Brion Gysin - The Process

Two days later, when I had bought a rucksack and a little gasoline Primus stove, I said thanks and good-by to my sponsors with my hand over my heart. That is where, along with my U.S. passport, I always carry my money. I caught a very early train out of Algut, up country to Blida, and that afternoon I rattled through the high mountain passes to Boghari on the rim of the Sahara where the train track ends. There, I caught a bus to Djelfa in the bare metallic mountains of the Ouled Naïl; a tribe of tinkers whose women are prostitutes, loitering around like painted idols, suggestively clinking with lucky gold coins. Long after dark, I changed to the back of a Berliet truck in a rising sandstorm. In the hours after midnight, we passed through Laghouat, where the French painter Fromentin was the first White to spend a summer, more than a hundred years ago, now. He mistook that one idyllic oasis for all of the Sahara, while we barely stopped there at a filling station, under some palms whose ragged heads were whipped down into the driving sand. The yellow headlights of our truck drilled out a sandy tunnel through the roaring streets of the town as we bored our way back out into the thick of the Sahara. The wind scoured the track we followed, tacking across a vast howling plain until, several hours later, we landed in the lee of the long walls of a desert caravanserai. We charged through a banging, broken gate, stampeding the hundred camels of several caravans which had taken shelter in the vast open courtyard. On the far side of this harbor, light streamed out from the tiny windows of one small room, like a cabin built to huddle against the far wall. Someone in there, on the floor, was making tea by the light of a hurricane lamp. Inside, I came across an old Visitors’ Book without a cover in which there were signatures and comments dating back into the last century. I added my name: Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N.Y. Moroccans tend to pronounce my name like Hassan, so that is what they all call me back in Tanger: Hassan Merikani. I signed that as best I can in Arabic. I had no comment to make.

The following day, we got to the sly and secret city of Ghardaïa, the outlaw capital of the Mozabite Dissident tribes who were driven out into these desert potholes where they found water many centuries ago. From this stronghold, the Mozabites have always ventured back into the orthodox community as small grocers who live in their shops which are real family affairs, crawling with children like mice. They are rapacious, good-looking, inbred people whose tiny children can do sums in their heads, running whole shops before they are ten years of age: experts at false-weight and short-change. For several hundreds of years, at least, they have sent every last penny of the money they amass back to their isolated city guarded all around by the Sahara where it is buried, they say, under their windowless houses. The Mozabite treasure of gold is greater than that of Fort Knox; gold goes in there and never comes out again. A Mozabite woman, on the other hand, may go out of her house twice in a lifetime; once to her wedding and once to her funeral. From the better homes, a woman never goes out: she marries a resident cousin and, when she dies, she is buried in the garden.

I tossed all night in an Arab hotel on a bed so hard it may have been made of gold. An odor of drains came gliding through the room, so strong it glowed in the dark like a ghost and left a faintly luminous trail of iridescent slime where it passed. Black Greaser, down in the narrow court of the caravanserai guarding our truck like a treasure, whimpered away all night on his flute made out of an old bicycle-pump; playing over and over the only windy tune that he could play:

Oh, I got a gazelle in Ghardaïa

She’s rich and loaded with gold

I want to marry but her father says: No!

Oh, we’ll buy a diesel, my love, I swear

They hung three millions in gold on your neck

But you can’t move out of that room!

We’ll purchase a diesel, my love, with the gold

Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!

In the morning, I went out in the cool bright air just after dawn to find the whole city already afoot, doing business. In their handsome open-air marketplace, half as big as San Marco in Venice but with whitewashed arcades, I bartered my GI boots, field jacket and worn Levis for sandals, baggy sarouel pants with embroidered pockets and this fine black burnous which has made me feel invisible, here, since it first dropped over my shoulders. Shyly, I bought veiling; five yards or so of fine muslin to wrap my head and face against the dry desert air and the bite of the sun. Since then I go, automatically, more and more deeply disguised through their Country of Fear.

The silky surreptitious silence of the Sahara starts in Ghardaïa, where every soft footfall is shod in sand. A hush hovers over everything like the beating of invisible wings beneath which one hears the incessant hissing of the desert. Men, and even women, speak softly, knowing they will be heard. When desert-dwellers meet, they stand off a few paces to whisper sibilant litanies of ritual greeting, almost indistinguishable in sound from the rustling of stiff cloth, as they bare a long arm to reach out and softly stroke palms. They exchange long litanies of names interwoven with news and blessings until a spell of loosely knit identity is thrown over all the generations of the Faithful like a cloak:

… and ye shall drink no wine, neither shall your sons forever. Neither shall ye build houses nor sow seed nor plant vineyards but all your days ye shall live under tents that ye may live many years in the land where ye sojourn …

Everything crackles with static electricity as if one were shuffling over a great rug. Everyone in the Sahara is very aware; tuned-in to the great humming silence through which drones the sound of an approaching diesel from hours away.

Previously assured transportation suddenly became precarious. We all sat or lay around in the shade of the truck which stood becalmed in the shallows of some new Time-Barrier. Departure was indefinitely delayed while the truck throbbed gently, as if poised like a porpoise ready to take off. Travelers must show their identity papers to the captains of Saharan Security in the Bordj or fort, before leaving; likewise, trucks. Officially timed departures are said to be relayed anead to the next Bordj or fort where the captains are supposed to follow your progress across the floor of the desert, like a cockroach crawling across a carpet in broad daylight. A conspiracy of silence on the part of the Arab truck drivers seemed to oppose this occult power of the captains. Restless and bored and just about ready to take a last turn around the marketplace, I was lucky enough to be still there when the truck suddenly began to take off, unannounced. I scrambled up into the vibrating cabin, screaming like an American tourist, waving the proof of my right to First-Class Transportation under the nose of the new driver, who had simply strolled over to the truck, jumped into the cabin, thrown in the clutch and started to leave. Even now, I sit here looking at the back of his head, wondering if he is not stealing the truck, the cargo and me.

Later that afternoon — no, the next afternoon, we picked up the Hadj back from the pilgrimage; the little old man I had taken, at first for a bush. I recollect, El Hallaj was skinned alive in Baghdad for proclaiming: “If a bush can say: I am the Truth , so can a man.” I have not been comfortable since. We grind along, hour after hour, like a metallic dung-beetle pushing its nose through the sand, probing the Great Howling Waste. Only sand dunes move more slowly than we do. Schools of golden dunes, which vary in size from ones you could ride astride to some twice as big as this truck, cavort like dolphins across the trail. They were not here when the trail was laid and they may be gone on the next big blow or they may grow into a dune as big as a city, they tell me. We break a new trail over the hard black reg in which the dunes seem to lie half-submerged, for we are skirting a giant paw of the Great Sandy Erg which lies athwart the Sahara like a vast rosy-golden sphinx as big as a country, Guardian of the Sandy Wastes.