Brion Gysin - The Process

Hamid suddenly became fascinated by the form he began to see in my map. He pointed out that the Great Desert is in the shape of a camel stretching its neck right across Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. He laughed like a lunatic to see that the western butt-end of his camel was dropping its Mauretanian crud on the Black Senegalese—“Charcoal Charlies,” Hamid calls them, having picked up the term in the port. The head of Hamid’s camel drinks its fill in the sweet waters of the Nile. The eye of the camel, naturally enough, is that fabled city of Masr, where the Arab movies are made and all the radios ring out over streets paved with gold. Us poor Nazarenes call the place Cairo, for short. Suddenly, some-where down on the lower middle belly of Hamid’s camel, about four knuckles north of Kano in northern Nigeria, I dowsed out a big carbuncle. With no more warning than that, my whole heart rushed out to this place which was pictured as an out-cropping of extinct ash-blue volcanoes jutting up out of the bright yellow sands. I noted that the whole area was called the Hoggar and it seemed to boast only one constantly inhabited place, whose name I made out to be Tam. I was truly surprised to hear myself calmly boasting to Hamid, as if I were AMERICAN EXPRESS: “I’ll be in this place, here, this time next year.”

“ Inch’ Allah! if God wills,” Hamid corected me automatically and then, as if he were indeed the Consul of Keef, who was sending me out on this mission, he went on: “I’ll get them to cut you a green passport of keef to see you through everything. I’ll see that you get the best of the crop from Ketama and I’ll bring it down from the mountain myself with the blessings of Hassan-i-Sabbah, the Father of Grass. On your way, you’re bound to run into some other Assassins.”

“But, Hamid,” I laughed: “I am not an Assassin at all!”

“We are Assassins, all of us,” he gravely replied.

When the time came, I found myself settling back in the train leaving Tanja, gliding slowly along by our magnificent deserted beach on the Straits of Gibraltar. “So, I’m off,” I sighed to myself in my cold First-Class compartment. Just then, Hamid, whom I had not seen for more than a week, swung aboard with all the fine acrobatic ease of an old contrabandista . With a big golden grin, he waved my “passport” under my nose; a parchment sheep’s bladder as big as two fists, packed hard as a rock with the pick of the crop from Ketama, high in the hills of the Rif. We tried a few pipes of the pot as the green winter landscape of northern Morocco picked up and flowed past the window of our train. A few happy hours later, Hamid dove off the train outside of Kebir, before we got into the station. “No money, no ticket: I travel free!” He was going on up into the hills to his village — Jajouka, Mount of Owls — to stay with his uncles the Master Musicians, who practice their Pan music all day on their pipes as they amble out of their little whitewashed thatched houses in their white woolen homespun jellabas and their white turbans to wander over their green Little Hills after their goats. I gave Hamid the money to have a sheep killed in my honor for a feast up there; to bring me luck on my journey, I said. He waved once and blew me a mischievous kiss as he slid through a hedge of giant blue cactus and was gone.

We just sat in Kebir for a long hour in the rain, which I spent fending off children in steaming wet rags who lounged through the train selling green oranges, used razor blades and, for all I know, reclaimed chewing gum and their not very appetizing selves; anything. At long last, the train started up again with a jerk and we soon slid off into the night, but it was hours past dinnertime when we finally staggered into the junction at Sidi Karim, where I learned to my horror that I would have to wait several bleak hours in the dingy station which the stationmaster was even then shutting up, turning off all the lights but one feeble bulb outside in the rain. As he got onto his bicycle to pedal off through the downpour, he regretted that there was no café or restaurant where I could find food in the forlorn village of Sidi Karim. I took out my pipe and managed to light up in the lee of the wind. Quite quickly, I felt very much better, indeed. As soon as I was turned-on again, I caught my breath with a gasp of fearful delight; one single step outside the murky circle of artificial light and I was back in Africa. East wind tore great silver rents in the night sky and slashed an occasional sharp sluice of rain across the shining railroad tracks alongside which ranked choruses of bullfrogs recited the interminable Word they were set a long time ago, now, as their zikr: “Kaulakaulakaulkaulakaulakau …” it sounded like. Sky-diving bats looped about the lamps they lit along the track, presently: “ Train coming! ” The bats squealed up into their ultra-sonic radar frequencies like the brakes on distant steel wheels. When the train did come, it came in an orgasmic rush of hot diesel-oil odor, trailing a veil of orange blossom like a bride; as a charming excuse for its lateness, no doubt.

The train was strangely empty, almost like a ghost train with only a few sleeping Moroccans huddled under their hoods. Carrying no baggage, ever, I made my way to the bar, where a group of French colonials eyed me coldly, taking me for a Moroccan I rather suspect. I adjusted my shades, forgetting for the moment just how much more Moroccan they make me look. At the bar, the Moroccan barman refused to serve me, at first, pointing to a fly-blown text on the wall which said in several languages: “No Alcohol May Be Served to Muslims,” followed by the text in very small print of a dahir or order-in-council promulgated before the last war. I settled down at a table and got something both to eat and to drink when I showed the barman my U.S. passport but he went on speaking to me in Arabic, nevertheless. The French people got off at Fez, where we barely stopped. The train rocketed on through the night, up to the pass at Taza, and then it ran on to the frontier at Oujda, where trouble had been reported on the outskirts of town but, despite this, no one even asked to look at my passport.

On the other side of the border, I found they had put on a sleeping-car so I paid a supplement on my ticket and got some sleep. In the morning, I lit my first pipe and looked out on a new landscape. The stainless-steel sun glittered through clouds onto the coastal plains where the red tiles on the rooftops of the houses and barns make it look more like Alsace than Africa, giving the tiny robed figures of Arabs in the background an air of people flying past in a dream. I took out my journal and wrote: As no two people see the same view along the Way, all trips from here to there are imaginary: all truth is a tale I am telling myself .

When we got to Algut, late at night, I realized that I was the sole passenger to get off that train. The station, awash in shallow neon illumination, was ghostly and cold. There was no one about but me and the exhausted, panting train breathing heavily beside me in the empty echoing station. I abandoned the train and made for a public telephone to call up the hotel but the phone was dead. Somewhere, I had heard there was a curfew; perhaps that was why no one was about, not even a sentry to challenge me at the gate. I walked out into the street, where there was one single taxi, waiting just for me. I ordered the driver, in my almost impeccable French, to take me swiftly to the Hotel Saint Georges , on the heights of the city, where the suites of rooms in that old Turkish palace are named after the commanders of World War Two, who once stopped there amidst the luxuriant gardens which some long-dead pacha long ago ordered to be laid out and planted with one thousand and one varieties of palm. My driver glanced at me oddly in his rearview mirror, but he may have realized I was merely quoting the old pre-war guidebooks I fancy so much. When I am high enough, I quote almost anything from Aesop to Zarethustra. I judged from the back of my man’s neck that he was, probably, a very white Corsican Blackfoot; a colonial leftover. Nevertheless, I leaned over the front seat to ask him politely what that was — pointing down to a sawn-off shotgun lying beside him. He replied: there were hoodlums about.