Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

And then the dunes. We bounced and slithered over the sand. When we stopped, the flies moved in, feeding from the edge of my eyelids, cleaning their legs on my tear ducts, exploring my nostrils, tickling my lips, crawling deep into my ears as if they had something special to tell me. I came here for silence and I have put my head in a helmet of flies. There are no cars, no trains, no jets, none of those mechanical noises I was so anxious to escape, just the natural sound of a few hundred flies sampling my body and my food. Is it really such an improvement? Wouldn’t I prefer to have a high-speed train shooting through the end of my garden? Ibrahim wrapped a blue scarf around my face, leaving only my eyes exposed. I squeezed the arms of my dark glasses through the tight folds of the thin fabric, and still the flies crawled around the edge of the lenses, and searched every stitch of the scarf for a point of entry.

I set off among the small blonde dunes, tufted with grass, towards the darker orange of the bare dunes in the distance. The big dunes are voluptuous and dead: sharp tendons and hollow scoops and round mounds and sprawling limbs of pure sand. Closer, the few green blades among the pale dry grasses take on a brilliant intensity. Sand, tracks, dung, grass, flies, sky. There’s a small pack to play with here in the desert. There aren’t even palms and goat herds and oases and bashi bazouks and camel caravans and Bedouin encampments. Just sand, tracks, dung, grass, flies and sky. That’s where I am and that’s what there is here. And out of this poverty comes a necessary inwardness. All the distractions I have been running away from aren’t here. I am falling without their resistance to lean on.

The far dune is far further than I thought. I run down the slopes, jog across the flat and labour up the far side of the sea of smaller dunes. The day is coming to a close by the time I reach the lower slopes of the big dune. I look back and after a search spot the white tents which Ibrahim and Mohammed have set up. I can’t go back yet. I am fixated on the summit. The sun is going down and I’m worried about time. Worried about time — it’s a miniature of my life. I make a contract with fate: if I can get to the top of the dune before the sun sets, I’ll be healed. I don’t stop to think what I mean by fate, or how it would reward me, or the countless superstitious deals which I’ve watched myself half-heartedly strike over the years. This is different: my whole being is unreflectingly locked into the contract.

To begin with, the route is hard and humped, but it soon narrows to a soft crease and from there a blade of sand curves up to the peak. With each step I have to excavate my foot and race to keep ahead of the sand which breaks away like snow in sheets and rivulets. It is as if I was running up the fugitive slopes of an hourglass. I have to stop and plant myself firmly while the sand rushes away around me, my heart beating violently. The wind grows stronger as I climb. The flies are fewer and then gone. They are hiding from the cold and the darkness that are rushing into the desert. I am heading away from any refuge, unsure of my footing, unsure of what will happen if I fall. The ridge is high and narrow. Will I bring tons of sand down on my unwilling somersaults? I imagine choking, my throat and lungs filling with sand. Now my lungs are the lower half of the hourglass. I untie the scarf around my neck. It seems to be strangling me.

There’s no colour in the air except the white glare of the sun and the darkening blue of the sky. No clouds, no smoke, no dirt to catch and redden the light. This merciless clarity unmasks the sky and fills the atmosphere with the feeling of planetary solitude. It is beyond human emotions, in a colder, slower zone of mineral melancholy.

I make it up the last few yards to the peak and look out at the lower dunes. The rippling gold sinks into shadow. I wait for my reward. I’m in the Sahara, still gambling, still making deals. The sun slides down fast, leaving a white nimbus around the edges of the large dune opposite. There is no time to reflect. I have to hurry back to camp. In the desert, still keeping busy.

Moonless night, stars down to the ground. Clouds of breath streaming past my cheek. My feet swishing through the cold heavy sand. Walking to calm down. Stopping to calm down. Starting again to calm down. Everything is work, everything has to be earned. My watering eyes bring down a rain of needles from the feeble stars, stitching me into the night. How can I sleep in this silence, the blood hissing in my ears like a hostile crowd? I patrol twenty yards of frigid sand, working to exhaust myself.

I try the tent. Huggermugger in plastic dereliction. The floor covered in used handkerchiefs, empty bottles, dirty clothes, ripped packaging, a torch with a flickering yellow bulb. Outside, no limits; inside, no room. Then no limits inside, then none inside me. Agoraphobia on the bone, agoraphobia in the marrow. I struggle into my sleeping bag and, after half an hour of writhing, my arms pinned to my side and a cold zip in my mouth, imagine I’d be better off outside. And so I burst out of the tent like a swimmer coming up for air, and find myself back under the covered dish of stars, under the dazzling rain of diamond and sapphire needles, a prisoner of too much space.

Today a veil of sand is swaying unreliably over the ground. From the edge of this dune it pours into the air like an inverted waterfall. Sparkling and smoky, it snakes through the hollows, hissing against my boots. Most things change by falling apart, but the restlessness of the desert is a renovation. The landscape is priming its canvas again and again, like an amnesiac living on the shining cusp of oblivion. I can see the footsteps I made yesterday being blunted, buried and obliterated, and I feel the exhilaration of still being here to witness the brevity of the traces I’ve left behind.

A man in my position might easily head for the mountains and try to find consolation in their perseverance — never mind the rock slides, the sinking plateaux and erupting islands — or, at the opposite extreme, he might extort some pleasure from knowing that he will outlast the flies spinning on the windowsill, but neither of these strategies can match the sinister joy of watching the dunes replacing themselves with each other, as if the world could be destroyed and renewed by the same gesture, as if my sense of death could melt into a universe of change, like ice slipping from a tilted glass into a summer lake.

And then the wind died and the stars were at their steeliest. Morbidly swaddled in my sleeping bag, an electric shock of panic kept me from unconsciousness; I was like a sentry who stabs himself awake to avoid the capital crime of sleeping on his watch.

The next day I lay dozing in the tent all morning in a pool of sweat. I woke up fuddled and airless and dehydrated. After drinking a pint of warm water with a taste of baked plastic, I climbed a small dune and tried to clear my mind.

What struck me was the spontaneous transparency of consciousness. Consciousness and experience are synonymous. When I feel the sun warming my face I know it for what it is, nothing needs to be added. I don’t have to tell myself a story: ‘The sun is warming my face.’ It is not a linguistic act. I don’t have to observe myself to know the content of my consciousness, that is precisely what I know already. I may not understand my experience because I am confused, but then the experience I am having is confusion. Understanding may require analysis, knowledge requires facts, but this knowing is given. In its essence consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental.