the Sahara. Could this air be radioactive, perhaps? Or, is that just the black breath of Ghoul?

Far away back up north in the green hills of Morocco, which I call home since I began to merge almost against my will into this scene with Hamid my Moroccan mock-guru, everyone around the keef cafés is always talking and singing of the Sahara but not one man in ten knows where it begins or ends or how to get into this desert. “It lies down that way, many days marching,” they say, swinging their long slim keef-pipes around vaguely south. Yet, every last man sitting there on a straw mat on the floor feels he owns the whole sweep of the Sahara desert, personally, inside his own Muslim head. Let some paleface tourist appear on the scene and they will all proclaim themselves competent “guides,” if you please; when not one of them can read even a map. In my forlorn American way, I thought to teach Hamid the lay of the land and, to this end, I pulled my poor self together to make an expedition up out of the damp grotto in which Hamid and I were living in the native quarter of Tanja, in the impasse of a narrow alley in a section of the Medina below even the tight-packed little pedestrian square of cafés called the Socco Chico; in other words, lost.

I adjusted my shades and smoked one last pipe for the road before I stepped cautiously out into the mainstream of mankind in the swarming alley as narrow as a corridor that is our street. At first, the entire Medina of Tanja feels like one mysteriously rambling mansion packed full of maniacs but, eventually, what looks like a terrifying trap to a tripper gets to feel like your very own house. I cut into the traffic and kept my head down as I whipped around corners with my eyes glued to the ground; so as not to be noticed, I hoped. I slid through alleys so wide I could touch the walls on both sides with my elbows and I had to flatten myself into doorways to let heavily-laden don-keys and porters push past. The whole point of this game, best known to Old Tanja Hands, is to get from one side of the Socco Chico to the other without crossing it; invisible to all traders and touts. My own cunning route, first shown me by Hamid of course, is a turnoff between the old Hotel Satan and the Casa Delerium , once a whorehouse in better days. This way, you can bypass not only the Socco Chico but also steep Siaghine Street running up out of it; lined as it is with neon-lit bazaars, swarming with tourists and tramps.

I meant to drop by the American Library on my way up to the Boulevard in the New Town of Tanja but, when I caught sight of myself in a mirror in a shop window, I thought: Uh-uh, better not! I managed to make myself look a little more human before I got to the Café de Paris on the Place de France. I drew up in front of a raggedy man who sells raggedy books in the street. On an earlier trip, I had spotted his stock of old dog-eared French guidebooks and road maps of North Africa, put out by Michelin, the makers of tires. As I bent over his wares, I picked up on the fact that I was getting scanned from behind their newspapers by the whole row of white American and British operatives seated, as always, out on the terrace of the Café de Paris. They had their telepathic finders out feeling all over me as I bought, for one dirham, a map which is now out of print. I scuttled back down to the Socco and called Hamid out of his cavernous keef café to drag him home for a bout of instruction in the map.

# 151 Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia ( 1 centimeter for 20 kilometers or 1/2,000,000 ). On this map, one handspan to the right along the Mediterranean shore lies Woran. With your thumb on Woran, your little-finger lands on Algut. If you pivot due south from that white city on the cliffs, your thumb will fall on Ghardaïa, the mysterious desert capital of the Dissident Mozabites. All that can take at least three or four days of travel from the bright blue Straits of Gibraltar, along the lush coastal valleys, over green hills and mountains so high they are covered with snow. On the far side of these are plains marked in brown to denote almost no annual rainfall at all and they must be crossed before you get to even the fringe of the bright golden Sahara. The trouble with this map is that it has two big insets of Woran and Algut, shown in some detail at a scale of 1/500,000, and these effectively obscure the desert trails to the south.

I trundled myself back up to the Boulevard again next day, or was it next week? Anyway, one fine day when I could tear myself away from the great smells of Hamid’s cooking and manage to part the curtain of keef which hung over our door, I fell out into the street and worked my way back to the Boulevard bookstall, where I bought, unobserved, an old guide to Algeria and the Michelin map #152—a great prize. This pretty, pictorial map was printed to illustrate the glorious exploit of General Leclerc, who marched a Free French army from Dakar all the way north to Tunis across the Sahara by way of Lake Chad. Not even the Romans could have brought off such a feat but Hamid shows little interest in anything done by the French or the Roumis, in general. Being Black, I am not a real Roumi to Hamid. On the other hand, Hamid looks down on all Blacks as the natural slaves of the Arabs; even though his own hair is curly enough to give him trouble finding a barber, back in the States. Hamid shuts me up when I tell him I am Black. “You’re not Black, you’re American! Safi! Enough!”