Ibrahim al-Koni - New Waw, Saharan Oasis

13

That night he woke the boy.

He woke him and spoke to him in the darkness — the darkness of his grotto and the darkness outside.

The boy wiped his eyes with his hands and protested audibly.

The man addressed him, saying, “I have frequently spoken to you about migration. Do you remember what I have said?”

The boy continued to rub his eyes, face, and head with his hands, struggling to stay awake. He murmured something indecipherable but did not speak.

The man said to him, “I told you that we don’t come to the desert to rest on the desert. Instead each of us comes to chase after the others in the wasteland like the tails of mirages. The adult outstrips the youth, but the lucky person outstrips everyone else and departs while still a child in the cradle.”

The boy did not respond. So the man continued, “There is a small faction who burden the earth and only emerge when they hear the call.”

The child stopped messing with parts of his body and exclaimed in a weird voice, “The call?”

“The call. The call is a present from the sky. The call is the language of the earth. The call is the gift of the possessed.”

The boy was still. He soon muttered, “Did Amghar refer to the possessed?” 11

“Yes, Amghar is speaking about the possessed, because possessed people are additional conduits. The possessed are another community. For this reason, a possessed person shouldn’t tarry when he hears the call.”

“. …”

“This is why I woke you. This is why I want to tell you that my time has come and that my call is ringing in my ears night and day. So promise me that you’ll be true to the covenant and that you’ll never abandon your mother, the earth.”

The boy mumbled indistinctly. The father made himself clearer with a decisive phrase: “Beware of fleeing the earth. You should know you’ll never get far if you do!”

“. …”

“I bequeath you the pickaxe. Beware of going too far away.”

The son yawned loudly, and so the father fell silent. The boy leaned forward and fell asleep. The father dozed off as the call resounded in his ears.

14

Weeping woke him several hours later that night.

He rose to find his son collapsed in a heap beside him, weeping loudly. He felt like questioning him but decided to refrain and then fell asleep again. The boy wept till morning. Then he went out to the plain, still weeping. He accompanied the herdsmen when they departed to the pastures. Since he was weeping, they asked, “Why are you crying?” But he didn’t reply. He left the herders and returned to wander among the dwellings.

The sages stopped him and asked, “Why are you weeping?” He did not reply. Instead he hid his face in his arms and walked away. The women went to him and also asked about the secret cause of his weeping. He did not answer them either. Then his chums blocked his way and questioned him. They asked persistently, but he crossed the vacant land to the heights to the north and roamed there for a long time.

The tribe grasped the secret behind his weeping some days later.

15

The nobles led their assistants, vassals, and slaves to the well as if they were the tribe’s heroes leading mounted warriors on a raid.

They trailed across the low-lying, vacant land south of the temple. Then they took turns descending down the shaft, their belts lashed securely with palm-fiber ropes. They dug the pit deeper and reached moist earth after penetrating a few cubits farther down.

The excavator struck the blow that cut through to the moisture. He took the hunk of damp clay in his hands and tasted it with his tongue. He closed his eyes and savored the morsel, leaning to the left and right. He emitted a groan of approval. Then he shared the good news with the people: “I bet there’ll be a greater consensus among you about the sweetness of the water than about anything in your lives ever!”

The depths resounded with the call of the depths, but the people above ground did not make out the words clearly. One man shouted a question down the shaft. So the excavator placed a lump of the clay in the container hanging over his head and jerked on the rope that hung there to signal for them to begin pulling it up. They drew the bucket up and struggled with each other for the moist clay. He heard them express their delight, shout to each other, and argue with one another as they exchanged muddy handfuls of the treasure.

He bent over and splintered the hard place with the solid stone of his alarming pickaxe. The earth at the bottom of the pit was astonishing. In its dirt, pebbles and pieces of white stone mixed with thin slabs of stone and promising lumps of clay. He dug at the heart of the pit for a time but found it was less moist there. So he turned his attention to the west side and struck the earth from there. He struck once, twice, three times. Then, after this final blow, the Master flowed out. It trickled from a fissure on the right side. It seeped from the pores of a solid, snowy white slab, which began to sweat. Then this perspiration dripped down, and beads of sweat collected on the august, generous body that darkness had hidden from the human eye forever. These beads increased in circumference, plumpness, and size. He dragged the blade of his pickaxe along the indescribable fissure. Then stone pummeled stone, and the solid rock spoke with a hushed voice. From the talk of the solid rock was born an actual being. The deluge flooded out and gushed down in a succession of large drops. In no time at all, the drops united in a line that continued to bleed, bleed, bleed. It bled and spoke as it fell on the rocks at the bottom. The wanderer saw it for the first time and heard its whisper like the first gasp of a newborn child.

16

He watched the wanderer change and evolve into a truly heavenly stream. He watched the mysterious wanderer emerge from the Unknown as a body. He watched the immortal wanderer collect, take shape, multiply, and appropriate a fluent, running tongue.

He watched the miracle jabber, flood, inundate the rocks, and rise to form a circular pond on which the light of the well’s mouth fell. Then it shone with a glimmering, dreadfully seductive charm.

The pulsing deluge damaged the hastily done work. Then the liquid poured from the groins of the fissure, and the pores of the rocks secreted even more. The creature twisted as it traveled and crossed on its eternal trip to the valley bottoms. So the disciple witnessed in its passage the secret of the Master and the birth of primeval life.

The heartbeat increased, and the anguish of the first people assailed him. Then he wailed, “May I accompany you, Master? Why don’t you carry us along on the journey, God of Wanderers?” Then a tremor struck that patch of ground.

The people above heard the earthquake, and the ground trembled violently beneath their feet. They shoved forward to the chasm. They leaned over its opening and batted away the spray that wet their downturned faces. This spray was thick, viscous, heavy, and mixed with mud, dirt, and gravel. They saw that surging water had risen to the top. They realized that an internal collapse had narrowed the well’s shaft and pushed the water up. They called to one another, fastened palm-fiber belts to their bodies, and were quick to dangle down the well, taking pickaxes and leather containers designed to haul dirt from wells. Three men descended and began filling the containers with lumps of clay, mud, and dirt. They immediately tugged on the rope when they finished filling the leather buckets. The other strongest men collaborated above at the mouth. The men unloaded a lot of dirt and kept drawing out containers of it all day long. But they only reached the buried man shortly before sunset.

Aggulli reached him. He found him tucked beneath an awe-inspiring slab of white stone that was marked on the underside with arcane lines like a sorcerer’s symbols. It was bisected by a network of minute veins that antiquity had traced inside the slab. Perhaps the pranks of some mysterious creature had dug them, one generation after another, till it became an indecipherable legacy like the talismans of the first peoples carved into walls of caves. He cautiously lifted the slab away and raised the excavator’s head. The lower part of his veil was missing, and his gray beard, coated with mud mixed with pebbles, was smeared with clay. There was an enigmatic smile on his lips, and his eyes expressed profound acquiescence. The blood flowing freely from his forehead mixed with lines from the rogue flood. Even after the victim was pulled out, his bleeding continued. Blood flowed from his forehead, deluged his face, eyes, lips, and beard, and fell to mingle with the deluge in the pit of the well.