Ibrahim al-Koni - Anubis - A Desert Novel

I darted over their smooth tops, which were rounded like the tombs of ancients in the northern desert. Here I lost the track but found it again after I had left the stone thicket and the trail became easier, less challenging, and higher. In this easy stretch, the shrubs fell away to the rear to disappear among the lower rocks, fleeing from the vanguards of the sandy rebel. In this area, only some low-lying plants blanketed the earth, seeking refuge from the fiery sky with the sun-baked surface of the aggressive ridges of sand. The track was clearer on the sandy soil. It seemed that my victim had risked her life attempting to free herself from the snare, for the struggle waged over this interval had resulted in heavy bleeding and in her shedding tufts of blood-soaked fur. Then, suddenly, the track disappeared. I retraced my steps to scout the area where the trail forked into two gullies. I followed the gulley that turned off toward the east without finding any tracks there. I stopped to peer around. I looked to the south and the north. I spotted her. I saw her with my heart before I noticed her with my eyes. I sensed her presence before I caught sight of her. Had it not been for this strange sensation, I would not have retraced my steps. I would not have explored the second gulley. I would not have paused at this spot rather than another. I would not have peered to the south and the north only to espy her hidden in a pit located between the two trails. A dense bramble of dry, interwoven branches hid her from view. The snare that I had laid over the hole played a part in concealing her. She was trembling violently from fear and pain, and snot was streaming from her muzzle. From the leg held by the teeth of the trap flowed fresh blood, which was mingled with clots of dry dirt. The silent call that had guided me back to her had been prophetic, for when I seized hold of her, I discovered that her leg had worked free from the snare and that its teeth no longer grasped anything save a hoof, so the doe would definitely have freed herself had she bolted from her hiding place. As I grasped hold of her with two quivering hands her trembling became even more violent.

Her eyes flashed with fear, innocence, despair, and beauty. I embraced her with both arms and hugged her to my chest, without knowing why. Perhaps the look in her wide, dark eyes was irresistible. Perhaps it was because the prophecy I detected in her deep eyes would never be repeated. Perhaps it was because the significance I read in the flash of her eyes was as intimate as it was painful, so that anxiety prevented me from discovering the secret of either our intimacy or her pain, because the call of greed suppressed the voice of truth in my heart. I did not hear it until after I had slaughtered her with a sharp stone, skinned, and eaten her.

Once her death cry fell silent, that voice grew louder. Anxiety was dissipated, the gloom faded, and the mysteries were revealed. I heard the statement her eyes had addressed to me in that look. Inspiration burst forth, and I recognized in the gazelle’s eyes the mother who had twice rescued me from destruction: once when wicked denizens of the spirit world, masquerading as the hare of misfortune, had enticed me and caused me to lose my way when I was searching for my father, and a second time when the world collapsed around me the day I slaughtered my father with a hunting knife only to find myself alone, abandoned, banished, a pariah. My situation in short had been tantamount to Anubi’s. My mother had arrived, thrust me into her skin, and fled far away to save me yet another time through metamorphosis.

WITH THIS BLOODY ESCAPADE commenced my break with the herds. Thereafter my animal kin shunned me and braved the heights to cross over into unknown realms.

The gazelles migrated to the north, crossing lofty, sand-strewn peaks to cast themselves into the mighty sea of sand. The Barbary sheep clans migrated to the south, scaling the circle of southern mountains and crossing into the trackless deserts that lead to mountain chains with surging peaks, about which the tribes recount fantastic legends as part of epics handed down from their forefathers. I first followed the gazelles’ trail in their journey northward but then retraced my steps rather than tackle the sandy slope that cast me down to the oasis one day, for I remembered that gazelles are a species extraordinarily hard to capture when traversing sandy ground. I conjectured, on the other hand, that I could catch up with the herds of Barbary sheep, which are slow creatures on the difficult plains that dot the southern desert before it reaches the mountain chains of whose impregnable heights fantastic legends are narrated. The hope for escape for Barbary sheep is always weaker when they enter a sandy area. The hope for escape for gazelles, conversely, is weaker when they enter mountainous terrain, as time-honored proverbs assert.

I scaled the mountain but had trouble ascending the highest boulders leading to the summit. So I fell back on my wits and sought easier passageways through the chain’s westward extension. That took me the whole day, and dusk fell before I discovered a gap. As darkness overtook me, I cast about for a sheltered place where I could spend the night. Stretching out in a hollow at the base of a column-like boulder, which was suggestive in its majesty of an idol, I surveyed from my lofty perch the low-lying areas where my oasis looked a modest plot no different from the groves of acacia or retem in some of the valleys of the northern desert. When I cast my eyes upwards, the bare, dispassionate sky spoke to me in a stern tongue. As it addressed me, I pondered the cause for the temporary insanity that drove me to pursue creatures that shunned me. Had gluttony motivated me to chase after them? Was gluttony an illness, a need, or an appetite? Was I pursuing them and risking my life in their pursuit out of a longing to capture beauty, which for some unknown reason I felt I could not live without? Was my pursuit motivated by fear of solitude? Was my pursuit occasioned by some other unknown cause? Was I pursuing because man must always pursue, so that even when he finds nothing to pursue, he invents a prey, albeit fictitious, deceptive, or imaginary? Was I pursuing them merely out of stubbornness, because these creatures that had so recently constituted my kin had banished me from their ranks in the course of one day, leaving me a fugitive, alone, and shunned, so that I resembled no one so much as a bastard, desert Anubi? Or did my motivation actually lurk deep within a whispering appeal that told me this rejection was not a rejection but a portent embracing an awe-inspiring truth related to my truth, which no stratagem had allowed me to discern in myself?

I wondered and wondered until my head hurt so much it was ready to burst open. Sleep carried me off before I could reach any answer to any question. I awoke to a dawn that was still cloaked in darkness. I sped away at that early hour, acting on the counsel of the Barbary sheep community, which recommends: “Travel in the morning, rising at dawn, in order to reach your destination.”

I struggled past the stone monoliths until dawn receded and a firebrand was born on the horizon. I climbed a forbidding cliff face and found I was ascending the mountain’s summit from its western side. Because of the gloom, I was not able to discern the full extension of its foothills. I groped my way through a relatively easy opening but was unable to make out the lay of the land until the darkness was routed and light prevailed. The region was filled with mountainous knobs of gloomy hue and modest elevation. These were spaced out and scattered at some points and, in other locations smack dab together. They rose at times and fell in other places till the plains terminated them. All the same, their average height remained constant, even though they were paralleled at the rear by true mountain peaks. Thus the oasis at the bottom appeared to be in a pit rather than on a plain.