Ibrahim al-Koni - New Waw, Saharan Oasis

It either deluges the desert with rains — washing the land with floods until it drowns the creatures — or imposes suns that breathe fires on the plains for years, scorching pastures, destroying plants, and leaving there only trails of mirages and wraithlike fumes.

The first peoples also learned from experience that the heavens aren’t stingy with water for the earth without reason, that the suns don’t scorch the pastures in vain, that suffering descends on the desert for a reason that will not remain unknown forever, because the times, which address them with the language of signs at the outset, must necessarily reverse course one day and turn against the secret they concealed and expose it till finally every matter they were initially keen to conceal is revealed.

This time the sages exerted themselves to search for the scourge’s secret too and discussed with each other a lot. Some found the cause in their subservience to the dirt and acceptance of the settled life that had always been their enemy. They had violated the law of nomadic migration once the leader’s tomb became a peg that tied them to the earth. Others thought that the drought contained a broader significance and said that there was a sign in the matter, a sign like an embryo born without features, although the days would fashion a face for it. They had repeatedly learned from experience that secrets, even the most significant secrets, exist only to become known.

They simply had to be patient and wait for an act that would fulfill the Law’s dictates.

The rabble were skeptical of the propaganda of the supporters of semiotics and spoke scornfully of their Law, which promoted a subservience that threatened the tribe’s life and brought its people only destruction and extinction. These ruffians continued to scoff and express their skepticism even after the diviner succumbed to dementia. Then rumors circulated among the tent sites suggesting that evil had gripped the hamlet for a long time because the tribesmen had violated the statutes by trading camels, saddles, and containers of clarified butter to the merchants in the caravans in exchange for gold dust. They had taken these ill-omened flakes to the smiths, who had worked the ugly metal into vile jewelry for these wretches to present to their girlfriends as a down payment on passion and fidelity. It was said, too, that the diviner also procured the vile metal and had it worked into jewelry he presented to the Tomb Maiden, with whom many knew he had fallen in love long ago, even before the disappearance of Lover of Stones. In another version it was said that he had not disclosed his secret until long after the migration of the Physician of Stones and that then she had repulsed him severely. The Virgin was said to have told him that a virgin who married the leader and befriended prophecy would never stoop to love people of the shadow world. But the soothsayer did not give up. He decided to resort to gold because he had long known that this hateful metal can imprison the hearts of virgins and realized that Wantahet did not introduce it into the desert until he had tested its frightening ability to transform intellects, baffle hearts, and distort intentions.

Passion blinded the diviner and caused him to forget the Law’s prohibitions. Then he acquired the forbidden dust from an itinerant merchant (according to another version: he acquired it from one of the tribesmen, who had secretly begun to deal in it) and had it cast as vile jewelry by a smith. Then he brought the present to his beloved in the temple. What is truly astonishing is that the narrators do not differ about the acceptance of the gift by the Priestess. Indeed they all agree that the Virgin took the jewelry and gazed at it for a long time before thrusting it between the stones of the tomb. Curiosity seekers swore that they themselves had seen her examine the jewelry with demonic, greedy eyes. She had held the gift up to the light before her face for a time and then had dangled the necklace around her neck and breast briefly while her lips smiled in a seductive way inappropriate for a beautiful woman who had chosen the Spirit World for her spouse.

The sages detested these reports. Many denounced passion and said that the curse was not actually in the forbidden metal but in passion, which shows no pity even to the people of the Unseen. The unwashed masses were amazed and said that the drought was a puny trial for a tribe whose diviner had acquired gold dust to present to a virgin who had dedicated herself to the rule of the Spirit World.

3

A thin, grim man, who was veiled and cloaked in black, paced outside the diviner’s tent waiting for the dark to descend. He looked around him with the misgivings of someone who feared being caught red-handed. Then he penetrated the tent.

Inside he found the soothsayer leaning against the tent pole beside a dying fire and staring vacantly into a dark corner. He squatted near the hearth and tossed a handful of branches on the fire. Then he said, “I see that my master is still touring the land of forgetfulness.”

The diviner did not actually return from his fugue and continued to stare rigidly into the void of the dark corner as if unaware of the visitor’s presence.

But soon he returned to say, “How absurd it would be for someone who has explored the homeland of forgetfulness to settle for the lands of vanity or to savor lingering with people.”

“I have never known a creature who lauded forgetfulness with your enthusiasm.”

“How could a person who hasn’t experienced forgetfulness or known its advantages praise it?”

“Why should we experiment with it when we know we will experience it one day for the first and last time?”

“If you all tasted the sweetness of forgetfulness, you would want to live it today, not tomorrow.”

“May the Spirit World spare us this fate! We have children we need to care for till they grow up. We have livelihoods that we need to husband and develop. In the desert there are beautiful women and maidens we need to fondle and embrace on winter nights. So to whom should we leave all of this if we travel the road of forgetfulness before the appointed hour?”

“If you wish to escape from the manacles you just mentioned, then you shouldn’t worry about them, because throngs of idiots will instantly assume your responsibilities.”

“I fear, then, I would be the one deserving the epithet ‘idiot.’”

“I have a superior claim to idiocy than you, because I want to bring outside a person who has grown accustomed to life in the dark recesses of a cave. I want to convince him that light is more beautiful than darkness.”

“You’re right. Leave me in my murky gloom and repay me your debt. Then go to the Western Hammada and live out your forgetfulness to your heart’s desire.”

The diviner abandoned his immobility and turned toward his guest to ask, “You?”

The visitor responded calmly, “Did my master think he was still advancing through his distant wasteland and chatting with the ghostly shades of tombs in the Western Hammada?”

The diviner sat up straight and tried to discern the features of the stranger by the light of the tongues of the fire that had begun to spread and blaze. He said, “I thought you were a man who once came to this tent to bring me back from the land of forgetfulness — thinking he was doing me a favor.”

“The fact is, Master, that I didn’t do you a favor that day out of any love of doing good, because you know no one does good these days out of a love of doing good. That day I did it because I feared my debts would go unpaid.”

“What?” The soothsayer shouted this acerbic question twice.

His companion responded with a muffled laugh. He snickered for a long time before he asked, “Have you forgotten the debt or was the whole affair simply a strategy to escape paying? Was your supposed flight to the Western Hammada nothing but a flight to avoid repaying the debt?”