The shadowy figures of travelers, who might bring either rain or harm to the community, always seemed portentous. So they consulted the diviner about the newcomer’s intentions, even before concern spread through the oasis, but the diviner — in a way typical of this miserable fraternity who are unable to satisfy people’s curiosity, even though people cannot dispense with them — merely sparked more curiosity with his murky sayings, which resembled riddles and puzzles.

The inhabitants of the oasis would not have been skeptical about the stranger’s doings, had he not aroused their suspicions with his conduct, for normally they hastened to welcome visitors and to shower them with displays of generosity, commencing with the slaughter of livestock, continuing with evening festivities, and concluding by shackling them with marriage to their daughters. They had attempted to employ the same ruses with this suspect wayfarer. Eventually they dispatched the fool, in the hope of obtaining a reading on the situation, since they had adopted the ancient tradition of utilizing a fool as their trusted messenger. They were convinced that strangers are by nature mysterious, secretive individuals, who conceal more than they reveal. Otherwise, they would never have set out across the deserts and would never have chosen to join the ranks of foreigners. Whenever their fools failed, they sent a sage. If he failed as well, they dispatched to the cunning fellow the scion of all the cunning of the oasis and perhaps of the entire desert: the diviner.

The stranger outwitted the entire string of investigators this time, however, thus increasing the apprehensions of the people and the anxieties of the elders. When the nobles consulted the diviner, he volunteered a cryptic statement of the sort that diviners favor: “Each day I grow ever more certain that not for no reason at all does a man travel great distances to seek what a mirage conceals.” Then Elelli added a clearer summary of the encounter: “There’s more here than meets the eye; so, beware!” The fool Edahi said what no one else did, although his remark disgusted both the elders and the common folk: “I’ll tell you the truth. The best thing you can do is to kill him tonight.”

He found the spring at the southwestern edge of the oasis. Shocked by the sight of the abundant water, which was ringed round with rude, earthen dikes, he slipped out of his clothes, pulled off his veil, and — without even meaning to — threw himself into the tempting pool. With his hands and feet he created a turbulence that disturbed the stillness of the water and the silence of the grove, which was surrounded by lofty palm trees interspersed with unfamiliar shrubs. From the fields wafted some unseen fruit’s mysterious scent, which tickled his nostrils, although he could not identify it.

The water on his skin felt delightful: cool, soft, and as smooth as a beautiful woman’s body. He ducked his head, and the flood covered him completely. The heavenly spring rocked him; he enjoyed submersion in the water and succumbed to the intoxication. When he thrust his head up suddenly from the depths to gasp for air, he heard a confidential whispering. He listened carefully for a moment, but silence returned, blanketing the whole area. After inhaling greedily, he found himself repeating involuntarily: “How delightful! Why haven’t the idiotic wise men of the desert ever told us that water’s embrace is more delightful than women’s?”

He was starting to submerge once more when the whispering started again. He discerned a feminine timbre to it. He listened for a time, but the voices fell silent and stillness prevailed, interrupted only by the cooing of a dove and the chirring of grasshoppers. He disappeared again, surrendering to the mysterious deeps, as vague insights were awakened in his consciousness. From the body of water he received a forgotten message. He strove to crack the talisman protecting it, but this was difficult. He struggled and did not give up. He almost succeeded, for consciousness’ smoldering coal flared up so that darkness was dispersed and existence was convulsed by a prophecy, but a commotion spoiled everything. He shot to the surface to find a row of beauties above him. He was unsure whether they were human beauties or beautiful jinn. They traded jests with a boldness unknown among the women of the desert and winked at one another with a coquettishness in which virginal bashfulness was not totally overshadowed by traces of the seduction of wanton hussies or even of the temptation of the women singers of whose audacity visitors from distant lands had provided him legendary accounts. They were haughty and uncannily similar in physique and height, and perhaps even in rank. They had beautiful faces, fair complexions, and large black eyes — like gazelles’ — that sparkled with promise, seduction, and passion. They wore wraps that concealed their towering bodies but revealed the contours of their full, curvaceous rumps. So he decided to jest: “Do I see female jinn or beautiful women?”

They all laughed again, and their bodies swayed back and forth, as if dancing at a celebration of the full moon. They so dazzled his eyes that he whispered some advice to himself: “Had no beautiful woman ever entered the desert, it would have been preferable to put your head under the water and keep it there forever.”

One of them, in a lilting voice, asked, “Why do you doubt we’re human?”

Without any hesitation he answered, as he plowed through the water, “Your beauty!”

They echoed in unison, “Beauty?”

Even so, he replied with the wiles of a man well acquainted with women, “Not merely your beauty, but your similarity. You resemble each other like female jinn.”

“Like female jinn?”

They laughed merrily, and then the woman with the seductive voice suggested, “You speak about the female jinn as if you belonged to that nation.”

“I’m not a jinni, but my first wife was one.”

They cried out with genuine curiosity, “Really?”

Then they started laughing again as they leaned their alluring figures over the bank of the spring. One of them requested, “Tell us about the female jinn. What are they like?”

In her eyes he saw a seductive look that no man experienced with women could have missed. He asked, “Do you mean in bed?”

They all laughed with genuine gaiety and for the first time blushed in embarrassment. So he decided to push the game one step further: “I’ve never found anyone to equal them in bed. They’re like blazing fire.”

The area resounded with their boisterous, flirtatious laughter, which no longer hid its bashfulness or seduction. He observed then that they were a covey of six beauties, each so comparable in allure and stature that it was hard to tell them apart. He seized the opportunity afforded by their mirth to ask, “Are you sisters?”

More than one responded, “Of course not!”

“As you know, I’m a stranger in this settlement, and the stranger is always entitled to consideration from the resident.”

“Speak!”

“I want to hear you sing at an evening party.”

One replied, “We’re singers by profession. What good would we be if we didn’t sing for men?”

He added mischievously, “A belle is only beautiful if she recites poetry. A belle is only beautiful if she slips into the bedchamber.”

Some laughed but others said, “It’s not right for a man who has just made shocking remarks to ask women to sing.”

“Shocking?”

“Didn’t you say — moments ago — that water’s embrace is more delightful than a beautiful woman’s?”

He disappeared into the water to seek prophetic inspiration to deliver him from this crisis. Then he said, “That was the tongue of the desert dweller speaking, not mine.”

“The desert dweller’s tongue?”

“Thirst’s tongue.”

“Thirst’s tongue?”

“A person who has never known the fire of the desert doesn’t understand the meaning of water; so forgive me.”

The woman with the seductive voice said, “Before you obtain our forgiveness, I have a piece of advice for you.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Never insult a woman, not even in private.”

“You’re right!”

“Do you know why?”

“I’m all ears.”

“Just as the birds carry seditious talk to a leader, the air is charged with carrying insults to a woman.”

“Are you a diviner?”

“Every woman is a diviner. A woman is instinctively a diviner.”

“You’re right, so right. I swear I’ll have to figure out how to repay you for this counsel, because advice is more precious than a pot of gold. That’s true even if it’s from the mouth of a fool; so, what then if it’s from the tongue of a beautiful woman?”

“Are you a poet?”

“Everyone in the desert is a poet; why ask?”

“Because the only appropriate recompense for a woman is praise in verses that tribes broadcast and that subsequent generations repeat. Similarly, there is no punishment for a woman more harmful than mocking her in an ode that’s repeated by every tongue and enjoyed by the tribes.”

He responded admiringly, “You’re right, so right.”

The woman with the seductive voice approached him and introduced herself: “I’m Tafarat.”

She stepped back so her companion could introduce herself: “My name’s Temarit.”

She stepped aside so her neighbor could present herself: “My name’s Tamanokalt.”

She drew back so the woman next to her could introduce herself: “My name is Tahala.”

She stepped back so her neighbor could come forward: “My name’s Tamuli.”

She stepped back so her friend could introduce herself: “My name is Taddikat.”

Silence prevailed. The dove stopped its cooing and the grasshoppers quieted their refrain. Then the stranger said, “My name is Isan!”

More than one of the covey exclaimed: “Isan! What a name!”

Then the proud beauty who had given her name as Temarit moved forward to say, “May I give you another piece of advice?”

When he nodded his bare head, she declared, “Be careful never to expose your head in a woman’s presence again.”

He was quick to defend himself: “I thought it shameful for a man to remove his veil in the desert, but not in the water.”

Temarit stepped back while Tamanokalt moved forward to elucidate the saying’s secret meaning: “If men realized how repulsive their faces are, they would never take their veils off.”

“What?”

“Their faces resemble camels’.”

“Camel faces?”

She stepped back so Tahala could add: “And their ears resemble donkeys’.”

“Donkey ears?”

She retreated, and Tamuli stepped forward to continue: “And their noses are birds’ beaks.”

“Birds’ beaks?”

She withdrew, and Tafarat presented herself to sum up: “Aren’t camel faces, donkey ears, and bird beaks a handicap for you?”

Initially upset, he responded, “A handicap. . a great handicap.”

“Avoid letting a woman see you without your veil, because she will despise you even if you fashion a palace for her in your heart and have enough children by her to populate the desert.”

Silence reigned again. They fetched their jugs to fill with water from the spring. First Tamuli bent over the pool. A black plait of her hair escaped from her wrap’s confinement to swing seductively through the air. In fact, it fell into the water. He crept toward her, as if to help fill the jug, but instead seized the braid in his hands, clasping it between his palms. A daring strategist well acquainted with women, he squeezed it till water sprayed out. He closed his fingers around it and affectionately fondled it. Then he leaned down to kiss it, inhaling its fragrance. Closing his eyes he said, as though to himself, “I never dreamt there were retem blossoms in the oases.”

In a whisper like the rustling of northern breezes caressing the plumes of the retem bushes, she replied: “In the oases, there are flowers more fragrant than retem blossoms.”

“You are a jinni!”

Whispering once more, she told him, “A man’s favorite perfume is a woman’s scent, not a retem’s.”

He clung to the plait and pressed it against his damp chest with an audacity ill-becoming a visitor who had only just entered an alien sanctuary. He had a strong incentive, however, for the inaccessible mystery guiding his steps granted him a prophetic insight that women tend to be animated and spontaneous with strangers but cautious and inhibited around kinsmen. Thus, he acted spontaneously, since he was certain the young women’s temperaments would not shine forth unless his did. Generally speaking, women are like dolls that are animated only when we manipulate them, when we show them how, for woman is a paste more malleable in a man’s hands than dough. He can transform her into a nun or an artiste, perhaps because her spirit is contained within man’s spirit. For this reason, no woman is corrupt unless a man corrupts her, and no woman is virtuous, unless a man has rendered her so.

She bent over him, inundating him with her perfume, her genuine perfume, the fragrance of a woman — not that of retem blossoms — a fragrance that fells a man rather than anesthetizes him. This perfume, which turns some men into heroes and others into villains, can perfect life or lead to insanity. It can create life or extinguish it. This is the feminine scent. A beautiful woman’s fragrance is life-saving when she wishes and fatal when she so decrees. It can animate dead bones if she chooses to offer herself, but slays the entire world if she decides to withhold herself.

A full breast escaped from her garment. She had leaned over so long that her virginal breast had lost patience and rebelled, jiggling and slipping down, liberating itself from its humble shelter. What he first saw was the nipple, which was bulging, promising, and as large as a date. It crowned her white, tantalizing, rounded breast, as if planning to escape or to liberate itself by swelling into a new breast atop the old. Sweating profusely, he went crazy and reached out to caress the full nipple that clung to the generous, bulging breast. Then an intoxicated moan escaped from the beauty: a deep, audible groan like the sorrowful lament in a hymn of longing. He drew back and responded to the water’s surge with an inaudible remark. The beauty raised her jug from the pool and stood proudly by the spring. She cast her gaze far away, toward the tops of the palms in distant fields, before asking, “Do you realize why the Law stipulated that man should cover his head with a veil?”

“When the priestess speaks, the world can but listen.”

“It’s because man’s most vulnerable point is his mouth, whereas woman’s is her body.”

“I think I’ve heard a saying like this before.”

“Since the Law proclaims it, not I, how could you have escaped hearing it?”

“But I heard no reference to the mouth in the lesson you gave me a short time ago.”

“We didn’t discuss the mouth, because our goal was to skirt the mouth. We did not mention the mouth, because we were obliged to circle the mouth and discuss its milieu, because a discussion of the mouth would have been an attack on its sanctity, or so the Law decrees.”

“An image! A sign! The language of the Law is metaphorical. This is another proof that I hit the mark when I called you offspring of the jinn, not the daughters of human beings.”

“What is the Law save words of advice from the jinn to the desert’s inhabitants?”

“Really?”

“Have you forgotten that Mandam, the desert people’s forefather, wasn’t expelled from Waw until the day his mouth devoured a fruit from the orchard?”

“Oh. . Mandam. . ”

“The mouth is the weak spot that led to our expulsion from the orchard and turned our world into a desert. Do you know the status of the mouth in customary law?”

“I’m not a diviner; how would I know?”

“A man’s mouth is comparable in every respect to the secret a woman conceals between her legs.”

Silence reigned. He gazed at the faces of the other beauties and saw they really were a troupe of female jinnis. He submerged his body in the water. He dove to conceal not merely his body but head, face, and mouth. He decided to safeguard his mouth by hiding it beneath the water so the torrent would create a veil from its flow, but he heard the she-jinni say, “The mouth is man’s weak spot. Beware!”

He dove into the water and disappeared up to his shoulders, neck, ears, and eyes. Then he submerged his whole head. He vanished, and the veil was complete, the veil of water. He held his breath and kept still for a protracted period. He swallowed some water but held his breath as long as he could. Then he sprang up to gulp in the air voraciously. He staggered and tumbled back before gaining his balance. He started to suck in air through his mouth and nostrils again, filling his chest. On discovering that the troupe of beauties had vanished, he assumed they really were children of the spirit world. He remembered what the priestess had said about man’s weak spot and laughed. He guffawed tipsily, reveling in the laughter. Then. . then, rage overwhelmed him. At first he could not think why. Soon he discovered the reason. He wanted Tamuli and she desired him too. She liked his audacity but would not forgive his restraint. So she had decided to punish him, to avenge herself on him. Thus she had recited the myth of the mouth, of the weak spot, and of the grandfather banished from Waw because of the morsel he had stolen from the orchard. She had decided to mock him in front of her companions in order to humiliate and punish him for cowardice. She had decided to say he had no right to reach a hand into woman’s orchard unless he was certain he was capable of plucking the fruit, because woman is like an enemy territory, which you do not raid unless you possess the courage to kill, because otherwise you will be killed. She had in effect told him: “Woman, too, is an arena where you will definitely meet defeat unless you resolve from the beginning to conquer.” He had unintentionally insulted her with his idiotic response and had revealed his ignorance of the secrets of passion to the covey accompanying her.

Choked with rage, he beat the water with both hands. Then, hoping they would hear his maxim, he shouted as loudly as he could: “Hear my law, wretched spawn of the jinn: Unless a man bares his weak spot to a beauty, he will never win her.” He guffawed with insane laughter while slapping the water.

Singing water’s praises, he crawled out of the spring and remembered the last time he had plunged into a torrent. That had been when the Amehru Ravine had flooded in the Tassili region, more than a year before. He chanted an ancient song in which the poet praised his master — water — in recondite verses. He had previously chanted these refrains repeatedly without ever discerning their secret meaning as clearly as he did now on emerging from the spring-fed pool. He said, “The bard was right to take water for his Beloved, since it’s the only entity that traverses the heavens to fall subsequently to the pits, inundating even the darkest, most remote areas. It cleanses itself in lights supernal and returns to hide in the lowlands. It explores the unknown as a creator when it turns to vapor and returns to earth as a created object when it becomes visible.” Then he asked aloud, “Who are you, water?” He answered, “Like us, water, you’re on a journey. Like us, you are launched on your migration by a fire. Like us, you recuperate by regaining the homeland.” He lay down under a palm tree and murmured the ancient song for a while. Then he observed, “Fire makes us fathers. Water makes us mothers.” He hoisted himself on his elbows and watched dusk’s flood spill over the calm pool, dazzling the eye with a captivating, golden reflection. Two lovers — the sky’s light and the earth’s water — exchanged a playful and meaningful look. This flirtation continued for a time till prophecy gushed forth in his heart. He grinned with a strategist’s malice and then muttered, “Beloved of long standing, I will fulfill my pledge to you. With your assistance, master, I will wreak vengeance, since vengeance is not really punishment unless our master water plays a part.” He inhaled the scent of the field — of the trees, mud, oasis crops and of the humidity that perfumed the air — until he felt dizzy. He laughed quietly before reaching in his kit to extract a dismal-looking cloth. Dropping it on his lap, he focused on his singing again. He leaned over the piece of fabric, never ceasing his mysterious refrain. Like the forest-land priests who never execute their mysterious rites without first reciting spells, he swayed back and forth to the haunting melody as he gazed at the surface of the nearby pool. He reached for the cloth and held it by the end so the rows of charms printed in white lines across the cloth were visible. These had faded, either from wear or perhaps from long exposure to the desert’s sunlight. When he fastened this end to his forehead, another amulet was visible in the veil’s “tongue.” This charm was stuffed into a case made of an unusual type of leather, which was also embossed with magical symbols. He began to wrap this alarming veil around his head as he intoned mysterious lingo like forest dwellers’ cant. Then he fell silent and reminded himself privately that the time had come for him to draw on his inner reserves and to twist his serpentine veil around his head to hide from the world his ears, which the shrew had recently likened to donkey ears. Women are descended from such a wily creature! Anyone who thought he could hide something from this community, even once, was a fool a thousand times over. The beauty had perspicaciously and instantly observed what he had concealed from mankind for ages. She had immediately seen his ears and had similarly discovered his tail. She had not seen the tail hiding behind his back or the one lurking between his thighs; she had glimpsed his real tail, his secret tail, his tail that had eluded the most cunning analysts. From that day forward, he would admit that woman is the mistress of cunning and the sovereign of all tacticians. She had been right to say: “Man should not expose his head.” When he exposes his head he actually exposes his intentions. A man who exposes his intentions is not a man or — for that matter — a woman. The head is man’s vulnerable point, not because it is crowned with the two horns that fools perceive as ears, but because it hides secrets. It hides thoughts, which — should they be laid bare — will reveal his true vulnerability. The concealed weak point is in the mouth, in the tongue, in the mystery that hides within the tongue. It is not the same as the body’s weak spot, which dangles between the thighs. Glory to the veil! Veils truly are glorious, because a message needs a veil. Prophecy would not be prophecy unless concealed behind a veil.

After fastening the veil securely round his head, he approached the water to inspect himself in its mirror. He leaned over the surface of the submissive pool, which was flooded by the golden dusk and saw another creature there: a haughty, terrifying demon, as unfathomable as a god. Amazed, he remarked: “It’s right for desert folks to shun a person who removes his veil. It’s right for the desert’s offspring to shun a creature who disguises himself that way. The lost Law decreed correctly that any tribesman who sheds his veil should be shunned for this bare-faced disguise. It similarly ordered that any tribesman sporting the veil should be honored, even if he belongs to an alien tribe or has entered the desert as a immigrant.”

He returned to his kit and extracted from the bag a pouch wrapped in leather ornamented with cryptic symbols. He removed a suspect powder, which he examined carefully before returning it to the bag. He thrust his hand into his bag again to take out another pouch also wrapped in leather even less prepossessing than the previous piece. He untied it and stepped toward the spot where the water bubbled up. He stood on the bank and mulled over the significance of the way the light looked on the body of its beloved water. He listened carefully to the silence, which was interrupted only by the songs of the grasshoppers. He recited the charm in a loud voice: “Aid me in the struggle, master water, as I transmit my commandment to people.”

He sprinkled a secret drug onto the water. The suspect particles flashed in the light as they fell and then scattered over the water’s surface. He watched them quickly spread

The evening celebration convened on the night the moon became full. While it was enthroned as lord in a heavenly throne, the maidens turned to poetry’s sanctuary and commended their hearts to mournful songs in their ancient longing as a message honoring the Beloved.

Their parched throats released melancholy songs endowed with a longing that was as ancient as the eternal desert and that was dispatched to honor a Beloved as ancient as the eternal sky. The women’s circle was located in an open area, which was adjacent to the houses of the oasis on the northeast and which bounded the far-stretched fields to the southwest. The men were present too but did not form a circle. Instead they sat in an impressive row and remained silent so they could — as they usually did when there was a gathering — spy on the women or the spirit world.

With their fingertips, the beauties made the drums speak; a cry emerged from the drums’ bellies. The beauties’ voices rang with longing, and a prophecy emerged from their mouths. Their fingers touched not only the drums but squeezed their own hearts.

Their throats did not release just voices but gave voice to their very spirits. Once the veil of the Beloved — enthroned in the heavens — was tinged with frenzy and blood, the men’s feet began to pummel the ground. They crawled about on their hands and knees in ecstasy. Others fell in the dirt, where in response to their longing they rolled around in a trance-like state of altered consciousness.

Meanwhile he — a stranger through all generations, the poster child of curses, the eternal man with the jenny — hiding behind a sandy hillock, began to observe the festivities surreptitiously. When the timeless rite commenced and the hearts of the young women were decimated by longing, he too quaked. He swayed and rocked with ardors beyond any that creatures of the desert had ever experienced. He released a lethal groan that could have devastated him had he not sped off in search of the vast open spaces. No one could sap the body’s strength, thrust a knife in the chest, or crush a breast the way these imbecilic, passionate ecstatics did, but he fled. He fled from the place behind the hill, from the oasis, and from the entire desert. He fled to the orchard. He did not, however, test its defenses. He circled round the place where physical space does not exist and longingly gazed at the Orchard’s Master, who had expelled him from his realm one day even before he expelled Mandam from the sacred site. For the first time he grieved at his eternal solitude and wished he had brought the she-jinni Tamuli with him so she could see what she had never seen, hear what she had never heard, and taste what she had never tasted. If that wretched woman acquired a talent or gained a gift from the spirit world and accompanied him on a trip to the horizons, she would grasp the secret. Then she would not dare chide him for criminal ignorance of the Law. She would certainly recognize that the punishment the Master of the Orchard had meted out to the jenny master was immeasurably more severe than that he inflicted upon Mandam, that child of wretchedness.

If there was anything in the desert that could excuse the beauty’s offense, it had to be her crazed hymn, which shook him and stripped away his ugly body, allowing him to flee as he did now, exploring the vast expanses of the place that no mother’s child had ever reached by any route, since it slumbers in hearts far away and can only be attained via the demon that tribes refer to as “longing.” Is this really you, ancient orchard? Is this really you, river of milk and honey? Is this really you, tree of obfuscation? Is this really you, enigmatic fruit? Is this really you, heavenly lote tree?

Then he bolted; he bolted and began running at breakneck speed. He raced as fast as the wind, indeed as fast as the jinn. He shot from his secluded spot in a second. He shot past the women’s circle in an insane leap and disappeared. He reached the fields in two seconds. He crossed over the spring in one second. He reached the sandy expanses in another second and collapsed there. He began to tremble and wail.

He heard himself weep like a child that has lost its doll.

It was reported by oasis people that the fool’s ancestors — like theirs — were originally nomadic and that he had settled in the oasis with other stragglers from one of the northern tribes during a lean year when drought had decimated both people and herds. These survivors had sought refuge in the southern oases as they normally did whenever drought gripped the desert for an extended period. It was also said — on the authority of these nomads — that the wretch had first appeared in a herd belonging to a slave woman who had discovered him squeezing in among a crush of livestock to nurse from the teat of a goat. He had been murmuring monotonous sounds like a chant. She recited over his head charms derived from the forgotten language of the ancestors and waited fruitlessly for his mother to appear to reclaim him. So she was forced to wrap him in her cloak and take him home, adopting him. The infant, however, did not remain hers, for children dropped outdoors by the Unknown are not born to become some tribe’s offspring but to live as strangers among the tribes. The fates entrust them to the desert race not to adopt but to cradle, since — no matter what — they will not consent to domestication or incorporation into a clan. Privy to this secret, the tribe’s elders watched compassionately as the woman raced among the tents of the tribe’s settlement, searching for her foster son, who had not returned home for days. They were certain that this alleged offspring was not like other children and that the poor woman could not have claimed him as her son even if he had emerged from her belly. What then if he had arrived through some machination of the Unknown? The proof for this was that the womb that had carried him for months had disavowed him, thrusting him into a herd, because of the despair his destiny caused her once the unknown world revealed to her that an infant the fates have chosen as their messenger will resist all attempts by people to integrate him into a family, so that not even his mother will be able to make a son of him.

Although the child disappeared for days or even weeks, he would turn up occasionally, reappearing as suddenly as he had vanished. He would surface perhaps out of compassion for his mother, even though he would never tell her the secret reason for his absence or where he had been during those days. He would just laugh idiotically whenever his mother attempted to question him and then dart off to join his playmates outdoors. It was also said that these mysterious forays of his were responsible for his mental hiccups. He had once absented himself for more than a month, and the whole tribe had gone out searching for him, to no avail. Cunning trackers arrived and followed a trail, which ended abruptly at an impressive hill that was encircled by tombs of ancient ancestors and that overlooked arid Temarit Ravine, which leads to the western deserts. When his tracks stopped abruptly, the tribe was reduced to wandering aimlessly, gleaning news from shepherds, wayfarers, migrants, and hermits. More days passed, then weeks, but the lost lad did not turn up. It is always like this in the desert, for deliverance from affliction comes only after one despairs of relief. People had despaired and lost hope when the missing lad appeared one evening, carried on the back of a camel that was led by a migrant who dropped him off at the campsite and continued on his way into the unknown. The feverish and glassy-eyed child, who had foam trickling from his mouth, argued with unidentified companions no one else could see. The slave woman tended him with herbal remedies, twiggy brews, and charms. After a few days he was able to move about on his own two feet. Physically he was returning to normal, but the trip had scarred him. He had become noticeably squint-eyed, and his mind was even more clearly affected. His words seemed topsy-turvy. He saw things no one else saw and heard what no one else heard. Even on the coldest nights, he would sleep out in the open, terming tents and dwellings “prisons.” He would tear the shirt from his chest and run naked, referring to garments as “swaddling clothes.” He had an extreme distaste for gold and called the ingots over which the traders in passing caravans vied “copper.” He also referred to the beauties of the clans as “snares,” even though he enjoyed teasing them and conveying their messages to their lovers. He played with children his age but ridiculed them as “fathers’ tombs,” whenever he quarreled with them. These wretches would taunt him and call him “foundling” to his face. He would take this as a joke and retort as his ruined intellect dictated: “You boast of your earthly fathers, but show me your heavenly father.” If they bragged about their fathers when he was present, he would tell them, “We should not call a father a ‘father,’ unless he’s absent. We should not brag about our affiliation with a father we can see and hear, even if he is the tribe’s leader or priest.”

Then he would suddenly feel so downhearted that tears would glisten in his eyes. Gazing over the expanses of eternal wasteland, he would say, “We’re all foundlings in this desert!” Those wretches, however, ignored his sorrow, for they were too “intelligent” to catch the secret drift of his words. Instead, they took turns mocking him, repeating, “You’re a she-jinni’s kid!” He would respond just as derisively, “You’re fathers’ sons. I’m the sky’s son.” When they decided to push their provocation further to deride him for his mind’s handicaps, he would retort defiantly, “Praise heaven for liberating me from this tyrannical demon!” The mentally unchallenged children would all laugh at the logic of their playmate’s boast of being liberated from the intellect’s constraints. The fool would make fun of his mates who bragged about their hobbling intellects, since not even the wisest of the tribe’s elders from either faction could rule according to his mind.

When he wearied of his contemporaries’ sarcasm, the fool enjoyed repeating, “Your minds are in your heads; mine is in my heart.” Then he would quit them as if fleeing to eternity.

What the fool could not bear was discussion of the mysterious voyage during which he lost his mind — or was liberated from that tyrannical demon, as he liked to put it. Whenever people chanced to mention that and inquisitively attempted to pry the secret from him, his eyes gazed off across the empty countryside. Sorrow pervaded his look, and his right eye became even more dominant. The most he would say was that the earth had answered his appeal, transporting the hill where he sat at twilight, to deposit him in the land of Longing. He never once, however, answered nosy questions about the land he referred to as “Longing.” When people showered him with inquiries, eager to hear more, he would slip away from the gathering and escape to the open countryside. The tribe’s elders said, “Fools are a community who will not betray their message. The only reason they lost their earthly minds was to recover their hearts in the spirit world.”

Western marauders who launched a raid against his tribe’s lands one year found him tending his camels in the region adjacent to the Blue Mountains. They fastened a palm-fiber rope around his neck and took him away as a captive to sell in the markets of Tawat, where a noble from the Ahaggar tribes, who live in the western deserts, purchased him. His new master set off with him toward his tribal homelands. The two men spent the night in a grim ravine ringed by clay banks. Then the captive took from his pocket a flute he had himself cut from a reed thicket in an oasis swamp of his lost homeland and — once his master had withdrawn partway down the valley bottom — breathed through it his grief for this lost land. After midnight, however, the master returned and loomed above his captive like a ghostly jinni, swaying to the melodies of the flute. The man stopped playing, but his master urgently gestured for him to continue. He breathed into the flute’s opening his longing and articulated his despair through these yearning breaths. The master swayed, experiencing the intoxicated trance of mystics. In fact, he liberated himself from the dignified behavior of nobles and chanted an ancient lament to the melody that flowed from the flute. Longing flamed in his heart, and with each breath he exhaled this fire, as the reed responded with complaints and wails. The stillness grew even more profound and this melody made the desert’s solitude seem even more pronounced. The heavens abandoned their eternal serenity to lean down toward the valley bottom, and the stars glistened with an inquisitive, inebriated gleam. Once the captive put down his flute and silence supplanted its harmony, the master observed, “I never would have thought a man could sing with a palm cord around his neck.”

Panting from exhaustion, the captive replied, “The cord’s around my neck, master, not around my heart.” He fell silent but added, “We lose nothing, master, as long as we have not lost the self.”

The master asked in a manner that showed his astonishment, “Haven’t you lost your self?”

“Of course not. Perhaps I’ve lost control of my body; I’ve not lost my self.”

“Isn’t slavery the ultimate loss?”

“Slavery is the body’s ultimate loss of control, not the heart’s. We lose our selves, master, when our heart is enslaved and we are free. We gain our selves via the heart’s freedom while we are captive.”

“Are you a poet?”

“All of us are poets, master.”

“Have you suffered a great deal?”

“What is life save a succession of pains that eventually accustom us to enjoying pain’s bitterness?”

“Woe to anyone who does not acquire a taste for pain’s bitter flavor.”

“Master, your slave here present before you, has in his lifetime seen calamities that make the affliction of slavery appear insignificant.”

“But don’t people say death is easier to bear than slavery?”

“Death actually is easily borne, master. Death is easier to bear than anything else, even when slavery isn’t the alternative. So, what if we’re able to wager only the body and thereby assure life for the heart?”

“That’s a hard choice!”

“Living’s hard; dying is easy.”

When the master did not respond, he continued, “It’s difficult to live, because we learn through pain. It’s easy to die, because we are made miserable by what we learn.”

The master expressed his agreement in a pained moan like a mournful ballad. He did not leave to sleep until shortly before dawn.

The following evening he sat with his captive and asked him to discuss calamities. So he told his master he had seen a land quake so violently that it swallowed what stood on its surface, a homeland trade one set of inhabitants for another, a windstorm blow hard enough to carry off people and their livestock and bring in other residents, a son raise his hand to stab his father, and a daughter disguise herself each night to couple in bed with her father. He told his master about the effects of an epidemic when it sweeps across the desert, about calamities occasioned by drought, the terrors of hostile raids, and many other afflictions.

It was not hard for the man to discern in each misfortune he heard recounted a message from the spirit world. So he developed a taste for these evening conversations and persisted in sitting with his captive each night until they became boon companions. He told him confidentially one day, “Man should not fear a man who has suffered, because just as there is nothing to fear for a man who has suffered, there is nothing to fear from him.” That was before he put all his possessions at the captive’s disposition. In fact, it was before he made him master over his whole world, so that even the master was at the captive’s beck and call. He commented jokingly at the time they concluded this contract, “In our world, the owner is the slave and the slave the owner. So don’t imagine I freed you when I relinquished control over you. From now on, I’ll be a chain around your neck.” Thereafter he did not discuss anything having to do with his possessions, until he fell prey to an illness that quickly dispatched him. Then his household found in his possessions a piece of leather by which he left his captive half of his livestock along with a gift called freedom. So, emancipated, he returned to his homeland.

He regained his homeland in the northern desert but found no family members, no fellow tribesmen, and no pastures. His family had perished, the tribe had been dispersed, and the earth had been scorched by drought. So he headed south and left half of his herd of camels — untended — to forage for any grass that had survived the lengthy drought in the sandy areas near the oases. Then he settled in the oasis and sold the remainder of his herd in the markets. He built a hut there and waited, gleaning information about his camels from wayfarers and caravan leaders and inquiring about the desert’s condition. The drought’s curse, however, continued unabated. So he thought he would defang calamity by amusing himself. He forgot that man always errs when he decides to amuse himself, because amusement — as subsequently became evident — is actually nothing but an affront to the mind.

Having taken a fancy to a girl from a farming family, he asked himself, “Why don’t I do today what I will have to do some day? Why don’t I give in and hitch myself to a woman, the way my ancestors did before me?” He only realized later that he had committed another error the day he decided to prefer a course of action that had not been recommended by his sovereign intellect but that tied him instead to his ancestors.

He married an oasis girl, and she bound him to the oasis.

Since his early childhood, women had used him in their stirring rituals as a medium charged with elucidating mysteries and furnishing them with news of loved ones who had traveled. Out of all the children whom women of the tribe used as mediums in their celebrations, which they normally called a séance, his reputation for prognostication spread. So the elders took charge of him, delighting in the birth of prophecy in the tribe’s settlements. Some searched his eyes for a sign and others made it their business to strip off his clothes to search for marks. Then they subjected him to an interrogation that lasted several nights. On completing this, they employed a cunning stratagem: they allowed him to play outdoors with the other children, but assigned a playmate to ask a question, so the child would not be intimidated by the presence of adults. They dispatched the boy, who was charged to return with an answer. They waited for several days before he brought back the response. When this prophecy was fulfilled, they announced to the tribe the birth of a diviner.

Roused after sunrise, he discovered a specter squatting nearby and staring inquisitively at him. He traded stare for stare, but the ghost did not shift position or say a word. So he asked, “Who are you?”

He quit the fields to take refuge in the cemetery. As he loaded his gear on his jenny, he said, “The most suitable place for a man to reside isn’t next to the living but beside the dead.” His throat rattled with suppressed laughter as he made his way stealthily to the center of the oasis and the foot of the mountain where the cemetery slumbered. Since appearing at the oasis he had explored this area repeatedly and had thus discovered that the mountain was not the hill the idiotic people of the oasis thought it was, but tombs of the successive generations who had lived in the oasis since the desert dried up and left an oasis in its embrace. Tombs had collected atop other tombs, and their stones had crumbled, covering other stones. Buildings had collapsed, burying the tops of those preceding them. The bones of the latter-day dead were heaped on the skulls of earlier decedents, rising to lofty heights in a structure that deserved to be called a sanctuary rather than a mountain. It towered into the sky, where it stood as a beacon to people of their own futility, bearing witness to them every day of the destiny that awaited them and their descendents. People are blind, however, and do not see. They are deaf and do not hear, ignorant and unable to decipher symbols. Had they looked, they would have discovered in the decaying bones, which poked out here and there from the ancient edifice, the destiny awaiting them. Had they listened, they would have heard the cry of reality in the eternal stillness of the desert. Had they been able to read, they would have deciphered the message incorporated into the sanctuary’s center with skull bones. These wretched folk, however, were locked in a never-ending tussle with reality as evidenced by the way they fled from their mud-brick homes over the course of generations as the tombs encircled them. Although they moved out of the way, destiny pursued them. Inevitably, the tombs encompassed them and they were forced to move again. Now, here they were, rejecting the reality that awaited them, fleeing to nearby open spaces, and calling the burial mound a mountain and its sacred slope a cemetery. They did not have the courage to decamp far away, to seek genuine liberation, to flee from internment, and to surrender their fate to the eternal desert, which would never remind them of their reality, since it is itself a reality that does not need to construct lofty mounds from the skulls of predecessors to remind people of their insignificance. Anyone who seeks its protection sneers at death. There is no death in the womb that nurtures us, but the desert does not forgive anyone who betrays her. He does not merely die an alien’s death but also lives miserably, because anyone who does not seek death’s protection, anyone who does not appeal to the desert for its assistance, finds his whole life a living death. His entire life becomes a desert.

In the entryway to one of these vaults clinging to the surface of the mountain, the intellect’s patron visited him one evening. He was an elderly man of uncertain age, tall, pale-complexioned, lean — apparently a wayfarer from the desert’s labyrinths. He seemed not to have imbibed the oases’ loathsome water, which upsets the body and the mind. He was veiled with a faded, striped cloth and brandished — rather than leaned on — a gloomy staff. With audible zeal, he was debating with creatures no one else could see. He publicly cursed the fertile land’s humidity, which had inflamed his arthritis.

He stood outside the mausoleum at sunset, and the stranger heard him say — as if he were rebutting a ghost from the spirit world, “We should never say: ‘Let’s do what our fathers did.’ ”

He went out to his visitor, whom he discovered beside a tomb that had crumbled to bits of stone, except for its marker. Gazing at the horizon, which was cloaked in sunset red, and clasping his stick with both hands, he asked, “Does my master propose a different maxim?”

The other man promptly responded, “Of course; we ought to proclaim, ‘Let’s do what the intellect says.’”

“What, pray tell, does the intellect say?”

“It says: ‘Beware of surrendering control of your affairs to oasis women, for they will become pegs that tie you to the land.’ ”

“Everything on earth ties us down. The body and even the earth do. Where can you flee a destiny of restraining commitments?”

“I’m sad to hear this from a stranger who has arrived in the oasis as a wayfarer.”

Deciding to enjoy the sunset, he squatted down beside the other man and observed, “I’ve heard that our master also arrived in the oasis one day as a transient from the desert.”

“I arrived in the oasis as a transient, intending to leave. But I betrayed my intellect and told myself one day when I took a fancy to a girl, ‘It’s time for me to do what my forefathers before me did.’ So I buried myself alive.”

Glancing circumspectly at his companion from behind his veil, he asked, “Did you say you’ve buried yourself alive?”

“Sedentary life is lethargy followed by death, don’t you think?”

He smiled behind his veil, and the smile showed in his mischievous eyes. The mind’s proponent, however, did not notice this, because he was still traversing the horizons, as he had done since first settling on the tomb.

He agreed with his guest: “I’m happy to hear a man who chose one day to settle in the oasis say this.”

“The matter could easily be tolerated if only our bodies were affected, but the frightening thing is that our minds are too.”

“I like what I hear! I like it a lot!”

“Our bodies are subjected to arthritis, bloating, obesity, and epidemics, but worse than all this is the harm done to our minds.”

He waited for the other man to offer a clarification, but the guest remained silent. He was silent for a long time. So he asked mischievously, “Is idiocy a manifestation of this syndrome?”

“Idiocy?”

“I had a delightful visit from a cheerful fellow who proclaimed himself an idiot. So I thought he might be a victim of the disease you just mentioned.”

He attempted to suppress a wicked laugh, but it escaped. His throat rattled for a while. Then he explained, “Naturally I didn’t believe him. Doing so would have made me the greater fool. Just as we should not believe anyone who claims to be wise, we should not credit the assertion of a person calling himself a fool. The conventions of concealment teach us that a thing’s reality lies in its opposite, not its mate.”

The man with the striped veil, however, was still preoccupied by his voyage to the horizons. From an ever-distant homeland, he observed, “Do you know that all the farmers I’ve seen were once nomads?”

“What evidence is there for that?”

He fell silent. Stillness prevailed, the evening stillness. Along the horizon that lay beyond the fields and that encircled the low-lying, sword-type dunes to the extreme west, a reddish gloom advanced. The specter, who was dubbed the intellect’s advocate, spoke: “Tip your ears my way, so I can tell you a tale.”

“We’re all ears.”

“In ancient times, the oasis wasn’t an oasis. It was a lake. Like all bodies of water, it was swathed in solitude and stillness and its waters glittered with light from the heavens. The ancient Law referred to the creatures living in the lake as water nymphs. These jinnis excelled at singing. Their singing was not like that we hear from girls today. What we hear now is merely a poor imitation of the songs of these aquatic sorceresses. Indeed, any man who heard their songs forever lost his mind and his way. The men of that age were nomadic and destined to live happily, provided that they did not settle down. This was specified by clauses of a secret covenant of which later generations knew little. It is reported that the man with the despicable jenny led them to the lake to hear the water nymphs sing in a soirée they held whenever the moon turned full. The men heard the singing once, went insane, and lost their way, forever. They lost their way and clung to the location reserved for every wayfarer who has lost his way. For this reason, you will observe that whenever they hear singing they become tense and rowdy, try to break free of their fetters, and lapse into altered states of consciousness. The singing awakens within them their ancient reality, which they call ‘Longing.’ Then they try to escape from their bonds and to regain their lost selves.”

“What a story!”

“Each nation’s reality is encapsulated in a story; beware of mocking stories.”

“I have no intention of slighting stories. I just don’t like to hear wretches blame their sins on the man with the jenny every time that passion blinds them or that a caprice overwhelms them.”

He turned to face his host for the first time, returning from his journey to the horizon. He stared at him with wandering eyes, as if noticing his presence for the first time, as if all the while he had been addressing ghosts, not the man seated beside him. He inquired skeptically, “Do you think they accuse the man with the jenny unfairly?”

“I’ve never doubted that. People inevitably make many more false accusations against those who wish them well than against those who wish them ill. Hasn’t my master learned from experience that they’re quick to fault him whenever he invites them to submit to the intellect’s guidance?”

He stared silently at his face. Then he leaned forward to say sorrowfully, “The truth is that they fuss more at someone who asks them to submit to the intellect’s guidance than at anyone else.”

His companion said approvingly, “You see? This should prompt us to revise the story. So we will say, ‘It was their passions that led them to fall into the embrace of the waterjinnis.’ We won’t say, ‘The man with the jenny subjected them to singing’s seduction.’ All the same. . let’s set aside the story of the first people. Tell me about the intellect’s sovereign rule. Didn’t you visit me this evening to lead me down the intellect’s path?” His throat rattled with malicious laughter.

Then intellect’s advocate replied, “The intellect is a messenger that leads but is not led. I did not come to convince you; you can satisfy yourself concerning it.”

“I’m not a diviner. I can’t read the secret thoughts you detect in human breasts.”

“Every intellectual is a diviner. In our world, the intellect is the greatest diviner.”

“But a prophecy from the tongue of a diviner is more powerful. A prophetic maxim is nobler when spoken.”

Darkness crept over the oasis, devouring the horizon as it went. Then it subdued the fields on its trek. In its grasp, the structures of the homes and huts of the farmers — scattered here and there — changed into ghosts. After a silence, the visitor said, “Let me mention then the intellect’s first maxim: ‘Don’t ever violate local custom. Never violate the customary law of a land where you settle as a guest.’ Am I wrong?”

The pervasive silence was broken only by the distant chirring of grasshoppers. With his fingers he traced lines in the mound’s dirt, which was mixed with the powdered bones of the dead. Then he said, “You didn’t err, because you speak of the law of those who lead a normal life. I cannot recognize, however, the customary laws of strangers, because I don’t live their life.”

“A man who lives with other people does not have the right to scorn their law. Do you know why?” Without waiting for an answer, he quickly supplied one: “Because he can’t do without other people.”

The second man retorted self-confidently, “Not so fast! Not so fast! We truly can’t do without other people when we acknowledge our membership in their community. Even so, I cannot surrender my affairs to them or allow them to reduce me to being just a man like any other.”

“What do you mean?”

With even greater self-assurance he continued, “For us to convey the truth to the people, we must refuse to live like the people. For us to save the people, we must keep our distance from them.”

“But people are children at times and wretches at others. How does it harm us to beguile them by hearing their complaints? What harm does it do us to respond to their weakness by accepting their offerings? What harm does it do us to humor them by sharing their amusements?”

His companion stubbornly rejected this argument: “If we keep pace with them, they will draw us down to their world. If we pretend to approve of their games, they will multiply their foolishness, assuming that we share their passion. If we cede an inch to them, we will lose our selves and become one of them for ever.”

“But you will never set the people’s minds at rest unless you reveal your intentions to them.”

A cry of protest escaped from the other man: “I should reveal my intentions to them? How can I reveal my intentions to them when I realize that by so doing I will lose not only my intentions but my prophetic maxims as well? I will lose not only my maxims but my self.”

He struck the earth twice with his staff and released a lengthy moan of longing, as if he — like others of the desert’s sages — was lamenting something that had died long ago. Rearing his head high — as if to address the heavens, which were strewn with the evening’s stars — he said: “This is the calamity of prophetic messengers. I swear by the supreme goddess Tanit that this is the way prophetic messengers speak. If messengers were lenient with people, hands would be raised to stone them.” Then, turning toward the other man, he asked inscrutably, “Are you a prophet?”

His companion replied immediately, “All of us are prophets. Anyone with a will is a messenger.”

Then his throat rattled with laughter, a prolonged laugh. Partially checked, it was sly and unwarranted.

When he returned after midnight from prowling through the orchards of the southern fields he found the diviner standing near his door. The ghostly diviner stood erect, facing the mausoleum as if praying. He was dressed entirely in black, from the cloth of his turban to the sandals concealing his feet. In the darkness he appeared a true shadow, a jinni shade. Although darkness and his veil disguised the visitor, out of the whole lot, he was the only creature the stranger could not mistake. So he decided to tease him: “Doesn’t the Law’s representative fear possible violence from the spirit world’s inhabitants when he loiters among the graves late at night?”

The specter immediately parried this jest: “Is there any place in our whole desert more appropriate for a representative of the Law than the ancestors’ tombs or the solitary countryside?”

“I’m delighted to hear that prophecy’s champion approves of cemeteries and deserted wastelands.”

“If an advocate of prophetic counsel avoided solitary open spaces, he would be forced to seek refuge from stupidity in lethargy, which slays the heart.” He continued, “What we do not attain by the spirit’s journeys, we won’t attain by the body’s. We cannot provide the nomad anything he has not himself attained, as you well understand.”

The jenny master puffed out fiery breaths. He had apparently decided to terminate the debate, for he invited his guest to sit with him. They crouched down, facing each other, however, as if their hostilities were destined to continue.

The jenny master said, “I understand you, but the Law does not. You practitioners of the Law are the first to betray it. By blowing the spirit’s riddle out of proportion you’ve caused us to forget the body’s existence. You have made the spirit such a master that we feel certain we are an incorporeal spirit. You’ve caused us to forget that we possess nothing in this world besides the body, which we are destined to carry about — just as it carries us about — because we know we’ll lose everything in the deal if we denigrate it. Our concern for the riddle you all call the ‘spirit’ is secondary to our concern for this sacred trust that generations have told us is perfected only by nomadism and ruined only by sedentary life.”

“I actually didn’t come to debate the relative merits of spirit and body.”

“Have you also come to invite me to drink from your tainted waters?”

“No, I’ve come to invite you to sip the earth’s water, which originates with heavens’ water.”

“Only the desert’s water is heavenly. The water in the oasis is surface run-off. Don’t try to tell me otherwise.”

“You have settled as a guest in our community, and all we want is to receive the guest as specified by the maxims of the Law, which states that a guest is always a messenger who bears glad tidings to people — without twisting your arm to honor us by embracing our customary law or by becoming one of us.”

“But what does the messenger of glad tidings do when he considers the people’s invitation a threat to the glad tidings?”

“I’m sad to hear this.”

“I’m sad too, but the law of hospitality is less binding than the law of glad tidings.”

Silence reigned.

An owl hooted in the orchards of a southern field.

On the way to the market he traversed alleyways blanketed in grey dust. In the late morning’s light, chips of ancient bones glittered like gold dust scattered across the earth. Other narrow trails crossed his route, some descending and some leading to higher ground toward the peak of the mountain composed of graves of the dead and skulls of the ancestors. Near a section of the ancient, ruined city wall, he found remains of mud-brick buildings that had collapsed, leaving only depressing debris to inspire grief and to awaken the certainty that anything that rises from the earth will crumble and sink back into the dirt one day, becoming part of the soil, constituting the true nature of this earth over which creep the arrogant shades who call themselves human beings. Here are the remnants of the wall that sheltered man one day. Here are the ashes of the hearth that fed man one day. Here are the shards of crockery that were the vessels of the dwelling’s master one day. Here are pieces of bone studded with mysterious pearls that glow in the light with the allure of inscrutability. These are all that remain of the master who once tyrannized the home. How comical it is that the house’s master should be routed and annihilated, while his utensils linger on as the sole evidence that he ever existed. Is the utensil stronger than the owner and longer-lived? The person who trampled others underfoot, who spilled blood, and who tread the earth with all the superiority of one eternally immortal has disappeared like a mirage, leaving an earthenware shard as the only evidence of his existence.

Fragments of skulls crumble away gradually to form part of the dirt of the road, walls collapse, sinking to the level of the ground from which they rose, and the bits of pottery will fritter away to return eventually to clay, so that nothing remains on the earth save earth. How then can the arrogant creature doubt that he is no more than one of the earth’s vulnerable sprouts that cause havoc on the earth?

Nevertheless, he had always admired this creature, simply because man had the courage to thrust his head toward the stars while hiding out among the grains of dirt. His humblest utensils in this world provide his elegy, but despite that fact, he feels arrogant, never losing his certainty that the trip will eventually lead him to occupy the throne of heaven. What is most amazing, however, is not man’s preoccupation with the celestial but his tenacious adherence to the worldly, the way he clings to the lowlands and surrenders to the earth, from which he should flee, instead of relying on it, since he understands that one day he will become a morsel in the earth’s belly. Man betrayed the prophetic advice of his ancestors, who adopted the law of migration, believing that sedentary people are the only dead ones, since they alone possess bodies that arouse the earth’s greed. Nomadic people, who never stay anywhere or settle down on the earth, own nothing to provoke the earth or arouse its greed. They possess nothing: no gear, no walls, no bodies, not even dreams. All they possess is their voyage, nothing more. They possess a single riddle, over which the earth holds no sway and for which the lowlands can offer no explanation. This is deliverance.

Was he acting rashly now — fettered by the weight of an amulet (known as deliverance) that generations had fastened to his neck — when he descended to the lowly arena to remind people of a commandment?

From the north came a breeze moistened by the breath of a distant rain. He inhaled this with thirsty lungs and then exhaled it in a hissing puff.

Before he passed by the mud-brick buildings on the way to the market square, an impudent creature jumped from behind a ruined wall to obstruct his way. At first he did not recognize the fellow, but his expression softened once he identified the fool in his coarse rags. He decided to tease him: “Is this your house to which you once came to invite me?”

He answered tersely, “This isn’t my house.” He was silent for a moment and then added, “That day I invited you to another house.”

“A house for strangers?”

“No, a house for the elite.”

“The elite?”

Letting his fist fall on his chest, he explained, “Here! In my heart!”

“I asked you about your house in the physical world, not a house in the land of Longing.”

“I possess no other house.”

“But a man must have some refuge unless he continually moves and sets course for the horizons.”

“The only refuge a man can rely on is the heart.”

They walked side-by-side on their way toward the market square and proceeded along a narrow alley lined on either side by houses. In the distance they heard the hurly-burly of the jostling throngs in the market. He continued needling the fool, “Where would you take me then, if I decided to accept your invitation?”

“To my heart. Is there a residence in this world more secure than the heart?”

“Let’s skip this tale of the heart.”

“That day I wanted to introduce you to my heart, but you were arrogant. I came to you that day as a messenger for everyone’s hearts, but you put on airs for some secret reason that will not remain hidden for too long.”

“Ha, ha. . here you are talking about unseen mysteries, claiming a diviner’s role too.”

“Who in the desert is not a diviner?”

“But don’t you think the best topic of conversation for two men is women?”

Edahi glanced at him anxiously before asking, “Did you say ‘women’?”

He winked slyly and replied, “That covey of she-jinnis. I was told in the oasis that there are six gorgeous she-jinnis, who resemble each other like so many barleycorns and who sing even more beautifully than the birds.”

“I think you must be talking about the water nymphs.”

“Water nymphs?”

“Haven’t you heard the story of the water nymphs who were responsible for founding the oasis, once upon a time?”

“I think I’ve heard something along these lines. But I haven’t heard of a definite link between the she-jinnis of the oasis and the water nymphs.”

“Those six maidens are descendants of the water nymphs.”

He stopped his companion, hoping he would say more, but they had reached the market’s outskirts, where a short, stout man in frayed garments approached them, introducing himself as Amghar. He described himself as the chief merchant.

Accompanied by the two other men, he entered the crowd and was distracted by watching people buying, selling, pitching their wares, and shilling. Some forgot the item they had come to the market to buy and spent their money on another product they had not even considered buying, only to feel the pangs of remorse later. Others were busy haggling, speculating, and bargaining. They would sell, because they had come expressly to sell, because the law of commerce is for the merchant to sell. Even if a seller discovers he has lost money, he will not be discouraged, since he knows he will make up with a deal the next day the amount he lost the day before. He also realizes that he will ruin the game and violate the customary law of trade if he ever hesitates and declines to sell for fear of taking a loss, since cowardice is the one offense commerce does not excuse, because buying and selling are even more important than making a profit. The game’s most important aspect is motion — whether it is winning and losing or charging and retreating — because motion, because winning and losing, because charging and retreating are not simply a set of rules for the game of trade but a legal code for the puppet that is the entire world. For this reason, commerce has always been the mate of its bedfellow, the material world; neither ever lives far from the other.

The head merchant, who might almost have been reading his mind, observed, “Commerce is the secret heart of our world. Had trade not been invented, the physical world could not have come into existence.”

“Trade is my archenemy.”

The other man inquired in a disapproving tone, “What did you say?”

“Trade is the archenemy of all wild refuges. Commerce is the enemy of deliverance, and any enemy of deliverance is my enemy.”

“I don’t understand what kind of deliverance you’re discussing. What I know is that the existence of this oasis is pawn to the spirit people call exchange, barter, or trade.”

He offered a chilly rebuttal, “It truly is a spirit, but an evil one. It truly is an enchantress, but one that braids her tresses into fetters for us.”

“I’ve never heard a man anywhere use such language about the queen of the world.”

The strategist, however, wanted to end this debate. So he asked, as he turned around, “Where’s the fool?”

“Never mind him. The fool appears suddenly and disappears suddenly.”

He paused by a herbalist who was touting a rag full of herbs and calling out his wares as loudly as possible: “Aphrodisiac! Aphrodisiac! Erectile dysfunction cured with herbal remedy: Ezer. It will make your sex drive sizzle.”

He casually asked the herbalist the price and then ignored the response to turn to tell his companion, “Do you know? What I love best out of all your commerce is your fool.” The head merchant stared at him in astonishment. So he repeated, “Indeed, what I love most in this world of yours is that fool of yours. Ha, ha. . ”

“I don’t like to make trouble between folks, but I gathered from something the fool said once that he doesn’t feel the same way about you.”

“Ha, ha. . I know, I know. That’s because he doesn’t understand that I’m the kind of person who is happier loving than being loved.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t love those who love me. I love those whom I love. Do you know why?” He did not wait for a response but continued as if to himself: “Whoever loves me places fetters around my neck. Anyone I love gets shackles around his neck.”

“Amazing! I’ve always thought we fell captive to those we love, not to those who love us.”

“That’s the logic of the masses. That’s the language of weaklings, who don’t know why they love the ones they love. They have no strength or ability to stop loving those they loved when they realize the truth about them.”

“Does my master have the power to extirpate love for one he loves on discovering that person’s true character?”

“The ability to extirpate love belongs to the loser, not to the person who hits the mark. Normally I don’t ever love until I have first grasped the true character of the one I love.”

A giant confronted them. He was turbaned with twin veils, which were doubled over, and armed with twin swords stuffed into twin scabbards stamped with amulets and ancient magical signs. In his right hand he gripped a long, gloomy-colored lance with a deadly tip. The chief merchant introduced him respectfully: “This is our master the warrior Emmar.”

With a palm the size of a camel’s hoof, he shook the stranger’s hand with noble condescension, but said nothing, in keeping with the nobleman’s etiquette. Therefore, the wayfarer decided to employ praise to make him speak: “Meeting warriors is always a good omen. In which campaign did our master gain his exalted title?”

The alleged warrior did not respond, however. He sauntered along beside him in the crush of people, kicking a stone with his sandal and shoving people aside with his colossal shoulders with admirable indifference.

He waited a long time for a response. Finally the head merchant volunteered an answer for him: “The hero Emmar has never participated in a military campaign.”

“Then hasn’t he defended the oasis against raiders?”

“No, never.”

“Hasn’t he hanged miscreants from palm trunks?”

“He’s never hanged a miscreant from a palm.”

“Hasn’t he punished highwaymen with his lance?”

The chief merchant and the warrior glanced stealthily at one another. He noticed in the giant’s eye a mocking smile, as if he were granting the other man the right to speak for him. “He hasn’t struck down any highwaymen with his lance, either.”

At this point the visitor suddenly stopped and adjusted his turban with his hand, “I remember: our comrade inherited his imposing title from his ancestors; that’s for sure.”

The chief merchant, however, denied that too: “No, not at all. The warrior didn’t inherit his title from his grandfathers.”

He released a throaty cough before saying, “This is a riddle! I swear it’s a cunning riddle. Save me from trying to undo the talisman, for I confess I can’t.”

He suppressed his hideous laugh, and the head merchant replied nonchalantly, “Our master Emmar felled a gigantic jinni in a competition and thus earned this heroic and fitting epithet.”

He glanced at him from behind his veil, but the chief merchant did not respond. So he asked, “Is this a joke?”

“Not at all!”

“I thought you were kidding.”

“Why should I kid you? Do you think that casting down a giant from the spirit world is a negligible feat?”

“Ha, ha. . I don’t consider it a heroic one, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Heroism’s something else. Heroism is felling your self, not felling the jinn.”

“Explain.”

“Heroism’s doing what you don’t want to do.”

“I thought heroism’s doing what you want — not what you don’t want.”

“Nonsense! A person who does whatever he wants in this world will eventually fail.”

“I remember wanting to have a fortune when I was barely more than a babe in the cradle. I heard a voice urging me to join the caravans and to become a merchant. So I did. I did what I wanted, because I realized that I was destined to be a merchant and that the whispering voice was my prophecy. Had I not been certain of this, I would not have succeeded. I would not have become — as you see me today — the chief merchant in the oasis and possibly in all the oases.”

“Ha, ha. . but commerce isn’t heroism. Indeed commerce’s the opposite of heroism. Heroism, chief merchant, is the renunciation of trade and the divestiture of wealth.”

“Divestiture! Divestiture! If we all embraced divestiture, the world would not exist as we know it and the oasis wouldn’t pulse with life the way you see before you now. Commerce, Mr. Stranger, is life.”

“If commerce is life, then there’s no doubt that heroism’s the opposite of life.”

“Do you mean that heroism’s tantamount to death?”

“Right. Heroism is to die, not to live, but. . not so fast; not so fast, why doesn’t our master the warrior answer my questions? Is he dumb?”

“It’s because warriors don’t speak.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Didn’t you just say that heroism is death and that heroes are dead men?”

“Ha, ha. . ”

A group of nobles blocked their way. A portly man of medium height, enveloped in dignified blue robes stood in the center. The chief merchant hailed him reverently, as if reciting a panegyric ode: “This is our chief, our sovereign, our master, the Venerable Ewar.”

With smiling eyes, the tribe’s chief advanced toward him and came so close he almost bumped into the stranger with his imposing turban. Then he noticed pockmarks left by smallpox on the cheeks of the chief, who gazed at him with laughing eyes before teasing him, “Do I behold the stranger who came to our community on a jenny’s back?” He pulled the bottom of his veil tighter and higher and then folded it over to provide a double covering for his lips in the fashion affected by nobles and tribal leaders. Then he threw back his head as he attempted to suppress a merry laugh before continuing: “How can you expect our elders not to think ill of you when you arrive on the back of a jenny, as if you were the accursed Wantahet, who has been the butt of jokes for generations?”

He raised his hand to adjust the end of his veil too, before embarking on his defense: “I have indeed garnered the tribe’s suspicions, even though I have yet to allure the masses into deceitful games to lead them to hell’s abyss.”

Everyone laughed in unison. The tribe’s chief laughed too. Hiding his laughter behind his veil, he asked, “Is this your plan?”

“Ha, ha. . can a creature rebel against his destiny? I will definitely lead them, but not along the road to the abyss — contrary to the way generations have told the story — but on the path to deliverance.”

“Deliverance! Deliverance! We will never learn the path to deliverance unless we delete this word from our vocabulary. Each recruit for the band of wayfarers claims to be a prophet and announces to the tribes that he is the Messenger of Deliverance. The strategist known as Wantahet also claimed he would carry people on the path of deliverance the day he cast them down the mouth of the abyss.”

“Hell, too, master, is at times deliverance.”

“Did you all hear that?” He drew the edge of his veil over his nose, concealing his pockmarked cheeks, and laughed with childish glee as he leaned back: “Hell, too, is deliverance. Do you mean it’s what the masses deserve?”

“Yes, indeed. Don’t we burn the body at times with fire to root out a disease?”

The tribe’s chief, however, tilted his turban toward him and whispered, “Why not defer our discussion of deliverance until you dine with me this evening?”

“I’ve promised myself never to share a feast with another person.”

The merry gleam left the sovereign’s eyes as he asked in astonishment, “Was that an oath?”

“You could call this nonsense an oath.”

“It truly is nonsense, for the oath should be for us to share a feast instead of to lie in ambush for one another.”

“Renunciation of feasting, master, is not always a conspiracy.”

“But a covenant we inherited from our ancestors said yesterday the opposite of what you’re saying today.”

“Ha, ha. . the covenant we inherited from our ancestors proposed many maxims that, if embraced, would discourage us from devoting much time to building, developing oases, or gathering in marketplaces.”

“ ‘People are a pain, but useful.’³ That’s what the ancient Law said.”

“ ‘No matter where the caravan goes, it will return to its point of origin.’⁴ The ancient Law also said that.”

“Is that a summons to nomadism?”

“There is no imperative, master, save this.”

“But no matter what, we will pass on. We will inevitably pass away, even if we appease the entire world.”

“The nomadism of appeasement, to which you refer, master, is an ignominious form of wayfaring. It is not the maxim-driven nomadism of which the Law speaks.”

The sovereign groaned in disgust and wound the fringe of his lower veil around his index finger so that it would hide the top of his right cheek. Then he said, “It’s not a good idea to hold debates in the market. I’ve never debated with anyone about the Law’s maxims in the congested market. Accept my invitation and I’ll slaughter a she-camel to compensate for your vow.”

He laughed to disguise his discomfort, but the JennyMaster declined in no uncertain terms: “Preposterous!”

The ruler shot back defiantly, “Do you derive more human comfort in leaning on tombs than from mingling with living beings?”

The jenny’s strategist bowed his head for the first time, but the throng discerned the deeply felt sorrow that he tried to hide before answering: “By sitting with our slumbering ancestors, master, we gain the wisdom of eternal rest, because through their rest they tell us more than worldly people tell us when they pause; they tell us the truth, master.”

“We’ll learn that truth one day, whether we want to or not; what’s the hurry?”

“Because we don’t truly live, master, unless we develop a taste for slumber; because we don’t truly live today, master, unless we sleep before death arrives.”

“You astonish me. You awaken in my heart a curiosity I once assumed I had laid to rest. Is there no way to hear the noble guest save in the market square amid this din?”

He answered with a look. Then he bowed his head toward the earth before shooting off. The chief called after him, “Hermits are always right. It’s futile for us to try to win a wager with a recluse.”

After leaving the other members of her covey — who were meandering through a grove of palm trees — to gather firewood on the eastern plains, she started to feel dizzy. Her vision was blurred by a dark cloud, and she felt totally debilitated. She began shaking and staggering. She sat down to combat her intense abdominal pain. She closed her eyes and hyperventilated. Sweat beaded up on her forehead. Convulsed by severe trembling, she fell to her knees. She tried to vomit up the clump that blocked her esophagus but spat out only quivering saliva of a sinister hue. As she fought to free herself of this scourge, she emitted a weird groan that frightened her even more than the seizure, for it reminded her of the querulous cry a neighbor woman had released more than a year before, prior to expiring beside her. The disapproving look visible that day in the dying woman’s eyes exceeded even the disapproving ring of her groan. Was death that terrifying? Could the other woman have been that frightened by her final passage, even though she had long realized she would die? Indeed, she had repeatedly said she looked forward to death, which would end her pains.

The vertigo diminished and the dark cloud dispersed. Her breathing became more regular. She rose to return to the covey in the grove, but immediately after she passed through the palm trees that spread along the grove’s heights, a gray hare bolted between her legs and fled east, toward the sword-type dunes. Suddenly, however, he changed course and flew off to disappear behind a hill that hid him from the grove. She felt awful, haunted by a desperate sense of doom. She hastened on, mumbling the ancients’ incantations to drive off evil spirits. Hurrying, she tripped and fell. She stammered, “Bad luck, bad luck.” She kept repeating this phrase in place of the arcane charms. She tried to rise again but collapsed. At that moment, her insides contracted with pain that seemed not acute discomfort so much as a knife slashing her insides with insane malice. She screamed at the top of her lungs. She tried to rise again, but the hideous pain felled her and she tumbled to the ground. She began to writhe as the malevolent blade continued to reap the contents of her belly. She kept pressing on her abdomen with both hands as she twisted about. Her body was suffused with such profuse perspiration that she felt the thirsty sand beneath her grow damp with moisture borrowed from her body. Once the knife ceased cutting, she opened her eyes to discover that the fluid inundating her and wetting the earth beneath her was not sweat but blood flowing from between her thighs. She released such a prolonged and hurt wail that she did not hear the call of a covey member hastening to assist her: “Help, women! Tafarat’s swimming in blood!”

After sunrise on a day promising severe heat, a proclamation rang out in the oasis: “Today, oasis dwellers, an affliction has settled on our homes; a malady has affected women’s bellies. So perform sacrificial offerings and try to stay calm until the matter is clarified and the affliction’s cause is discovered. Those present are duty-bound to inform those absent.”

The fool moved from one neighborhood to another, speedily at times and slowly at others, wiping sweat from his face with the tip of his veil at times and with the sleeve of his garment at others, and raising his voice to call out at times and falling silent to catch his breath at others. He paused repeatedly in front of houses and huts to receive water from women, who watched him inquisitively as he sipped from their jugs or wooden vessels before darting away again. Only the fool realized, however, that what passersby observed in women’s eyes that day was not curiosity, thirst for information, or fear of the unknown — which are normally associated with the news of any scourge — but a feeling greater than all of these. Their eyes had an expression of certainty presaging calamity; for the scourge this time not only threatened the women but constituted a conspiracy that threatened to deprive the oasis of offspring — perhaps even the whole desert. The women’s calamity, however, did not silence him, for he continued to shout the announcement: “Today, oasis dwellers, an affliction has settled on our homes; a malady has afflicted women’s bellies. So perform sacrificial offerings and try to stay calm until the matter is clarified and the affliction’s cause is discovered. Those present are duty-bound to inform those absent.”

Boys joined him as he made his rounds. They kept him company, with one line racing along to his right and a second one on his left. Some would fall away whenever he exceeded their range, but others would join each time the procession reached a new settlement. Elders were scattered at the entryways of huts and mud-brick houses, standing there like silent specters or statues; they did not budge till the company had passed by and disappeared from sight in a grove of trees or behind the top of some hills.

Only the visitor to the oasis sequestered himself that morning on the flank of the hill. He watched the procession from the time it left the press of northern houses and traversed the shacks scattered along the plain that led to the dwellings surrounding the market square and circling the hill to the north and east. He did not cease watching until it turned to slip down the narrow alleys where dwellings clung to each other and the houses shared walls, as if protecting each other from an unknown danger.

The public affairs announcement reached his ears too, booming loud enough at times for him to make out clearly every word and then fading into the distance where, in the stillness of the open country, it seemed the buzz of a fly. Even though insolent laughter rattled in his throat from the moment the tour began and the proclamation first rang out, more than once he choked on a tear in response to the tragic ring of the call, which sounded like a lament to him, perhaps because he heard only tragedy in the announcement and could decipher in it only a mourner’s admonition whenever it resounded through the tribes’ settlements. Were creatures destined to hear from the herald’s mouth nothing but an elegy whenever a proclamation rang out in the tribes’ lands? Were creatures destined to hear nothing more than a lament from the mouth of the herald? Are glad tidings a voiceless, shameful secret that slips into these lands covertly and diffidently and flees clandestinely from these territories too, as shamefacedly as it arrives?

He nearly choked on his disquieting laughter once more, because he resembled the ancients’ legendary jackal, which only grinned when hungry, since it realized that hunger is inevitably followed by satiety, and only wept when satisfied, realizing full well that hunger inevitably follows a good meal. He likewise would laugh till his throat rattled when sad, because he knew better than anyone else that sorrow always ends with joy, and would weep through joyful events, since he knew that joy ends with sorrow.

He swallowed his laughter and descended the hillside to meet — at the bottom of the hill — the chief merchant, who was upset. His anxiety was apparent in his eyes, and his veil, which was pulled back from his mouth, revealed the deep scar of an ancient wound that had marked his left cheek, crossing his upper lip.

He brought the merchant up short with the question: “Has some evil befallen you?”

He glanced up at the stranger absentmindedly before responding: “What is there in our world but evil? The moment we catch our breath from one evil, we encounter another. Didn’t you hear the public announcement?”

“I heard the announcement and watched from my vantage point as your herald made his rounds.”

The chief merchant stared at him with red eyes: “Yesterday all the pregnant women miscarried.”

”No!” His disquieting laughter, however, rumbled, and he chortled a bit until he could ask, “Why did that happen?”

“A malady this widespread isn’t a medical issue; it’s a punishment.”

“And as you know, a punishment is often a message of deliverance. Should we fear it this much and lapse into anxiety?”

Amghar waved his hand as if to drive away flies and then asked desperately, “What shall we do with women whose bellies are barren?” He reached out to seize the end of his veil, which had pulled away from his mouth, twisted it around his index finger a little, then pulled it up toward his left ear and tucked it into the fold so his nose was completely hidden. He asked with an unexpected sigh: “Tell me: Is a woman with a barren belly still a woman?”

Confining his wicked laugh to his chest once more, he replied, “A woman with an empty belly is definitely not a woman, but she’s not a man either.”

“Yesterday, after midnight, my wife suffered a miscarriage too.”

“No!”

“I was there when she ejected the stillborn child the way a she-goat ejects a kid.”

“Ha, ha. . ”

“Writhing like a viper from her pain, she released a sound that reminded me of the bleating of a goat. Then she groaned and the fetus slipped out with the groan.”

“Amazing!”

“I wouldn’t feel so bad if I had children, like most men.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked up at the stranger blankly: “She’s the third woman to enter my home and the first to become pregnant by me.”

“I’m sorry to hear this.”

“The spirit world has decided to punish me for forgetting my vow.”

“Vow?”

“Yes, absolutely: my vow. I promised a banquet to the goddess Tanit if one of my wives became pregnant. When she suffered morning sickness, began to crave clay, and admitted to me that she was pregnant, I remembered the vow. By the next morning, however, I had forgotten it because I was busy with one of my caravans that had returned with goods from the forest lands. After that I forgot it altogether and never thought of it again until the affliction struck yesterday.”

“Vows are destined to be forgotten. We never remember our vows until after disasters strike.”

He cast a suspicious look at the stranger: “But the elders say you’re responsible.”

“Me!”

He glanced far away to remark, “They’re not sure, but evil’s always marked by an omen.”

“Ha, ha. . did they read in the tablet of the Unknown that I bring evil?”

“The diviner did not confirm that but didn’t deny it either.”

“They have a right to suspect me since I’m the only outsider to visit the oasis of late. They also have a right to think ill of me because I rejected their community the day I declined to eat with them.”

“I suspect that refusing the invitation is the only reason.”

“Yes, indeed; declining an invitation is a sign. Turning down a banquet is always an indication of a departure from the Law that everyone has prescribed for everyone to follow. But. . but, what do you think?”

He was silent for a time. Then he replied: “What does the victim think? The victim has a right to be suspicious. Only a person struck by an adder’s fang sees the rope as a snake.”

He tucked the purse under his arm and went out. He had awakened shortly before dawn and stammered out his arcane incantations first thing. Then he had slipped into a corner of the entryway, where he poked his head into his kit, pulling out the scary satchel ornamented with talismans of the ancients. From this he removed two scoops of suspicious-looking, powdered herbs and then dumped them into a smaller, leather purse, which he tucked into his flowing sleeve, also embroidered with cryptic traceries. The purse bounced around the thin garment’s empty spaces. So he secured it under his arm and went out.

With deliberate but haughty steps he crossed the open space between the fields and the mountain. When he reached the irrigation ditches fed by the heavenly spring, the scent of the earth and its vegetation and puffs of humid air assailed him. He took a deep breath. Then a string in the Unknown vibrated and a tear burst from his eye. He crossed the irrigation ditches with wide strides that mimicked a lunatic’s leaps, penetrated the palm groves, and stopped by the spring.

The water was calm and the stillness surrounding it universal. The grasshoppers, exhausted from chirring all night long, had ceased, the dove had not risen yet, and the masters of the earth, blissfully united with their wives, had delayed their departure for the fields. The only remaining witnesses over the physical world were the crests of the sand dunes that served as a messenger from the vast desert, which was preparing — in the fullness of time — to swallow this insignificant tract of land, so that it could become an eternal bit of the enormous emptiness. Removing his sandals, he walked barefoot toward the spits of sand adjacent to the spring. Removing his garment, he knelt on the bank of the pool, reached out, and thrust his hand deep into the water, which was as warm, soft, and delightful as a beautiful woman. Before he knew it he had closed his eyes and released an intoxicated moan. He asked himself what need there was for beautiful women when water was at hand.

He did not worry about trying to answer his question but hopped up and leapt into the water. He waded a few steps beside the bank, playing in the water with both hands at times and dousing his body with splashes of water at others. He dawdled and frolicked like a child before he told himself out loud: “The fact is that only a desert lover can grasp the true nature of water.” He walked out to where it was deeper before immersing himself. The whole spring-fed pool was convulsed and flooded the banks and the nearby sand spits.

Although he lingered for a long time in the beloved’s embrace, once he emerged he immediately withdrew the leather purse from the sleeve of his garment. With the composure of a zealot, he loosened the fastener and then eyed the mysterious herb’s particles, which were interspersed with yellow-colored florets. He approached the revered spring to scatter over its depths the malignant contraceptive powder. Shortly after sunrise he returned by the same route, but no sooner had he left the grove’s thick vegetation and crossed the irrigation ditch than the fool jumped out at him from behind a pomegranate bush.

In the crowded market the elders gathered around him. First, the chief merchant Amghar approached, accompanied by the self-styled warrior Emmar, his preternaturally large frame held ramrod straight. Emmar’s hands, which resembled camel hooves, were clasped behind his back. He had hunched his huge shoulders so that his tiny head, which was lodged between them, seemed from a distance a spherical colocynth lodged between two boulders. The chief merchant stammered a greeting, which the stranger could not make out, since people’s clamor, tongues’ chattering, and vendors’ cries drowned his words, swallowing everything. He was astonished that the series of miscarriages, which had shaken the entire world and turned life upside down in the oasis, had not negatively affected this jinni called commerce.

To make himself heard above the frenetic deal-making, he shouted at the top of his lungs: “The epidemic’s long arm has touched everything in the oasis, but not even an epidemic can rattle the market. I wonder which jinni commerce harbors?”

The chief merchant came several paces nearer, shouldering men aside on his way. He replied, “Commerce’s secret is identical to life’s, for in this desert of ours whenever one man meets another, a contract is always a third party.”

“Is that true?”

“We never meet, master, except to make a deal.”

“I know that when we meet to fight we deal in casualties.

I also realize that when we meet for love we consummate a contract of glad tidings. I don’t understand, however, what we do when we meet to do nothing; I mean when we meet to play.”

Amghar answered without any hesitation: “Play is also a contract!” He rolled a pebble out of the way with his sandal before he added with a bow, “Indeed, honored guest, play’s the biggest deal of all.”

The visitor stopped dead in his tracks and suddenly confronted the other man. He faced him as if intending to attack, flee, scream, or do all of these at once. In total surprise, the warrior retreated several steps and then stretched out his calamitous hand, the camel’s hoof, to find the hilt of his sword. Meanwhile the strategist was standing right in front of the chief merchant. He proudly drew himself erect and glared at the other man but did not speak. The situation would not have been so threatening had he spoken. All three men seemed to feel that any action or gesture issuing from this riddle called man would not only remain ambiguous but would even become threatening, unless the man supplemented it with a comment from his tongue. Yes, indeed, man is a tongue,⁵ for when a man lacks the ability to speak, he becomes a shadow, a specter, and an apparition.

Finally the tongue spoke. Finally the man within the strategist asked, “Is it appropriate for a devotee of commerce to play?”

Amghar gave him a questioning look and the strategist repeated the question a second time, without once relaxing his provocative, threatening pose. At last the chief merchant countered, “Is there anyone for whom play is inappropriate?”

Only at that moment did the two other men notice that the stranger was trembling, even though he made a heroic attempt to stifle in his chest a mysterious tumult for which they could discern no cause. He croaked out an indistinct, questioning noise, to which the chief merchant responded. This time he sounded as if he were singing. He waxed poetic, since he was discussing his beloved commerce, and cited again his childhood dream, which the stranger had already heard mentioned. Then he switched to contracts, praising them with a zeal comparable only to that lavished by ancient poets on epic battles. He spoke at length and chanted for a long time, until he finally observed that commerce is life and that anyone for whom play is unsuitable is unfit to live.

He stopped singing to catch his breath but immediately added the final stanza of this epic: “Anyone who does not excel at commerce will not excel with contracts. Anyone who does not excel with contracts will not excel at play, and in this desert anyone who does not excel at play will not excel in life. So, woe to anyone who does not excel at play.”

The strategist did not yield, however. He decided to open a debate with the merchant about the difference between the physical world and life by asking one simple question: “Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for an advocate of free trade to say that commerce is our world rather than to finish by saying that commerce is life?”

The trade advocate was not ready to yield, either: “This debate could take a long time, but I would like to end it before it leads to a quarrel, as always happens. With my master’s permission I wish to conclude it with a single sentence: for a merchant, commerce is a commandment, and each commandment creates a life for anyone who cherishes it. Am I on the right track?”

“You’re right. My question contains the germ of a lengthy debate. Why haven’t you mentioned the epidemic?”

“As is always the case, an epidemic is followed by chaotic confusion.”

“Confusion?”

“And confusion, as you know, is a blind witch that does not distinguish between proximate and remote causes.”

“I really don’t understand.”

“I mean the confusion has touched our master as well.” The stranger cast an inquiring look at Amghar, who abandoned his recondite language to explain, “The finger of suspicion has been pointed even at our master.”

“Ha, ha. . ”

“The footprints of some strangers fill with heavy rain. The footprints of other foreigners are cracked with drought. On the heels of some strangers comes joy. On the heels of others comes foul play. Each step a stranger takes contains a secret.”

“This has been said forever and a day.”

“People associate the women’s miscarriages with your footsteps.”

“Really?”

The sage Elelli stepped in front of them. He was accompanied by the diviner Yazzal, who said, as if continuing the unfinished conversation: “Your arrogance has worked against you. If only you had accepted a bite to eat from people, the finger of suspicion would not be pointed at you now.”

He replied immediately, as if to reconfirm their ongoing conversation: “I think people will continue to point accusing fingers, even if we accept a morsel of food from them.”

“The morsel is a balm. A piece of food is an amulet that drives away insinuations and safeguards people against other people’s evil. Believe me.”

“People are naturally inclined to look for a scapegoat.”

“But there’s no question that people repeat with conviction the saying that a man who refuses food people offer is a man who fears people and that a man who fears people is frightening.”

“Why should people fear a man who doesn’t care to eat with other folks?”

“Because they feel sure he is a strategist; because they’re certain he’s hiding some scheme up his sleeve.”

“Scheme?”

“Yes, indeed. According to local custom, abstention is a scheme. Withdrawal from society is always considered a conspiracy by customary law.”

The strategist exhaled generously in preparation for wading into a no-holds-barred debate, but the appearance of the tribe’s chief, accompanied by the fool, made it difficult to continue and made the group feel uneasy. So he swallowed his argument, preferring to remain silent.

The tribe’s chief, in any case, did not go easy on him. Leaning on his staff, which was inscribed with mysterious markings, he confronted the stranger, asking him bluntly, “Doesn’t the son of foreigners realize that there are no hiding places for secrets in our world?”

Sensing the threat implied by these words, he decided to attack as well: “Explain!”

“You were seen scattering a suspicious powder into the spring. Do you deny it?”

“Ha, ha. . Even a true accusation requires substantiation; so what about a false one?”

Ewar’s veil dangled open to reveal the smallpox scars on both cheeks. He raised the end to fasten it beside his nose before he declared curtly, “There are witnesses.”

He gestured toward the fool, and Edahi took a step forward and then a second one. On finding himself in the circle of nobles, he trembled and looked down at the ground. Then he said, “I saw you swimming in the spring at dawn. Before you left, I saw you scatter an herb over the pool, or something like an herb.”

A murmur spread through the crowd. Some men exchanged words and others glances. A second circle composed of vendors, nosey parkers, and the general public formed around the first one. The strategist felt more threatened by being trapped inside this mob than by the accusation. Like any alien, he felt alone, on his own; not merely alone in the market or in the oasis, but in the whole desert too. He had a deadly sense of being abandoned for all time, from cradle to grave. This feeling motivated him to mount his own defense, for who would defend a forsaken man, unless he did so himself?

He decided to mount a strategic defense, using his mastery of the tongue to bait the accuser. “Our master has thrust in front of me a creature who has flung an accusation in my face. Could my master tell me to which community my accuser belongs?”

Ewar waved his stick in the air twice, pointing toward the fool, and then without delay replied, “The accuser is the fool. Amazing! Didn’t he just recite his accusation for you?”

The strategist responded with cunning malice: “He actually did recite the accusation, but you’re the only one I’ve ever heard say that he’s a fool.”

“What does that mean?”

The strategist ignored this question, however, and proceeded a step further with his interrogation: “I would like to ask whether ‘fool’ is the man’s name or an epithet like any other.”

“ ‘Fool’ is an epithet. We all know that the fool’s name is Edahi and that idiocy is a trait attributed to the wretch.”

“If our master has admitted in front of this crowd that the fool actually is a fool and not merely called one, then what law leads the elders to think that a fool’s testimony constitutes evidence?”

People became restless and agitated. Heads bumped against each other, and laughter was heard among the common folk. Ewar fiddled with his veil once more to disguise his manifest discomfort. In a tone that indicated that he had lost his self-confidence, he asked, “What?”

“You said that the person who saw me release what you term a suspect powder was the one you call ‘the fool.’ You have also just admitted that the fool actually is an idiot and not merely called that. So what sense does it make to consider the testimony of an idiot as evidence?”

“But he’s a fool unlike any other. Everyone knows that Edahi is unique among fools.”

“Ha, ha. . The fool’s a fool. The fool’s a fool in all respects, at all times, in all tribes, and in every language.”

“I trust the testimony of this fool more than I do that of the noblest elder in this oasis. What do you think about that?”

“Ha, ha. . This is according to our master, not according to the Law. Our master can believe anyone he wishes. Our master can believe the fool to end all fools even more than the wisest elder, but the Law acknowledges only the intellect’s sovereignty over the world. The Law says: ‘Death isn’t evil; the real evil is losing one’s mind.’”

“Not so fast! Take it easy! The Law truly said that death is not evil but did not say that losing one’s mind is evil. It declared instead that insanity is evil.”

“Ha. . ha. Does our master see a difference between going insane and losing one’s mind?”

“I actually do see a difference. Anyone with a mind can tell the difference between going insane and losing your mind.”

“Can our master share that distinction with us?”

“We often lose our ability to reason clearly. Frequently the wisest elders don’t think straight, but with insanity we lose our ability to reason once and for all.”

“Is idiocy a type of reasoning or a loss of reasoning?”

“Idiocy is a short-term liberation from reason’s restraints.”

“Amazing!”

“Yes, indeed; idiocy is the boundary between insanity and reason, between liberation and restraint, and between shackle and prophecy.”

“Did my master mention prophecy?”

“Certainly. Prophecy. Occasionally idiocy is prophecy.”

“Wouldn’t that assertion count as blasphemy against the lost Law of the ancients?”

“No, certainly not. Occasionally idiocy is prophecy.”

The crowd murmured excitedly. The uproar lasted a long time. Then the strategist proclaimed decisively, “Reasoning that allows us to say that idiocy is prophecy also lets us say that prophecy is idiocy.”

“Prophecy is not merely idiocy. It is also insanity.”

The strategist clapped his hands together while the marketplace shook with people’s commotion. They did not limit themselves to a restrained objection but shouted their protests out loud.

When the jinn she harbored in her breast stirred one day, she protested: “You’ve destroyed me! Chasing after you through the deserts has destroyed me.”

He did not disapprove so much of the thought expressed then as of the inflection used, for she had repeatedly said even more scathing things but had never dared to express them in the tone she used for this complaint. A comment’s tone is our only evidence for its veracity — just as the music of its words is our only evidence to support a declaration of love. . or of hatred. This time, she had revealed her hatred in the ring of her voice.

He let his gaze wander then into the eternal wasteland, which had never promised him anything save liberation. Then he asked with the calm typical of a recluse, “What do you want us to do?”

She replied immediately, as if she had been expecting this question: “We’ll do what everyone does.”

“What does everyone do?”

“They abandon the nomadic life and settle down on the land.”

“But if we give up nomadism, we’ll perish.”

“Don’t say we’re nomads because we must search for grazing lands in the great outdoors. Don’t say we must migrate to stay alive, because you know that everyone searches for grazing lands outdoors, but they settle on the land for a time to ensure that they have a life, too. So don’t say that only wanderers truly live and that people with an easy life are specters and zombies, as you like to claim.”

“Yes, I’ll never be ashamed to repeat that sedentary people are really dead even while alive and that nomads live on even if they perish.”

“We’re nomads, but not because we search for pasture in arid lands; we migrate to search for our selves. We become nomads to flee from our selves. Do you deny that?”

“There’s no need to deny it. Indeed, I’m happy to repeat along with you that we migrate to search for our selves. Indeed, we’re nomadic because we flee from our selves. I wonder who you heard reveal this maxim. Ha, ha. . ”

“I didn’t hear it from my mother or father. I didn’t hear this aphorism until I learned the nomad’s tale, because hearing maxims is the only good point about nomadism.”

“I’m delighted to hear you confess that nomadism has a good point.”

“I’m not embarrassed to acknowledge that the nomadic life teaches maxims, but it sells us these aphorisms at the most outrageous price, since it demands our lives in return.”

“Any maxim for which we don’t sacrifice our lives is fraudulent.”

“We could afford to sacrifice our lives for prophetic counsel if we lived more than once.”

“Nonsense! We must pay for a prophetic maxim with our lives, even if we live only once, even if we live but half a lifetime, even if we don’t live once, because our true life is in the maxim, not in this physical world for the sake of which you want us to throw down the nomad’s staff and become farmers.”

“A prophetic maxim can refresh a wanderer through this world and can rescue a solitary man. It cannot, however, revive a woman’s heart.”

“Is a heart that’s not inspired by a maxim a heart or a lump?”

“Woman’s always made of different stuff.”

“Ha, ha. . I admit that this is what I wanted to hear. Do you admit that woman’s a creature with a different provenance?”

“There’s no need to deny that!”

“Do you agree that man and woman are creatures from two different communities?”

“How could I fail to agree with you when you see that man is devoted to flight from the earth whereas woman’s temple nestles on the earth?”

“Does this mean that I violated the laws of creation when I carried you off into the vast expanses of the desert?”

“How could you have failed to violate natural law throughout the dreary years you attempted to bid the earth adieu and to make a throne for it in the expanses of the heavens?”

“Are you trying to say that you play the part of the earth on our voyage?”

“I’m not the one who said that woman is always an earth and that traveling man is the wind.”

“Ha, ha. . ”

“You’re too arrogant to admit that you’ve wronged me.”

“I’ve wronged you!”

“Don’t we wrong a person whom we ask to accomplish what she’s not created to do?”

She fought back a flood of tears before adding miserably: “You have sinned against me because you know I am your hostage, since I have no father to protect me, no brother to deliver me, and no mother to comfort me.”

He did not abandon nomadism, however, because — although he did not dispute her argument that he had wronged her — he still could not alter what was in his soul. He felt certain that a man must inevitably wrong other people if he wishes to bear his burden, if he wants to be true to his trust, and if he ever means to communicate his message.

He did not abandon the nomadic life even when she took matters into her own hands and delivered from her belly a peg to restrain him. He knew she had not done that to satisfy a woman’s natural thirst for a child or to gratify a lust to plant human progeny in an expansive, arid land indifferent to both seeds and offspring. She had done what she had in order to fasten a collar more firmly around his throat and a band tighter around his neck, so she could pull him backward, to a set place, downward, to the lowlands. Yes, yes, indeed. . the bottomlands; that’s what the she-jinni wanted for him when she delivered the infant. Understanding this secret shook him and sent a wave of terror through his soul. He could feel the band tighten around his neck as if it were a python. He began to feel he was being strangled, that the earth had split open to reveal a dark abyss wanting to swallow him whole so he would disappear into its belly forever. These fatal events were not merely revealed to him in waking visions but became horrible nightmares and a daily way of life. He would leap upright from his slumbers and then race across the empty plains like a madman.

The visions persisted and the nightmares became more severe. So he decided to end the nightmare and fled. He fled once more. He journeyed from the borders of the western Hamada to the far side of the great, central desert. To challenge the specter of sedentary life he traveled to Massak Satafat. En route he noticed the wretched glint in her eyes once more. He could see the hatred that he had heard in her voice the day she first mentioned her distress to him and her fatigue from all their travels. He paid no attention, however. He continued on his way, letting the horizons guide his steps without trying to get to the root of that look. When a woman’s eye gleams with a meaningful look, she is brooding about something. When a woman’s eye shines with hatred, she is certainly hatching a plot to divest herself of that feeling. Man is different, because he can feel hatred without humoring it or finding relief through some plot.

He carried her across the southern deserts on the back of a camel while she clasped in her arms the infant she had hoped would be a peg to tie him to the soil. Instead that child became a goad for the father and a red-hot poker. Each time the horizons begat new horizons and the desert extended into the distance to engender another desert, her despondency, misery, and depression increased. Yes, indeed, her cheeks flushed in an alarming way and the features of her face darkened more from despair than from any tanning by the southern, Qibli winds. She remained closeted in her despondency even during the evenings when — to prepare for departure during the following days — they halted their nomadic travels. She once asked him a question, the thrust of which he did not grasp until she had performed her heinous act: “I wonder whether children can find a place in the heart of a nomad?”

He remembers telling her then: “No one loves his children as much as a nomad. A wanderer admittedly does not really choose to bring children into his world, but he loves his children when they arrive in this world much more than those idiots who pride themselves on their love of the earth.”

She smiled slyly that night, but he paid no attention to her crafty look, because he roamed around in the obscurity of the night’s desert, which was bathed in moonlight. He trailed after the stillness far away to borrow prophetic maxims from unexplored regions of the spirit world. He did not realize that when hatred gains the upper hand, it inevitably seeks a victim, sooner rather than later.

The next morning she placed before him their son, wrapped in swaddling clothes, eyes protruding, blue-cheeked, his delicate neck still showing the imprint of her fingers. In an unfamiliar voice, she said, “I guessed that the nomad who did not choose to beget a child would never think of burying it in the ground.”

He deserted her.

He left her in the wilderness and bolted, roaming through the wastelands. Whenever he remembered what she had done, he collapsed and vomited till he almost threw up his guts, which had gone without food for days. His need for food led him to consume grass and drink from mud puddles. Although he had resolved he would never return to her, a disruptive whispering crept into his breast, urging him to go back. It was an odd kind of whisper; not one he could label. Only after he had groveled in his desert for several more days was he able to assign to it that strangest of all titles: compassion, alias mercy or the duty that binds the heart of anyone who has one. So he went back.

He returned to find her kneeling like some evil spirit at the tent’s entrance. She stared at him with the antipathy of a sorceress and the eye of a she-owl but said nothing. He sensed that it had been a mistake to return but realized as well that duty’s call inevitably leads to pain, even though it relieves the heart. Since her presence near him felt like a life-threatening lasso around his neck, he decided to liberate himself.

One day he approached her and began: “Do you remember any family member to whom I can take you?”

She replied gruffly, “I have no family. You know that.”

“There’s not some distant relation somewhere?”

When she shook her head no, he felt the lasso tightening but did not despair. “Tell me what I should do with you.”

“Just do what any man who takes responsibility for a woman does: he settles down with her on the land.”

“A nomad has no fixed abode. . as you know.”

“But I’m not a nomad. I’m a woman. I’m a female. I’m a mother. I can’t live if I don’t settle down. I want to have a fixed abode. I should have a home: is this true or false?”

He gazed curiously at her face. “How can you claim to be a mother when not long ago you strangled an infant you plucked from your own belly?”

“I strangled him because I know I can bring him back.”

“Bring him back?”

“Yes; I shall bring him back, since it is the earth that has swallowed his remains.”

“I see you’re speaking with the certainty of a priestess.”

“I am woman. I am the feminine. I am the mother. I am the earth. I am the goddess Tanit, whose soul was born from her soul and who created the entire desert from her flesh.”

“Amazing!”

“Your tragedy is that you’ve never known me.”

“I really don’t know you.”

“I am your destiny.”

“My destiny?”

“Woman is man’s destiny. Have you forgotten the Law’s teachings that stipulate her protection when hastening along narrow desert paths?”

“I’ve never heard a maxim like this attributed to the Law.”

“Who can claim to know all the teachings of the Law?”

She gazed off across the vacant land, which was flooded by dusk’s jagged shadows. She looked exactly like a true priestess reciting a novel prophecy when she declared: “Like the desert, the Law has no beginning and no end.”

Then she adopted a new approach. She began to repeat a new refrain, morning and evening: “You abducted me one day and then abandoned me. Why did you abduct me if you intended to abandon me?”

Eventually, growing sick of her ballad, he flung his rebuttal at her melancholy face: “I did not abduct you. I have not abandoned you. What it amounts to is that I don’t want to forsake my principles and renounce the nomadic life.” She was so overwhelmed by lethal sorrow that he forgot what she had done and rocked her on his lap. He decided to terminate both her pains and his own by terminating the farce tribes refer to as “marriage.” He went to the animal pen and milked a camel. The fresh milk was topped by thick froth. From his pack he withdrew a mysterious, herbal powder. Then he dropped a handful of the powder into the milk container, which he took to her. She was complaining of a headache, nausea, and pain in her joints. He squatted near her and watched as she sipped the spiked drink. She swallowed a little only to stop and glance furtively at him. Then she continued drinking from the container as the froth coated her pale lips. When she finished, she set the container aside.

She said, “Don’t start to imagine that I’m feeling sick because I’m pregnant. You know why I’m sick!” She leaned her head against his butt.

He murmured, “I know.” His response, however, did not assuage her rancor, and so he decided to ask her, “Why does a woman feel she needs to bear children?”

She replied in a voice that was not her own: “Because woman is a mother, because woman is the earth, because woman is a goddess. Haven’t I ever told you that?”

“Why should a woman destroy her children, since she is their mother?”

“Because a woman loves her children.”

“Does a woman kill her children out of love?”

“Yes, of course. The lover must kill the one he loves.”

“Why should a woman give birth if she is destined to kill?”

“Because the sun also shines; it shines only to set. Everything that comes into existence does so not in order to remain but to disappear.”

“Why should a thing appear if it is destined to disappear?”

“A thing must inevitably disappear. If it didn’t, it could not reappear.”

Her voice shook. She began to fade away but without any sign of suffering or any complaint. Her voice became muffled. She had trouble speaking. He toyed with locks of her hair and stroked her face. He asked, “Is it better for us to disappear or to reappear?”

“Appearing constitutes a loss, but when we disappear we regain what we had lost in the spirit world.”

“I’m happy to hear that, since you will recover there everything you have lost here.”

She did not respond. He felt her pulse and found the protruding vein limp. Then there was no pulse. He bent over her to examine the expression in her eyes by the light of the fire. He saw a profound surrender in her look. He closed her eyelids and muttered as if addressing the eternal stillness in the eternal wasteland: “Farewell, poetess of the nations! Farewell, priestess of the tribes! Farewell, goddess who gave birth to herself and created the desert from her flesh!”

He adopted the jenny as his mount after a disastrous experience with the malice of camels. In fact, it was the spiteful behavior of this species that drove him to the she-ass. To quench the thirst of some camels in Tassili, he had been busy drawing water from a well, aided by a camel, which he had received from a foreigner in repayment for a loan, without ever imagining that any of the tales of this species’ perfidy might come true. Just past noon, when the heat was most intense and when going back and forth around the mouth of the well had exhausted him and apparently that creature too, he was caught off guard by the behemoth’s rebellion. When it first veered off course to the right, he assumed it had become disoriented, but once he tried to catch it to guide it back to the path, the camel lengthened its stride and quickened its pace. Then the leather bucket, which was fastened to the well’s winch, tore apart, and the camel dragged the rope away behind it. He shot off in pursuit but did not catch it until it had descended into a nearby ravine, where it was halted when its halter rope became entangled in an acacia. He found it frothing and spitting angrily and voluminously as it tried to escape from the trap that the shrubby acacia had devised. He grabbed hold of the nose rope and attempted to calm the beast, but that was not meant to be, for there stirred within it a jinn troupe that — according to the tribes’ tales — had concluded an age-old pact with this creature’s ancestors. Although he detected a look of overt hostility in its hideous, bulging eyeballs, he freed the nose rope from the tree’s root and stroked the camel’s flank, caressing it the way mothers caress their babies, for he knew that camels delight in all types of fondling. Then he sang a lament, since he was sure that these creatures dote on songs of longing, but insanity — once awakened — is a demon that does not recognize affection. Frenzy too — once it emerges — is a ghoul that is not seduced by songs of longing. From deep in its chest it released an abominable sound. Then it twisted its neck back in a lightening-swift movement to bite his hand with its vicious teeth, which were filthy with foam and spit. Had he not fallen back at the last second, it would have seized his hand. Instead its teeth raked the back of his left hand, wounding it.

Then the battle flared. He pulled hard on the halter, but the beast reared its legendary neck upward in insane rebellion, severing the rope that twisted round this scoundrel’s head. Thus the demon was liberated. At once it attacked him, braying with delight at its liberation, confident of its triumph. Finding no way to defend himself, he retreated with a bound. Since the open countryside offered no sanctuary for anyone fleeing from a raging camel, he leapt aside and took refuge in the acacia. The camel circled the tree, casing it with the rash defiance of one determined to take revenge in some undisclosed way. This circling was also foolhardy and exhausted the beast. Then it paused to growl, bray, and threaten him from the far side of the shrubby tree. When it stretched out a serpentine neck to bite him, he retreated. The demon’s rage peaked and, oblivious to the thorns, it threw itself on the acacia’s boughs. It crushed the vicious canopy with its body, as thorns penetrated its hooves, and then reached him. At that moment, since his only hope of deliverance lay in the open countryside, he burst off, racing toward the neighboring mountain chain, and the beast sped after him. He came to an area strewn with jagged rocks that skinned his legs and severed the strap of his right sandal, which he cast off. Then the stones lacerated his foot. He stumbled on a hill in the next stretch, lost his balance, and fell. The demon caught up with him, and he rolled across the flank of the hill and used his hands to help him gain his feet so he could continue fleeing.

In the following lap he forgot about himself and so forgot the danger threatening him, because he soon adjusted to running. Indeed, he began to enjoy his flight. Then he realized that man only escapes from danger once he relishes it and grows accustomed to its thrill. He felt exhausted, but the mountain chain was still far away, even though it looked very close. The mountains of Tassili, like those of Tadrart, look a stone’s throw away, even when a traveler is days from them.

Exhaustion and thirst got the better of him and he sensed the ghoul’s mouth above his head. When the camel’s frothy saliva rained down on his arms, he realized that the accursed beast had caught him. He decided to try to outsmart it and suddenly veered to the right. He sped a short distance and then changed course again, to the left. The sly demon, however, kept right on his heels, veering in pursuit of him with the deftness of a bird and the suppleness of a serpent; so he felt desperate. He despaired because exhaustion had overwhelmed him and thirst had betrayed him, casting him into the all-encompassing consciousness of danger once more, for ruination lies in ambush whenever one is conscious of danger while feeling its thrill.

In the succeeding lap, the beast pulled off his veil when attempting to bite his head. So he ran bare-headed across the barren land. In his flight, he descended some gullies, but these led to a steep incline, which he started to climb, gasping for breath, his heart almost leaping from his breast with each breath he took. Had he not used both hands and feet, the beast would have savaged him before he reached the top of the rise.

As he gained the summit, he fell. He fell and rolled across its extremely hard slope. He did not stop to think what he was doing until he reached a depression. Then he found himself in a deep ravine where trees grew at scattered intervals along the valley bottom and livestock grazed. No, these were not sheep or goats; these were donkeys. Half of the herd bolted; the others were startled but did not flee. Nearby, a few paces from where he had fallen, a gray she-ass gazed at him with inquisitive eyes. He detected in her look a mysterious smile. In this mysterious smile he discerned a message of salvation. He leapt to her side and then mounted her with another bound. At first she took offense and bucked in a heroic attempt to free herself, but he clung to her back. In fact he melded himself to her back, for he was certain this was the only straw to which he could cling. At that moment the ghoul reached them. First off, the jenny kicked it with her hind legs to halt its attack. Next she shot away down the valley with insane speed. She went past the trees and then regained the half of the herd that had bolted. In the wink of an eye she had outstripped them to continue her mad flight. She attained the mountain chain in an incredibly short time and deposited him at the foot of a mountain, beside a copious pool, which the torrents of the last rainy season had left and which rocky outcroppings sheltered from the fiery sun. Gone was the barren wasteland, and the beast had disappeared along with it. So he bounded to the pool to drink.

He climbed the slope and stretched out in a cave for a long time. On regaining consciousness, he brooded about the camel’s secret. He knew a lot about the wrath of camels but did not remember ever harming this one since receiving it from a noble of one of the tribes of Azjer in compensation for a long-deferred loan. Whatever could have come over it?

The next day he descended to the base of the mountain, drank from the pool, and ate some plants in the valley bottom before he made his way to the jenny. He found her grazing in a southern bend of the ravine. Then he stroked her neck for a long time and sang her an ancient lament. Next he tore apart his garment, which was stained with blood from his insane trip, and made a shackle for her from the strips of cloth. After placing this fetter over two of her legs, he set off to explore the area. He discovered evidence of camels and ashes from the fires of herdsmen but did not encounter anyone before evening fell, and so he relaxed. He climbed the hillside again and sought refuge in the cave. He lay down and immediately fell asleep. He was shortly awakened, however, by a ruckus. He searched to see whether those responsible for the ruckus were at the entrance to the cave but found no one. He crawled outside to find, towering above him, a man wrapped entirely in dark-blue fabric, from his veil to his feet. Rising, he found himself face-to-face with the specter. As desert people normally do when uncertain of the lineage of a wayfarer or of a stranger’s ethnicity, he inquired:

“Am I addressing a human being or a jinni?”

The specter replied immediately, “In the caverns of Tassili we frequently meet human beings with the body of a jinni and jinn with human bodies.”

“But we can always rely on amulets. The unintelligible lingo of the ancients reveals a creature’s constitution and shreds his veil of dissimulation.”

“Tribes of jinn have buried in the Tassili caves some of the most potent amulets. The only amulet worth anything here is a man who sees no difference between men and jinn.”

“I actually have never detected any difference between them.”

“That’s your most authentic amulet.”

“My master may sit with me, but I am unable to offer him food or drink, because I am also a guest in these lands.”

“We are all guests in these regions. Anyone who thinks differently is a scoundrel.”

They sat facing each other at the entrance to the cave. The guest spoke of rain and then changed topic to discuss armed raids, then epidemics, and finally famines. When it was his turn, he spoke about the fortunes of the tribes in the northern deserts and finished with his migration to the central deserts. Then he recounted his bloody ordeal with the camel he had received as repayment for a loan. The guest interrupted him: “Did you say you received it as repayment for a loan?”

“That’s right.”

“The secret lies in the loan, not the camel.”

“What?”

“We violate the commandments of our lost Law when we ask for a loan. We violate the Law twice when we grant a loan to people.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“Not so fast! Take it easy! Your first mistake was in making a loan to your friend, because a loan serves to nurture enmity in strangers, whom we provide with an incentive to become our enemies.”

“But why?”

“Human nature!”

“Do you think the debtor doctored the camel with some secret potion?”

“Didn’t I tell you that even worse than the jinn are people who disguise themselves as people?”

“But what should we do for individuals who fall on hard times and are in pressing need of a loan?”

“We give them what we can as a present, not a loan.”

“Amazing!”

“That’s preferable to loaning them something and then receiving a booby trap in return.”

“I don’t understand how a person can turn a beast into a booby trap.”

“That’s incredibly easy. One simply abuses the animal and then dispatches it to a competitor or enemy so that its bile will be vented on him instead of on the owner who mistreated it.”

Then he prepared to depart, and his host descended the hillside with him to see him off.

He decided to rely on cunning. So he descended to the valley to dispatch the camel as a warning.

He traveled along the twists of the valley to the south until he reached the caves where he normally hid necessities for his journeys: water skins, leather buckets, saddles, ropes, lances, swords, and arrows.

In the ancient cave, which was carved with the designs of the ancestors, he found that the saddle had disappeared, although the water skin still hung from the cave’s ceiling where he had left it a year or more before. It had shriveled and shrunk, and its leather had dried out, making it difficult to recognize as a container for storing water. The water skin and the saddle, however, had been hung there simply as part of a strategy appropriated from the customs of sorcerers, who toss down a bit of gold where people can reach it in order to put them off the trail of the true treasure.

He stood at the heart of the cave with worshipful humility. He turned toward the mouth of the cave and took one step forward; then a second step. He halted. He turned to the right and once again took two steps with eyes closed and head raised. He halted. Then he swung round to face the cave’s interior. He took a step, a second, and then a third. He halted. He turned right once more. He faced the north wall, which was decorated with colored and incised depictions of chimerical creatures that were composites blending human beings with animals and jinn. He stood in the presence of his ancestors’ altars with the prayerful attitude befitting a place that exuded antiquity’s scent, conveying a message thousands of years old. He murmured a charm in the forgotten language borrowed from the tongue of the forgotten tribe that had left him these cryptic maxims carved into the cave’s wall. Once he had recited this incantation of unknown meaning, he turned left. Then he took two steps before he knelt and began to dig beside the wall. Thus he liberated from the people of the netherworlds a treasure he had entrusted to them for safekeeping many years before. They had appropriated it, and he would certainly not have been able to retrieve it from them without the secret password, the worshipful rituals, and a recitation of the charms of the first peoples. He dug for a long time, scooping out dirt and then rocks before finally extracting the treasure, which consisted of a brass sword and a spear the shaft of which ended in a vicious iron triangle. The sword was metal and the tip of the spear was metal, and — like gold — metals are treasures that denizens of the spirit world love to seize, just as they seize gold dust and the newborns of human mothers who have not protected them with wormwood leaves, knife blades, or the charms of the ancients tucked into pieces of leather. He brandished the spear in the air and then removed the sword from its scabbard. He felled an invisible enemy with a single blow and then descended the hill.

He caught up with his camel in the northern ravines and found that with its hideous chest his crazy beast was covering a she-camel. He lit a fire nearby and then thrust the metal point of the spear into the ashes. He fetched a new, palm-fiber rope from his kit and profited from the beast’s preoccupation with mounting the female to fasten a fetter around its jaws and then to draw the rope back to tie firmly around the stallion’s hind legs. When he took the spear point out of the fire, it looked blazing, like a live coal. He advanced on the frantic camel and plunged this fiery triangle into the creature’s butt. The singed flesh made the hissing sound of a burning coal dropping in water. His nostrils were assailed by the scent of burning flesh. The scoundrel vented its pain with a voice that was not an animal’s or a human being’s. It was more like the sound of one of the unseen creatures: the voice of a ghoul, a she-demon, or a jinni. This sound blended with the voice of the miserable she-camel so that the braying became an earthquake that rocked the desert’s stillness. He was not finished, however. He removed the spear and returned to the fire, heating the sword furnace-hot. He placed the blade against the beast’s right jaw, burning the skin and sending smoke into the air. The earth shook with the ghoul’s howl. It tried to stand up to evade the pain of the fire but its attempts to free itself were frustrated by its copulative union with the female’s body. So it collapsed on the she-camel’s body as he struck the fiery blade against its other jaw. Smoke from the burning flesh filled the air once more.

When he had finished acting out his maxim, he approached his victim. After mumbling an invocation, he said: “Scion of misfortune, this is my message to your master.”

He unfettered the camel and took it to a herdsman for return to its master as a present.

Within a matter of days, herdsmen told him that the ignoble beast had caught its master off guard as he stretched out to sleep, pounced upon him, and crushed him under its chest.

He swore that from that day forward he would never take the offspring of camels as his companion, for he considered any animal making a trip with him a companion in a desert of never-ending journeys.

He went to the higher gorges and searched the herds of wild donkeys for his jenny that had saved him from the teeth of destruction one day. He handfed her barley and — from passing caravans — purchased for her dried clover imported from the oases. He placed a halter on her head and from then on thought of her as his companion, substituting her for those offspring of baseness, malice, and perfidy referred to in the tribes’ languages as “camels.” He was not content with this compact that provoked the horror of those who love the mahari and of devotees of other fine camels. He also launched a hostile attack against this species, accusing them of descending from inhabitants of the spirit world. In one of the satirical odes he composed, with some assistance from the talents of a wily herdsman, he said that demonic jinn like to cling to the backs of camels to make them their steeds and that, indeed, camels rank second as mounts for the denizens of the spirit world, topped only by the wind. For this reason, arrogance and haughtiness are a curse that befalls all those who choose to ride a mahari. By contrast, desert tribes have never observed a single presumptuous person feel haughty while mounted on a donkey. Times would come that would turn this innovation head over heels, just as the desert previously had been turned topsy-turvy by an innovation called commerce, which had transformed the most estimable people into the basest and converted the noblest heroes into riffraff, while turning members of the lower class into nobles.

The tribes attributed to him provocative verses that denigrated the status of camels and extolled donkeys by contrast. Despite the anger aroused by these verses, which some people interpreted as a challenge to the law of chivalry and a heresy attributable to the common people, many elders discovered that they were not devoid of wisdom, especially since the donkey was the first beast of burden domesticated by their original ancestors. In their lives back then, they had relied on the donkey for assistance even before cattle, which eventually were wiped out by droughts, leaving no evidence behind them in the desert. These men confirmed that it would be slanderous for them to snub their grandfathers’ companion, which had sprung to their forefathers’ rescue, or to celebrate the heroic deeds of the camel, which was proverbial for being as hateful as a slave or a flood. When panegyric poetry ruled supreme and the story was disseminated through the tribes, spiteful individuals jested and thus bestowed on him the epithet Wantahet, inspired by the hero of the story transmitted down through the generations with the comment that the master of the jenny at the end of time would approach villages to entice tribes to a banquet only to pull the banquet carpet out from under them, allowing them to fall into a bottomless abyss. When this message reached him, he responded to these people with a message in the form of a long ode, in which he eventually admitted he was the jenny master but denied that he was the jenny master who would lead the tribes to a banquet in the abyss. He was, rather, the jenny master who would lead the tribes to the banquet of deliverance.

The oasis lay in a depression encircled to the south and east by a network of sword-type dunes. It was bounded on the north by a barren plain strewn with rocks that were baked in the inferno of ancient volcanoes and then divided by shallow valleys leading eventually to a distant mountain chain, which was swathed in murky blue. To the west extended a wasteland with even, sandy dirt coated with pebbles. At the heart of the oasis stood a single hill, although it was not originally one and had become a mountain thanks to the flow of a power called time, which leveled the buildings of one generation, reducing them to mounds on which the next generation raised its own. The subsequent act in this everlasting epic was the collapse of this generation’s buildings; thus the structures of later generations rose on that debris. Eventually, with the passing days, the top of all this construction stretched high enough to stand as a real mountain, crowned by caverns and decorated at every step by skulls of bygone generations and the bones of ancestors, whom time had felled and cast down to feed the earth. During its long history, this oasis apparently experienced a flowering that brought it many honors among the oases but also created enemies for it, so that it was subjected to armed raids from neighboring clans. Testifying to this were broken remnants of the oldest wall — incorporated into a later one. These were located by the tomb mountain on the north. The desert world understands from experience that oases only imprison themselves behind walls to defend themselves against violent enemies. It has also learned from experience that enemies only launch attacks on prosperous oases.

Generations have related that the spring, located at the southern limits of the oasis, near the sands, was once part of a great lake, before the wind’s sandy attacks advanced against it in prehistoric times. Out of self-defense, it retreated north, seeking refuge with the rocky desert, for which the northern mountain chains serve as a landmark. Once water nymphs had enticed desert men to abandon their endless migrations, settle down, populate the empty space, and sow the earth, they were able, thanks to this astonishing feat, to lay the cornerstone for the structure of the civilization known to later generations as “the oasis.”

The day he arrived at the market mounted on his jenny, he stopped her at a nearby wall and tossed her a handful of clover for her delectation. Then he went to the square, where the chief merchant hurried to greet him, jubilantly resorting to panegyric hyperbole: “It is reported that Wantahet willingly carries his jenny on his back when wading through mires in the sandy desert or transports her by camel-back, like a precious cargo, thus going out of his way to demean camels.” “Ha, ha. . Why shouldn’t the jenny master carry his jenny on his back, since she protected him one day? Why shouldn’t the jenny master decry the offspring of camels, since his fear of them is not unfounded?”

“The jenny master’s tongue never lacks a response. Only a person granted felicitous use of this organ by the spirit world will ever know happiness.”

“The tongue assures happiness in our world, but eternal happiness depends on the intellect.”

“You’re right. Anyone granted mastery over the tongue will never need to conclude a pact with our master luck.”

“And anyone allied with luck will equally have little need for the tongue. You merchants are the scions of luck.”

“That’s what everyone thinks. Only a few people realize that nothing depends so much on the intellect, which you just mentioned, as does commerce. Because they are ignorant of the truth about this riddle called commerce, people disdain it. The problem is not that common people are naturally opposed to what they don’t understand; they simply have never known the delight of commerce. They don’t understand that landing a deal ranks even above landing a beautiful virgin.”

“I know that no sedentary person practices a profession unless he finds pleasure in its pursuit.”

“Commerce, Mr. Foreigner, isn’t just trade. Commerce does not consist merely of profit or loss. Commerce — like woman — is a plaything. Commerce is a song! Commerce, for the accomplished practitioner, is a stanza in a long epic. The epic is the physical world and commerce is its verses. Commerce’s brilliance is evidenced by its ability to call forth civilization from a void. Were it not for commerce, this oasis wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. If it were not for commerce, we would not have had the pleasure of meeting here in the market today.”

From behind his veil, he watched the merchant with interest but interrupted at this juncture: “Your aria about commerce has moved me, inspiring me to dream up a deal. Ha, ha. . would you imagine that the jenny master would dare engage in commerce by offering a deal to the master merchant?”

The chief merchant smiled a salesman’s cunning leer and then replied, “Why not? A contract lies hidden in everyone’s pocket. In the heart of each creature sleeps a wish that can be converted into a contract. The innards of any individual conceal a contract. A woman is pregnant with a fetus; a man is burdened with a contract. From cradle to grave, our entire life is a contract. Some succeed in fulfilling it early; others only execute it successfully later on, but woe to anyone who fails to conclude a contract, because our contract, master, is our life.”

“Actually my contract will prove equally significant, since you think the only true contract is one that provides deliverance for us, because every deliverance is a life.”

“Yes, every contract is a deliverance and every deliverance is a life.”

“I’d like to sell you glad tidings, cheap.”

“Cheap, glad tidings?”

“You’ll trade me barley, dates, and dried meat for the antidote.”

“Antidote?”

“In my pocket I have an antidote to treat the epidemic threatening the bellies of your women.”

“Are you joking?”

“Would we dare joke about a condition that threatens people with annihilation?”

“What do you mean?”

They halted within sight of the crowd, facing each other. The man offering the glad tidings said, “You can try out the antidote on your wife. If it fails, I’ll pay the cost of your goods plus my camels. You can send your vassals to Danbaba, where they will recognize my camels by my mark, which the tribes ridicule, claiming that it was not inherited from our ancestors. No pictures of hares or donkeys were incised on the rocks, since these two wicked creatures were considered ill-omened. Tribesmen have even cast doubt on my mark, which — branded on my camels’ flanks — is shaped like two long ears, for they deem the design an innovation that violates the Law. Hee, hee, hee. . ”

He nearly choked on his offensive laughter, and so the master of commerce assumed the reins of speech: “I don’t think I’ll need to send my men to take possession of your camels in Danbaba. I would never have become chief of the merchants in this oasis had I not trusted people. Trust is the law of commerce. My own law is to be less troubled by the loss of some goods than by loss of confidence in another person. So how does one test the efficacy of your antidote?”

He moved a step closer to his companion and gazed into the man’s soul from concealed eyes. He seemed to have stopped breathing altogether before he asked in a hoarse voice, “Does it hurt you a lot not to bring children into the world?”

Amghar lowered his gaze. He sighed. He exhaled audibly. Then he whispered, as if to match his speech to his companion’s: “What are we without children? Do you believe that we really live when we don’t live on through our children? Everything we do is in vain if we don’t bring children into this world. Even my commercial transactions are in vain if I can’t pass them along to my children as a trust.”

The master of the glad tidings remained silent for a time. Without ceasing to stare his companion in the eye, he said, “You know I don’t visit other men’s homes.”

“I know.”

“You know that charms must be recited before a medication can be administered.”

“I know.”

“You know that an antidote is a prophecy and that a prophecy will flourish only in private.”

“I know.”

“You also know that idle chatter is the helpmeet of miscarriage and that the tribes do not know the success of a matter that has not been cloaked in silence.”

“I know.”

“Send your wife to me tonight. You will see the results in a few weeks.”

She lost the fetus, and a woman without a fetus is not a woman. She lost a treasure on which she had counted even more than her spouse imagined, because a child to its father is nothing more than a toy, but a child to its mother is the world. For this reason, oral histories of the tribes have passed down tales of ancient women, who threw themselves down pits or into flooded ravines when their sterility was confirmed, in response to the traditional assumption that a woman’s life is pointless if the fullness of time proves her barren. She had nourished doubts about herself and whispered suggestions had shredded her heart after she spent a year with her husband without feeling a fetus twitch inside her. Then she rushed to the blind sorceress to beg for deliverance. The wily scoundrel subjected her to a taxing examination, messing about with her internal organs. Then she gave her a potion that upset her digestion so terribly that she almost spat out her guts. Next, from straps of camel hide that had been soaked in water, she made her client a vicious girdle that became a stifling corset as it dried, almost arresting her respiration. She left her victim imprisoned by this corset for three days. On the fourth day she freed her and sent her — heavily laden with herbal concoctions, her neck encircled by amulets — back to her husband. Within only a few weeks, she felt nauseous and experienced the first symptoms of pregnancy. Her happiness, however, like all other sorts of bliss, did not last long, for something descended on the languid oasis that carried away women’s offspring and tore embryos from the bellies of their mothers. She suffered a miscarriage too. She would have been able to keep up her hopes and to regain her strength preparatory to becoming pregnant once more — like all the other women — had the sorceress not acknowledged the difficulty of mounting a counteroffensive. This was what so terrified her, rekindling memories of the ancient tales about a barren woman’s destiny, that she twice slipped off secretly to the spring to check the depth of the pool in preparation for the day when she would decide to imitate the example of those ancient women.

In the past, prior to her calamity, she had recalled her escapade on her wedding night to laugh at her own antics, which the oasis considered disrespectful of the customs the tribes had passed down from one generation to the next. After the affliction, however, tears burnt her eyes whenever she remembered that first night, when she had fled to hide in the groves, as the Law dictates, and the women had gone out to search for her, but she — instead of playing this game to its conclusion — had decided to trick the women and to slip into the isolated tent — near the fields — where her bridegroom sat. She had not done that out of any disrespect for the Law, as the oasis thought, or because she longed to throw herself into her man’s embrace. She had violated ancient customs out of a longing to obtain something else, which not even all women would really comprehend, since not every woman is a woman and not every mother is the type of mother who fondles offspring in her heart as her sole dream.

She did not reveal her secret even to her sisters, because she was sure they would not believe her. So, rather than bare her heart to them, she preferred to let them call her “Tenekert,” because even if they had believed her, they would have rightfully disapproved of her disrespect for inherited custom, since she knew they did not bear in their hearts the same whispering and did not share her thirst for offspring.

Now, as he broached the topic of the antidote with her, she remembered his astonishment the moment she had come to him on their wedding night. He had tried to disguise it with silence at first but had suddenly abandoned his gravity to guffaw so loudly he ended up losing his balance. He had continued squirming on his earthen throne for a long time as he attempted to stifle his laughter. She waited for him to stop laughing, curious to hear what he would say, because anyone who initiates a surprise always anticipates reactions rather than some new action. After his bout of laughter subsided that night, he grasped her wrist to offer his interpretation: “You know? I didn’t acquire my fortune until I had paid for it with my life. I did not imagine that I would acquire a creature who would revive my lost life gratis. Hee, hee, hee. . ”

She did not tell him her real reason that night. She did not reveal her secret to him. She left him in his triumphal swoon at his imaginary victory. She was not uncomfortable about allowing him to presume what he wanted, because she knew instinctively as a woman that nothing is easier for a clever woman than to introduce happiness to the heart of a man, who is more like a child than a man, because it takes little to make a man feel happy. It merely takes a presumption, provided that the cause of this presumption is a woman rather than a man. Women can rest assured that a man requires nothing more than a doll in order to enjoy the legendary condition called happiness, provided that this doll is a woman. An astute woman does not need to borrow a doll for him from the temporal world or a puppet from the physical world, since she can transform herself into an action figure for him. This is woman’s secret. This is the difference between an astute woman and a dumb one. She had given herself to him that night like a doll. He had not needed to wait for her to be brought back from a flight to the desert for a night or even for several nights, during which time he would have submitted to a vexing interrogation by old women, who would not have handed over to him the maiden he had chosen as his spouse until after negotiations during which he might have surrendered half of his wealth, or even all of it, to pay them for delivering her, in keeping with the dictates of the lost Law.

She had, however, violated the exalted commandments and fled from the desert and from the hands of the aged sorceresses. She had fled from this faux-flight to throw herself voluntarily into the embrace of the ghoul, her abductor and her spouse. She had offered herself to the man in order to give him the impression that he was receiving her for free, to make him think that he had concluded the most precious deal in the whole world, for she was certain that to a man in whose veins trade flows like blood a woman is merely another deal. In fact, she is the ultimate deal, one that renders superfluous all previous deals. She did not tell him that she had another contract in her pocket. She did not disclose her vulnerable spot to him. She did not discuss with him her longing for a child. She was fated to keep this secret throughout this period, even though secrets do not remain secret forever. The moment for the secret’s predestined revelation arrived when he approached her dejectedly to broach the matter of the antidote with her, for she decided then to strip bare her heart. She decided to defend herself by discrediting what men always assume to be certain, even though she knew that by using this defense she would injure the man’s self-esteem. That night she had no need to tell him she had not fled to his tent on their wedding night out of any yearning to conquer man’s community but instead to gain offspring from his loins. That achieved, it would not matter to her whether she lost on the deal, since she would have acquired life by gaining a child.

That night she did not need to utter a word, for her eyes told him all he needed to hear. She informed him in this way that she would have sought an antidote to allow her to bear a child even if he not raised this subject. She told him with her eyes that a man, in her opinion, was nothing more than a meaningless specter if he did not carry the miraculous seed in his body, that he would never deserve a woman unless the spirit world supplied his loins with this sacred trust and that he was not created to take a woman but to be taken by one, because man’s message resembles that of a male drone destined to perish once he passes on the sacred trust to the queen bee.

She had seen the stranger at the spring one day when she was with her sisters. It had not been hard for her to see what type of man that strategist was. Therefore, she knew what she would do when she went the following evening to receive the antidote from his hands.

Had he exaggerated when he told the jenny master that winning a deal beats even winning a beautiful virgin? In point of fact, he could just as easily have asserted the opposite, since his bitter journey in search of a contract had taught him that a contract not aimed at securing a beautiful virgin is an improvised and pointless one. He had never dreamt of a contract involving a fortune in isolation from a contract involving a beautiful woman. Indeed, he had not begun his journey on this bitter quest for any other purpose than the pursuit of the impossible dream he always beheld in the physique of a beautiful woman. He was now able to state decisively, after many years had been frittered away, that the dream of conquering a beautiful woman had been the original, whispered temptation that had aroused inside him a longing to make a deal and a craving for riches. He had understood since adolescence that a belle is a she-jinni who will not fall into a man’s snare unless it is baited with a fortune. The day he set out to realize his mission, his secret motivation never slipped from his mind, notwithstanding the seductive, tricky stratagems that each trading trip casts before travelers, tempting some to fall by the wayside and luring others to deviate from the true course till they forget their goal and substitute for it another Beloved. Thus an action figure is transformed into the lord of lords, while the Lord of Lords renounces the exalted heights to become a figment of the imagination in the difficult errand. He actually had been reckless on the way but had never ignored the truth. He had attempted to distinguish between the Beloved and the dummy, which we compare with the Beloved so it can nourish in our hearts our passion for the Beloved. He had fought off the demons, struggled with the jinn, and come to blows with battalions of ghouls to consummate a contract. Whenever he made a deal, he would retreat into himself and address in his heart the mysterious Beloved, in order to borrow from His sovereignty a new incentive to assist him in making another deal, because the young beauty for whom his heart had pounded when he was an adolescent and who had jilted him for a rich man, had not left his memory, even though she had left his heart. She had become a sibilant insinuation whispering in his ear, reminding him of his loss. At the outset, his sole reason for embarking on this journey had been to transform this sound into a pining song that would convert his defeat into a victory. Since the journey had begun for the sake of a woman, a woman necessarily became its goal. The day he spotted the beauty bathing naked in the pool at the spring, a lump formed in his throat and a whispered desire stirred in his heart. The cause of the lump was the memory of his first disappointment and the reason for the whispered suggestion was the dream he had cherished so fondly throughout his journey that it had almost become a forgotten secret. Her precious chest was splashed with drops of water and topped by two jaunty, swelling breasts. To her right breast clung some strands of jet-black hair that formed around the shapely, virginal nipple a mysterious, gloomy-colored circle that reminded him, for some unknown reason, of the halo of the moon when it turns full. Her large black eyes, which resembled those of a gazelle in the Massak desert, shone with a dusky radiance. In them glowed a cryptic look suggesting temptation, appeal, desire, hope, or a secret combination of all these. He was convulsed by a tremor — actually an earthquake, one well known to anyone to whom the spirit world has presented the woman destined for him. Afterwards, he found himself involuntarily repeating out loud: “She! She! She’s the one!” Then he emitted a subdued groan before proclaiming hoarsely: “I’ve waited a long time for you!”

His friends, however, let him down the day he mentioned her, for they cautioned him: “If you allow a water nymph to wedge you between her thighs, you’ll be forced to kiss your travels good-bye.”

He considered for a moment. He remembered her precious chest crowned by full breasts sprinkled with drops of water. He remembered her virginal nipple encircled by a charm that resembled the full moon’s halo. Then he sighed and told them: “Traveling is a pain. The day must come when the wanderer lays down his staff, whether he wants to or not.”

That evening he decided to marry her, forgetting a maxim he had learned from business: “What we acquire, inevitably acquires us.” The appearance of a beautiful woman on the horizon of our world constitutes a danger that inevitably causes us to forget both the lessons of experience and the maxims of the past.

When she came to him, once night was fully entrenched, she was spooked by the darkness in the vault. So he took her outside to find a secluded spot, leading her silently over hills strewn with the skulls of ancestors and the tombs of the deceased. The moon gleamed high above while stillness stood guard over the lowlands. He did not even hear the chirring of the grasshoppers that vied musically with each other in the distant field adjoining the spring. All he could hear was the slap of their sandals on the stones of the path. He remembered that women cannot bear silence even when no man is present. What would she think, then, when accompanied by a man? As he tried to devise something to say, he remembered the vault and told her, “Tombs are an inevitable part of life. Anyone who passes through life must eventually pitch camp in a tomb.” He added that he could not see the difference between the wall of a tomb’s vault and a wall that formed part of a house, since both house and tomb are constraining containers. “Houses are tombs for the living, if they are truly alive, and tombs are houses for the dead, if they are truly dead.” He was incapable of assessing which of the two groups should more properly be termed “living” and which “dead.” His sly laughter rattled in his throat. Then choking on his guffaws, he fell silent. He felt like a fool and warned himself that speaking intelligently to a woman is stupid even on normal occasions; how much more so on a night of seclusion. He tipped his turban to the vastness of the sky as if begging for a prophecy. He listened carefully but heard only their breathing. Even the sound of their footsteps was swallowed by slipping sand that guided them toward the secluded area that led to the fields. He said cryptically, “This is a night for poetry. Sing me a song of longing.”

She stammered, “It’s always easier for us to recite poetry than frenzy.”

“Ha, ha. . wayfaring truly is an insane frenzy, and what’s even crazier is talking about it.”

“Why should we wander when we can recite poetry?”

“Because wandering is itself a verse of poetry. Wayfaring is a substitute for poetry. When a person is incapable of reciting poetry, his only option is to pack his gear and set off to race the wind.”

“That’s depressing. I don’t know why it depresses me to hear a discussion of wandering.”

“Wayfaring is depressing because it is real, and reality is always a form of punishment.”

“But poetry is a consolation.”

He emitted a deep groan before he replied, “Poetry is wayfaring for those who are unable to wander, and wayfaring is the poetry of those unable to compose poetry.”

They entered a rough area where their sandals sank into stubborn mires. So they fell silent, but he heard her voice once they had escaped from the difficult terrain. She intoned one of the ancient songs of longing, humming it. Then she stopped. She said in a lyrical voice, as if continuing the yearning song that had ceased before it could ring out: “We are water’s daughters who seduced the desert warriors into filling our wombs with offspring to provide a posterity. Who are you?”

“I am a son of the Qibli wind, which created the desert for the relief of the wayfarer.”

“How can the desert provide relief for the wayfarer, given that it’s a desert?”

“Because relief is deliverance, and the only deliverance for the world’s wayfarers is the desert.”

“Had the water nymphs not embraced the men of the desert, they would have perished.”

“What good does it do for water’s daughters to embrace the desert’s sons, since they will perish even if they grasp the lifeline afforded by the water?”

“For them to perish beside the water is a lesser evil than for them to perish in the wasteland’s labyrinth.”

“Nonsense! To perish beside the water is a humiliation. To perish in the desert’s labyrinth is a point of pride. Perishing beside the water is a form of slackness. Perishing in the wasteland’s labyrinth is pure. Perishing beside the water is decay. To perish in the wasteland’s labyrinth is a song. To perish beside the water is disgraceful. To perish in the maze of the desert is heroic.”

“Shrewd men discuss the stranger’s wiles using the language of myths, but how futile it is for elders to assume that they will frighten off a woman with their mythological hermeneutics. Instead, they are much more likely to awaken curiosity in her breast. So, who are you really?”

“When I said I’m the son of the desert’s breath, what does that make me?”

“The desert has never exhaled anything but fire!”

“Bravo! Bravo! Fire is my name, but I’ve never disclosed it to anyone. So watch out!”

“Does the strategist fear sorcery enough to conceal his name?”

“Only fearful people like us become strategists.” “Really?”

“Dissimulation is the first secret in the law of strategic thought.”

“Tell me about your names.”

“You won’t return to your spouse’s bedchamber the same person as you came if I tell you about my names.”

“You inflame my curiosity.”

“You obviously understand what it means for water and fire to meet.”

“Water and fire?”

“The offspring of water and the offspring of fire. . ”

“You’re contributing to my insanity.”

“I have seven names. They are my veils.”

“Your veils?”

“They are more like scarves that protect me from people’s duplicity.”

“Do you have enemies?”

“Strangers only attribute cunning to a person who has enemies.”

“It would really be sweet if I could hear the rest of your names.”

“How can I tell you my other names when you haven’t even decoded the talisman protecting the first one?”

“How can the talisman for the first name be decoded?”

“The only way to decode it is through the union of fire and water.”

“But their union destroys the fire.”

“The fire that dies in their union brings new life to the water. What doesn’t perish in the wasteland is not generated in the spirit world.”

“I feel dizzy.”

She collapsed into his arms and he carried her toward the sword dunes, stumbling like a heavily laden camel.

One dark night, at the foot of a venerable mountain in the heart of an oasis lost in a desert that had no beginning or end, a suspicious specter advanced slowly. He did not take the path that circled the foot of the mountain from the northwest but slipped through the palms on the eastern side and crossed the secluded area adjacent to the debris of the mountain’s flank. Then he made his way to the burying fields that climbed the mountain’s southern haunch where the stranger had taken up residence in the vault of a mausoleum.

Before this vault the specter halted, petrified, like a boulder. He did not stir, breathe, or speak and could easily have been a scarecrow from the fields or a demon jinni who had decided to terrify the hearts of passersby.

His prayer lasted for a long time before he made a sound to announce his presence. He emitted a weird panting noise that was not a cough, hawking, guffaw, or shout. Another specter popped from the mouth of the vault, took two steps toward the visitor, and then also went rigid. He held himself erect, faced the visitor, and did not stir. He stood motionless for a long time. There reigned between them the silence of eternal deserts that are devoid of mortals, grazing beasts, and birds. As the confrontation continued, the stillness grew ever more magical, profound, and mysterious. The two evidently enjoyed the stillness. Their meeting seemed to have been ordained before the dawn of recorded time. They appeared to communicate through their silence, as if silence were their language, as if they were more eloquent when speaking with silence’s tongue than with a physical tongue. They might well have been two incognito gods rather than the progeny of terrestrial creatures enchanted by the tongue’s babbling. The offspring of the Unknown scorn the tongue and consider its chattering base defilement that cannot be effaced even by the grandest oblations.

Their silence could have lasted forever, since their silent communication was apparently quite effective, but a nearby owl hooted, rocking the desert’s stillness and reminding them that an ignoble organ called the tongue rested between both their sets of jaws. So the visitor thought he would visit that arena first: “Since prophecy has not descended to the low-lying world of people, people have no choice but to knock on the door of prophecy.”

The vault’s master answered him allusively: “Great is the man who lauds prophecy to the people. Great, great is the man who does not wait for prophecy to knock on his door but goes to knock on prophecy’s portal, even when this forces him to compromise a nobleman’s gravity and to slink by night to the burying grounds.”

The visitor released a moan of longing. “To be guided to one with whom communications have been ruptured for years and years is also a prophecy.”

The vault’s master approached his guest, took his hand, and guided him to a seat on a mat by the tomb’s entrance. Then he sat down beside him. Once more the two specters confronted each other, but then the host substituted for the tongue of the jinn that of human beings: “It’s hardly conceivable that a veil could conceal what time once disclosed.” “You’re right. When the days have stripped a heart naked, not even a thousand veils can hide it.”

“The heart’s a treasure that no secret can conceal.”

“Tell me the truth: Did you try to hide the evidence with the tip of your veil, diligently seeking to conceal your identity?”

“The evidence?”

“Of smallpox. Have you forgotten the scars from the epidemic?”

“Would a son of the desert forget the traces of an epidemic?”

“Just as the son of the desert would not forget the scars of the epidemic, the victim of the epidemic would not forget a hand that pulled him from the mires of that affliction.”

“No payment for the benefactor exceeds gratitude in an age that knows neither gratitude nor loyalty.”

“We must never allow people’s shortcomings to rob us of our trust in people.”

“Should we insist on this out of compassion for ourselves or out of compassion for other people?”

“Both.”

They fell silent and stillness returned to guard them with an even greater authority, for once the pillars of the tongue’s stammering wobbled, silence determined to reassert its sovereignty over the world. As it grew deeper, more cryptic, and more seductive, the two men seated there sensed an indefinable awkwardness. They sensed an awkwardness a creature discerns only after it has hardened into an offense. To free himself — refusing to cling to the coattails of silence — he hastened to use his tongue: “It’s easy to hide a distinguishing feature on your two cheeks; it’s hard to hide one that cannot be hidden.”

“Are you referring to the jenny?”

The jenny master did not reply, and so the guest added, “I didn’t need to see the jenny; nor did I need any other distinguishing characteristic to be guided to the true identity of someone with whom the fates once united me.”

“The day we met in the market you left the impression that you didn’t recognize me and had never seen me before. Was that a snub or a rejection?”

“Neither. The vassals had mentioned other identifying characteristics unlike the distinctive mark any fool could spot on the body, and so I felt perplexed. When the elders met and the messengers related their conversations with the stranger, I grasped the secret and no longer had any need for proof. I did not reveal the stranger’s identity, however, hopeful I could spare the oasis anxiety and fearful the rabble might harm him.”

“You did the right thing.”

“Everyone knows it’s a serious matter when a man leaves home, but a stranger’s success is held hostage by our ignorance of the secret intent he harbors. A secret that has been disclosed is a prophecy that dissipates before it can be fulfilled, and the dissipation of a prophecy means the destruction of the prophet.”

“I’m pleased to hear the Law’s wisdom from the tongue of a person who enjoys wallowing in the mires of oases.” “I’m sorry you still think ill of oases.”

“What does the stranger do when the disciple and friend has given verbal expressions of gratitude but betrayed a solemn promise?”

“Not so fast! Take it easy!”

“We should obey maxims, not memories.”

The guest emitted a hurt groan and raised his head toward the stars in the sky as if searching for inspiration among their twinkling lights. Then the vault’s master said, “The day I rescued you from death, I had only one piece of advice for you: to keep traveling. Have you forgotten?”

“How could I forget?”

“How can I believe that you haven’t forgotten when I see you relishing languor. You don’t even stop there but have agreed to lead other languid folks as well.”

“The problem with rules is that there’s always a good reason to break them.”

“When has deliverance been easy?”

“I admit it has never been easy. The commandments of the lost Law testify to that.”

“Hardship that brings deliverance is easier to bear than ease that brings ruin.”

The visitor sighed with disappointment and remarked ruefully, “Easy for us to say; hard for us to do. You don’t know what it means for a man to put down roots.”

“I know; roots are the greatest evil of all.”

“We absorb a root’s moisture and grow roots without even knowing it.”

“Cursed be the root that serves to destroy us, even if it provides us refreshing draughts.”

“Oh, woe, alack.”

“The noblest element of the rambling man’s heart is his longing. No one fails while longing persists in his heart.” “Longing is what endures.”

“It was longing that permitted our ancestors to perform heroic deeds. It was longing that enabled our ancestors to compose poetry. It was longing that made it possible for our ancestors to etch the Law’s maxims onto the hearts of subsequent generations.”

“Our grandfathers were men; we are merely shadows.”

“Longing is a charm that brings life even to shadows. There is nothing that longing cannot accomplish.”

“Oh woe, alack. You show confidence in rooted people when you attempt to revive decaying bones.”

“The restoration of life to decaying bones is a prophetic mission.”

They fell silent again. The stillness seized hold of them, transporting them far, far away.

No one leaving the oases for the desert has ever been totally free of infection. Similarly, no son of the desert has gone to the oases attempting to escape a drought without eventually returning to the desert carried on the beast of a passing caravan, a feeble shadow of his former self, so famished he barely has the strength to draw his final breaths.

The day a passing caravan carried back to the desert its son Ewar and dropped him in the tribe’s custody, no one imagined that this specter could be brought back to life, not even by a miracle. The wretch who had fled from a prolonged drought that had once settled over the central desert was not merely famished on his disastrous return but carried in his body something worse than hunger. He harbored an affliction even worse than the fires of drought. He had smallpox.

Desert people prefer to receive from the oases a prodigal son who has lost his bodily strength to hunger rather than to receive back a prodigal son who carries an infectious disease. Over the course of the centuries their reason for avoiding the manacles of sedentary life within the walls of oases has been fear of infection associated with house walls, foul air, and virulent diseases.

They consider diseases that come to their dwellings from the world of the oases a lethal threat, since they are certain that these diseases are far more virulent than those carried by the desert’s winds, since the former do not respond to desert antidotes or medicines derived from desert plants. For this reason they have established a law that decrees quarantining a patient in a tent erected for him in a deserted area far from their settlement. Medical experts and herbalists visit him, but if the disease resists their treatments and they despair of finding a cure, they signal people, and the tribe packs up to seek refuge in the desert from this curse, leaving the invalid to his fate, because according to the customary law handed down through the generations, to sacrifice the whole community for the sake of one of its members would be an unforgivable act of ignorance, even though the choice is cruel.

The day the miserable Ewar, who was covered with terrible sores from which oozed purulence and pus, was carried by a mount to the tribe’s encampment, people also gave him a wide berth, set up a distant tent for him, and dispatched some specialists for a diagnosis. Meanwhile, groups of people — men and children — stood at the entrances of their dwellings, apprehensively awaiting a signal. That day the medical examination did not last long. The specialists left the invalid’s tent with bowed heads and stood there with the gravity of priests, clinging to silence while they recited cryptic prayers to the Unknown. Then they departed, dragging their sandals across the earth. Thus people learned that the experts were stymied and that the poor man was to await his fate in the desert world, alone. So the men turned back inside and pulled the tent posts, collapsing the tents on their heads. Children wept together while women hurried back and forth, beginning the process of packing up their belongings. This was not a departure to gain pasture lands in some other desert. They did not depart for the sake of change or because they felt they had stayed in one place too long. Their journey was not to flee from an enemy, as happened during years of armed raids. This journey was terrible in two respects: first, because it reminded one — like any journey — of that journey from which one does not return, and, secondly, because it presaged a death and served as an elegy. Departure meant not only that they were burying themselves in the folds of an unknown from which they might never return but also that they were burying a brother who had sought their help with an affliction for which they had been unable to find a cure. They were burying a son who had sought asylum with them only to have them refuse. Their inability to offer asylum to a relative was not merely a sin but a punishment from which they could not escape, not even by the most grandiose sacrificial offering. Thus with their journey that day they were not merely offering an elegy for one man but for the whole clan. They were not offering an elegy merely for strangers but for themselves, because they had violated the precepts of the lost Law, which prods people to act heroically. These precepts instruct a person to sacrifice his life to save the life of another person hard-pressed by a calamity and to sacrifice his own life in an attempt to rescue a victim of a calamity, even if he fears this will be in vain. They definitely would not have fled from an enemy if that had meant leaving behind them someone whose life would be in danger, even if they were powerless to resist the enemy, because raiders are enemies who originate in the physical world, unlike diseases, which are considered enemies from the spirit world. They had the fortitude to defy death when the enemy could be seen and heard. They had no strategy, however, for combating invisible and inaudible adversaries from the spirit world. For this reason they carried their calamity away with them in their hearts that day, just as they carried away their possessions on the backs of their camels, racing off to seek sanctuary in the great outdoors, which had never disappointed them, more from a hope of burying their rout in its vast expanses than from a hope of finding deliverance for themselves in its labyrinth, because flight in response to a whispered suggestion of the heart is more difficult even than one caused by avoidance of an epidemic.

The invalid whom they left alone, inside the tent, however, was not conscious of any whispered suggestion and did not feel any rout, because he required no medical expertise to realize that he had to summon all the strength he could muster to fight off the disease if he wished to stay alive. So he stretched out a trembling hand to seize a piece of bread they had left near him and struggled to chew it, not from hunger but because his ailing body needed nourishment to help it struggle against a disease. He swallowed a morsel with disgust. Then he undid the tie of the water skin that hung from the tent pole above his head and nursed from its mouth like a kid nursing from a goat’s teat. He took one sip and then refastened the tie, worried about exhausting the water. He knew he would perish from thirst even if he did not perish from the disease. His life now depended much more on the water in the skin than on the illness in his body. The tribes’ specialists who devised this stratagem understood this and therefore usually were stingy with a terminal patient’s water, because they were certain that plentiful water would only prolong his suffering. He moved slightly to check the sores on his face as the stink of purulence assailed his nose. He tried to stop his nostrils with the end of his veil, but it was enmeshed with his decomposing flesh and therefore difficult to pull off. It was, similarly, hard to free his garment, which was bonded to his body so tightly that it was no longer possible to distinguish cloth from flesh. The viscous purulence had coated and soaked the garment so that it adhered firmly to his carcass, even though the liquid had not dried yet. In fact, it continued to leak from his sores, flooding and flowing over the surface.

From the entrance wafted some breaths of noonday heat. He wished for an attack of the Qibli wind, which sucks up water from wells and even absorbs the dampness from water skins, leaving plants in the desert little more than desiccated waste and deadwood, no different from rocks and dirt. He wished for an assault from the south wind, which would effect the deliverance that thus far the disease had failed to provide. He attempted to open his eyes to see how light it was, but his stupor veiled the light, making night and day equivalent. He had lost the sense of sight but not his senses of smell or of touch, despite the frightful devastation to which the disease had exposed his body. He also experienced the fiery breaths of the desert via his ruined body, although he could not hear it howl across the wasteland or keen while struggling with the tent. He remained rigid, powerless, abandoned, waiting for a deliverance that did not come. He lost consciousness several times, although he knew he had not slept even for a moment. He began to lose his sense of time just as previously he had lost his sense of pain, but still deliverance did not come. He felt very thirsty but had reached a tipping point where drinking or feeling thirsty seem equivalent. He did not try to move his hand to unfasten the water skin because he felt nauseous. He was nauseated by his own body, which stank with the foulest odor in the whole desert: the smell of a body decomposing, the smell of a body festering, the smell of purulence.

He fell into a stupor again but before beginning this trip into altered consciousness made the wish never to return from this journey to the beyond, but. . But what the spirit world wishes is always different from what we wish. The spirit world wants to return us from a voyage to the beyond when we do not care to. The spirit world takes us on this journey, which we do not even want to make. Its justification is that it provides us with a form of deliverance on each of these trips.

This time, too, the spirit world laid the type of snare that grows ever murkier the clearer we think it has become; this cunning strategist brought back to life this body, which was covered with sores and ulcers, by the hand of a messenger disguised in the rags of a wayfarer. He held tightly in his right hand the halter of a jenny, which trailed behind her a camel laden with his belongings, and his left hand grasped a prescription hidden in a fodder bag.

The jenny master bound his veil tightly around his nose, leaned over the inert body, and examined it for a long time. Once he had ascertained that maggots had yet to assail the body, which was awash in vile liquids, he straightened up and grumbled aloud, “Wherever there’s a putrid stink, there’s some plague. Wherever a plague holds sway, an oasis has played a part.” He removed his belongings from the pack animal and lit a fire in front of the tent. He took some herbs from the fodder bag and then selected from his belongings a container, which he filled with water. He steeped the pungent, grimlooking herb in the water and intoned a mournful song while waiting for the fire to transform the sticks to hot coals. From a stick he fashioned a poker with which he pushed aside the flaming logs. He then placed the earthenware vessel over the coals without pausing in his repetition of the mournful elegy. A traveler must sing. He sings even when nothing prompts him to sing, for — if he does not sing — he will speak, and the spoken word is what the traveler cannot bear, not because it is wrong for a solitary person to talk to himself, but because it distracts him from the wayfarer’s sole enjoyment, which is listening. Eavesdropping on the spirit world is impossible unless one listens carefully. Silence is the spirit world’s protective amulet that can only be foiled by adroit listening, for the desert’s sound is masked by other sounds and the desert’s sound is a prophecy. Prophecy is always located in a place beyond sound, in a place beyond place. Prophecy is the rambling man’s secret. Prophecy is the wayfarer’s goal. If he does not reach it through speech, he searches for it in silence. If he cannot attain it through silence, he circles its sanctuary by singing. For this reason, a wayfarer communicates through song, not words.

In the vessel, the herbal brew thickened and its color became even less appetizing. He removed the container from the fire pit and allowed time for the liquid to cool. From his kit he took out a wooden spoon marked with arcane symbols. He then carried his treasure to the body stretched out beside the tent pole. With difficulty he tore away the veil that had dried onto the victim’s face. He leaned the man’s head against his knee and started to feed him the disgusting liquid from the wooden spoon, which was decorated with talismans. He emptied the potion into the man’s belly, down to the last drop and then jumped up. Standing above the head of the prone body, he declared as if reciting a charm: “Now we shall see. Either you turn back or you proceed forward. Either way, you won’t lose much.” Then he left the tent and stood by its entrance, contemplating the eternal plain that spread to the four corners of the world; indeed its nakedness stretched all the way to the naked sky. There he sang another prophecy: “It’s not the disease that kills but the drug.”

He roamed across the plain. That evening, when he returned, he found the victim writhing in the tent, bickering with specters in an audible but indistinct voice. He raved for a long time in the language of the Unknown but finally said: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

He continued to writhe as a new liquid oozed forth. This was not pus, purulence, or blood. It was disagreeable-looking too, but this liquid’s sharp scent was not that of pus or purulence. It was the scent of the suspect herb. He repeated again: “Fire! Fire! Fire in my belly!”

Tightening the veil around his nostrils first, he proceeded to examine his patient, on whose forehead he noticed beads of sweat. As this sweat coated the man’s whole body, the flesh started to liberate itself from the garment that had dried, adhering to the body’s flesh. He rejoiced in a loud voice: “Ha, ha. . I knew I wouldn’t succeed in saving the ailing body from destruction until I burned off its infected sweat.”

The miserable wretch moaned loudly and opened his eyes for the first time. His eyeballs looked so white that they did not seem capable of seeing anything. His eyes expressed astonishment mixed with fright. This was the astonishment of an eye that had grown accustomed to darkness and that had gazed into eternity for a long time. His eye was frightened by the light marking its return. It felt perplexed at having lost space and at having been deprived of the sensation of existing in space. Now the only evidence left to it of its existence in time was the fire burning inside it. The next moment the wretch screamed in a repulsive voice, repeating the appeal: “Fire! Fire! A drop of water to put out the fire!”

He, however, did not grant his patient a drop of water to extinguish the flame, because he had no intention of putting it out. He knew that extinguishing the fire inside a body suffering from smallpox would allow the disease to gain the upper hand over the medicine. The fire was the medicine. The fire was a noble emissary because it would only overpower the strongest adversary. Smallpox, once established in a body, is stronger than the body. For this reason, he had bet on the nobility of fire, on the innate disposition of fire, which recedes unless it can combat champions. Smallpox was the champion to which he had dispatched the fire as a terminator. Now the fire was close to completing its mission. Here the belly was begging for help and thus announcing the victory of fire. Fire’s victory was the cure, a cure for which one paid a steep price in suffering. It was, however, still a cure. He knew the truth about fire, because he would not have been the lord of fire had he not known fire’s true nature.

Following his patient’s recovery, he started a debate with him: “It would be better for you not to settle in an oasis again.” With total candor, the other man replied, “The truth is that I don’t know what I can do with myself if I don’t.”

“Is sedentary life that attractive?”

“The worst thing about sedentary life is its ability to co-opt people. We disdain it and then it gains control of us. We mock it and then it slays us.”

“The most accursed snare is one we disdain.”

“You’re right. We must never disdain anything. I set foot in an oasis for the first time to satisfy my curiosity.”

“Curiosity is dangerous too.”

“I enjoyed my stay and sold a camel.”

“Then you followed that with the sale of another camel after a few days.”

“After some weeks.”

“Then you looked around you and noticed a beautiful woman.”

Ewar smiled and adjusted the end of his veil to hide his cheeks, which were scarred by smallpox. “You’re not mistaken, but. . ”

“There’s no need to be ashamed. A man doesn’t need to be a diviner to understand that the curiosity that leads a person to set foot in an oasis will necessarily lead to the sale of a camel and the entrance of a woman. I wager that the next step was the purchase of some land.”

“You’re not mistaken this time either. What astonishes me is not your ability to discern this but your narration of the tale, apparently from painful, first-hand experience.”

“Once a beautiful woman appears, land must necessarily follow. Is there any peg stronger than land? Is there any tie stronger than a beautiful woman?”

His throat rattled with contemptuous laughter. Then he added, “A man has only two companions when embracing slavery: a piece of property and a woman.”

The convalescent did not capitulate: “Do you know why?”

He did not wait for a reply but allowed his gaze to roam the plain, which was flooded by deceptive mirages. Then, fed up with the mean-spirited mirage, he glanced at the horizon and pressed beyond it, as well, to end with the sky. He tarried there and did not return from this journey until he was burdened by a prophecy: “What is there in our world besides land and women? What would become of this lethal maze we call the desert if we did not find land and a woman in it?”

“Ha, ha. . you take the earth and you take the woman. But then you mustn’t complain when you have to pay for the deal with your body, which a plague has mauled in compensation.”

The man suddenly trembled, however, and asked with strange despair: “But what can we do, master, if departure is this painful? Doesn’t our master think the contractual price of migration oppressive?”

“The matter would be simple if smallpox was the only price we paid for the deal. What’s worse than smallpox during this slumber is another plague you could call the heart’s demise.”

“But, master, in the place we quit we lose things we don’t find in the place we seek. That’s the hardest aspect of the contract to migrate.”

“This is the price of the message.”

“Message?”

Migration’s messenger remained silent for a time. He adjusted his veil across his face to cover even his eyes, as if he were a priest wishing to conceal some emotion, weakness, sorrow, delight, or prophecy. “Yes, nomadism is also a message. Nomadism is a prophecy.”

“What an inhumane prophecy!”

“Has the desert ever known a form of prophecy that was humane?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve never sampled anything with a bitterer taste than nomadic travel. Migration is daily death.”

“But it’s also a daily resurrection.”

“I don’t consider the spirit world a form of resurrection. The only thing harsher than death is resurrection from death.”

“Do you know why?” He answered without waiting for a response: “Nomadic travel, like life, can only be a message of deliverance, because it is a message of punishment.”

“I’m tempted to call this another curse that differs little from the plague.”

“Travel truly is fire for the body but balsam for the heart. Sedentary life is truly a balsam for the body but a fire for the heart.”

“Fire! Down with fire! Don’t remind me of the fire.”

“A person who does not wish to remember the fire that consumes his innards must endure the fire that buffets his skin.”

He fell silent. Then as he watched the mirage on the plain he added: “Even children are careful to refrain from putting their hands in the fire once they’ve been burned.” His companion remained silent. Then he continued: “I did not save your life for you to forsake me. So, beware!”

His seated companion bowed his head and raked the pebbles with his finger, creating patterns. The master of deliverance asked pointedly: “Isn’t it wrong for children to be more astute than we are?”

“Explain.”

“What need is there for me to explain?” But he immediately proceeded to warn: “Don’t put your finger in the fire again.”

“Do you want me to avoid setting foot in an oasis ever again?”

“You can stay in an oasis as a wayfarer but don’t ever lay aside your traveler’s staff there again.”

“Is this a commandment?”

“Yes, the first and last commandment.”

He was silent for a time as he dug a little vault in the earth. Then he erected a building and made some roads around it. Finally he destroyed his creation with a single blow and said, “Thrusting your hand into the fire twice is truly insane.”

“Insanity’s worse than death, so watch out.”

“One whose hand has been burned by the fire has no choice but to obey.”

He stared at him. Their eyes flashed. The jenny master asked, “Is that a promise?”

He gazed at him for a long time before mumbling in a voice that was scarcely audible, “Promise. . ”

She appeared in the dark of night and stood at the entrance to his grotto like a spirit world shadow lounging about the oasis after midnight. An unfamiliar perfume assailed him, awakening a whispered response in his heart. He asked, “Who are you?”

“I should have thought that a woman who has affected a man with the perfume of her heart would not be forgotten.”

“I remember: a jinni among the water nymphs, a jinni who imprisoned with her hips the first fathers and created manacles for those nomads from the tresses of her hair.”

“You’re right. I thought forgetfulness was one of men’s defects.”

“Ha, ha. . forgetfulness is a defect of the entire tribe. Forgetfulness is the destiny of all its descendants. The body’s perfume in a man’s nostrils, however, is truly a talisman; a body’s scent, not a flower’s, the fragrance of a female, not the desert fragrance of retem blossoms.”

“The body’s fragrance emanates in whiffs that a woman does not grant to any passerby. The female fragrance is woman’s gift to a man who deserves her love.”

“I won’t deny that woman is a riddle, but how can a woman grant her perfume to one man and deny it to another?”

“This is woman’s secret. A woman’s body does not release her scent unless her heart is pounding with love.”

“Amazing! But. . what name did you cast in my ear after you cast the whiffs of your perfume in my nostrils that day? Was it Tamalla? Was it Tahala?”⁶

“I am not Tamalla. I am not Tahala, either. Tahala’s my sister, and Tamalla’s a name that doesn’t appeal to me, since it refers to an illness that destroys with ennui what hatred has not. May the spirit world spare us compassion.”

“How can a tongue that recites poetry praising love ask the spirit world for protection against compassion?”

“Love is compassion’s enemy. Love revives whereas compassion slays.”

“Really? I grow more certain every day that beneath the clothing of every woman in this desert is concealed a priestess.”

“If woman did not conceal a priestess in her heart, she would not have been able to train the greatest rogue in the desert: man.”

“Ha, ha. . ”

He stifled the laughter in his chest and stillness blanketed the earth. High overhead the stars’ wrangling seemed significant. The empty plain below was devoid of creatures and even the air lacked wind. All the same, a secret like a melody penetrated the stillness and began to brush against the heart with a subdued whisper. He listened intently as the whisper became ever more ambiguous and contradictory, but the she-jinni’s voice suppressed the whisper’s puffs with her own quiet provocation: “When a woman comes to a man to reclaim a trust, the man should expedite matters.”

She was seated facing him, at the mouth of the entryway, while stars crowned her head. Her body released its perfume, and her heart was filled with the secrets of priestesses.

In the darkness he smiled slyly and then said figuratively, “Retrieval of a trust is conditional upon disclosure of the token.”

“Token?”

“The secret password. To overcome the talisman protecting the treasure, you must speak the secret password.”

“Tafarat! Tafarat’s the password.”

“Ah. . ”

“I won’t conceal from you that I would not have told you her secret if she had not told me how she found her heart’s delight through the trust.”

“Did she really find her heart’s delight that way?”

“Had she not, I would not be asking for it now.”

“Ha, ha. . you are a serpent!”

“Serpent?”

“Lust is a serpent concealed within a body. The serpent is lust revealed as a body. Water nymphs know the truth about the serpent.”

“I’m not afraid of snakes.”

“How could you fear snakes when you are one yourself?”

He crept toward her and took her wrist the way a bridegroom takes the wrist of his bride on their wedding night. He inhaled the fragrance of her body. Then he hissed hoarsely: “You didn’t know that Serpent is one of my names.”

Singing a sad ballad as if lamenting a death, as if resorting to these verses to free herself from a calamity, she arrived the night the moon became full. He stood erect at the entryway as if to hail her arrival. He sighed deeply, smothered an inner flame, and then overcame his own ardor to say, “Doesn’t our mistress fear the ardor of outsiders when she croons songs of longing for everyone to hear?”

She responded immediately as if she had been expecting his question: “When I observed the stranger’s ecstasy the day he leapt over the young women’s circle like one of the jinn, I grasped the truth about the stranger.”

He laid down a mat for her at the entrance and gazed at the full moon. He said as if he too were singing: “How could the stranger escape ecstasy when the moon shines over the world? How could the stranger retain his sanity when there are young women in the world? How could the stranger stay on track when there is singing in the desert? Look! The night’s as bright as day.”

“Were it not for the stranger’s frenzy, I would not have grasped the truth about the stranger. Had I not learned the stranger’s true nature, I would not have approached him.”

“Haven’t you come to seek the trust like your jinni sisters?”

“Had I not grasped the truth about the stranger I would not have approached the stranger about the trust. The trust is truly precious, but the poetry concealed in the stranger’s heart is incomparably more valuable.”

“Do you love poetry that much?”

“Poetry is progeny! Why can’t poetry be one’s offspring?”

“Ha, ha. . I doubt that desert women share this daring opinion. I doubt that your sister Tafarat would accept our mistress’ views.”

“I have no wish for them to share my opinion, because they were created women with women’s hearts. I was created a woman with a man’s heart.”

“Ha, ha. . Don’t women adore poetry as much as men?”

“Woman loves poetry with her tongue. Man loves poetry with his heart. Woman sings the verses with her voice, but man bleeds verses from his heart. For this reason, women love poets more than all other men. If given a choice between a poet, a warrior, and a wealthy man, a woman would choose the poet, without any hesitation.”

“Not so fast. Take it easy. I know women who would choose the wealthy man without any hesitation, if given the choice.”

“I expected you to say this, because you’re a man. Man’s misfortune is that he cannot tell the difference between a woman and the shadow of a woman.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just as we should not attribute the descriptive term ‘man’ to a person simply on the basis of attire, we similarly should not describe a person as a woman based only on clothing, since both women and men are often disguised in the other gender’s body.”

She chanted a song and he began to tremble. She sang softly, as if crooning to herself. In her lament he detected the call of the eternal yearning that imprisons lost time in the flask of existence and that recovers the lost space that one never reaches by wandering. He reeled. He repeated the refrain after her as he swayed to the right and left. He asked melodiously, “What’s the secret of poetry do you suppose?”

She too sang her response: “The secret of poetry is that it enables us to know.”

“Know what?”

“To know what we shouldn’t.”

“For us to know what we ought to know is deliverance. For us to know what we shouldn’t is punishment.”

“Poetry is punishment. Poetry’s not poetry unless it is punishment.”

He kept swaying as she started to sing again. The stillness was humbled. The full moon listened. The bones of dead ancestors shook in hillside graves. The water nymphs who had slipped into the earth’s veins to feed the spring trilled. He chanted too: “I used to think that the secret of the passion for poetry was beauty.”

“Like you, I used to think that hankering for a spatial Waw was the secret of poetry. Then I thought that the craving for the temporal Waw was the secret of my passion for poetry. Next I realized that the place Waw is not one we can locate in space and that the Waw era is not one we can bring back in time. Poetry, Mr. Stranger, is a punishment because it teaches us what we ought not to know.”

“It teaches us the truth?”

“Yes indeed. The truth is what we ought not to know, not what we ought to know. Woe and woe again to anyone who knows the truth.”

“Is this why poetry is so inhumane?”

“Contrary to the claims of critics, poetry’s lack of humanity is not related to beauty’s inhumanity. Poetry is inhumane because the truth is.”

“Oh! How cruel truth’s inhumanity feels to a man’s heart. What impact does its cruelty have on a woman’s?”

“The redeeming grace is that the only woman who suffers this punishment from poetry is one with a man’s heart, not a woman’s.”

Her tongue poured forth poetry. She sang stanzas from past generations’ epics for which she retained the ancient tunes. She proceeded far down the path of melody, the path of lament, into the vast expanses of longing, into the sacred cloister of the truth. Then everything else disappeared, leaving in the desert only the song.

At some stage in this journey he decided to disclose his secret to her: “Do you know? My name’s Isan or Gnosis too.”

“My name’s Tamanokalt. I’m a jinni, one of the water nymphs.”

“Gnosis, as you know, is my veil. Gnosis is one of my most important names.”

The fourth was Tahala, who said that she was suffering from anxiety and had found no cure. She also said that she could even forgo the trust if only he would find her a cure for her depression, since she realized that having children would not provide deliverance to a person plagued by anxiety. She cowered inside her wrap like a hedgehog as a wave of sorrow overcame her. She burst into tears — like a person lamenting on suddenly being confounded by a calamity.

He waited until the attack had calmed and then asked her point blank: “Is Tahala the name you were given when you were born or is it a nickname the world has assigned you?”

Holding back her tears — like a child who has lost a doll — she replied, “It’s said that I didn’t stop crying for the first seven days after I was born. People took that as a sign they should call me Tahala.”

He observed her with interest, trying to discern the expression of her eyes in the dark, but she immediately averted her face in fright and shouted: “He’s following me! Here he is now, standing behind you.”

He turned, but all he could see was the mouth of the vault. So he asked, “Who is following you?”

She pulled her wrap over her face before replying: “The demon!”

“Is he a demon from the spirit world?”

She nodded yes. Then he exclaimed in a defiant tone: “Ha, ha. . No demon from the spirit world will dare hide from me.”

“He threatens me with his hateful fingers, tipped with blue nails.”

“Know that to the demon master, every demon of the spirit world is nothing but a shadow.”

“But he’s hideous! He’s more hideous than a scarecrow.”

“Forget him; tell me whether this specter is responsible for your tears.”

“I don’t know.”

“When did the demon first appear in your world?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Has he ever harmed you?”

“He likes to stick out his ugly tongue at me. A viper emerges from inside him, not a tongue.”

“Has he ever joined you in bed?”

“I don’t know!”

“I wager you found his tongue entertaining.”

“Entertaining?”

“Haven’t you learned — over the course of time — to enjoy the sight of the viper he harbors?”

She was silent for a long time before she stammered in a faint whisper, “I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you ever grasped the secret of the tongue?” “What’s that?”

“The tongue is a viper concealed in the mouth and the viper is a tongue scurrying across the desert.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Haven’t you consulted the sorcerers?”

“The sorceress said. . ”

She hesitated, and so he encouraged her to confess: “What did the sorceress say?”

“The sorceress said that I would only find a cure from the demon in a man’s embrace.”

“Ha, ha. . The sorceress was right.”

“What?”

“I mean I’ll liberate you from the demon once and for all.”

“Really?”

“I’ll pluck him from your world the way a thorn is plucked from the foot.”

Then he added as he crept toward her and took her in his arms: “Don’t you know, water girl, that Spirit World Demon is one of my names? But he’s a demon who frightens only to entertain and who does evil only to do good.”

When Taddikat came in search of her amulet, she decided to tell him her story: “I’ve inherited a curse from my ancestors.”

“Who among us has not inherited a curse from the ancestors?”

“My great-grandmother was the fifth of the seven maidens.”

“This is a story of nomadic wandering.”

“After wandering away from the hamlets, the miserable women were overcome by hunger.”

“The bevy of naughty girls might have perished of thirst had they not happened upon the spring.”

“They found water but had no way to feed themselves.”

“This is the law of things: We never obtain exactly what we desire. If things are in order one day; the next they start to fall apart.”

“It’s my great-grandmother who confided to the other six naughty girls how to trap Wannes, the brother of the seventh woman, Tannes.”

“Oh! Conspiracy is the worst thing the intellect has ever dreamed up.”

“When they were alone, she whispered to the others that they should entrap their companion with a gift. So they gave her the remaining dates to keep her beloved brother Wannes alive.”

“Malice is an offense the spirit world detests.”

“The period of wandering lasted for a long time, and hunger turned to temporary insanity that drove the six wayward young women to demand that Tannes slay her brother Wannes in return for the gift of dates she had received from them.”

“Charity is worse than a contract. What we obtain today from luck’s hand we hand back tomorrow as an offering to luck.”

“The only recourse the poor woman had to save her beloved brother was to repay the debt by slicing from her own thigh some flesh she gave them to redeem her wretched brother Wannes’ blood.”

“We pay a huge price for a gift that comes with strings attached.”

“Tannes cursed them before she left to roam the desert, and the spirit world honored her cry.”

“An innocent person’s curse ensures a punishment that may be delayed but will not be ignored.”

“A prophetic oracle announced that the curse will afflict descendants of the fifth member of the bevy of naughty girls down to the seventieth generation.”

“For children to inherit the sins of their parents is a blind exercise of will.”

“I’ve always seen myself as a redemptive sacrifice the fates have demanded to ransom my ancestors.”

“The best medicine for a disease is a disease. The only relief from a curse is with a curse, and Curse is one of my names.”

The sixth woman composed fulsome verses in praise of mirrors.

She too arrived on a night when the moon turned full.

She announced that her name was Temarit before she recited the couplets of the ode to him. At first she declaimed the verses and then she added a melody and sang them. Into her verses, the cunning woman inserted a lesson, which was disguised as a tale that was both eloquent and witty. She related a folktale about the idiotic maiden who continually brooded about her true nature without ever finding an answer for her questions in her desert world. Then the ignoble Mola Mola bird led her one day to a pond where for the first time she saw her own face mirrored by the water’s surface. Starting at noon, the beautiful woman contemplated her beauty in the mirror that day for a very, very long time and smiled a lot. She repeatedly inclined her body, leaned over the water, and greedily gazed at the vision. She saw a vision in that vision. In her double, which was floating on the water, she beheld a prophecy. When she deciphered the prophecy, inspiration flooded her heart. As inspiration flooded her heart, she understood something. She learned something she had not previously known. She learned what she ought not to have learned. She learned her secret. She learned woman’s secret: woman’s sovereignty. When she understood this truth, she realized her error.

The beautiful woman was trembling when she returned from her outing. She returned with a treasure that would put the desert world at her beck and call. She experienced what later generations called happiness, even though an obstinate suspicion whispered to her that she should be on guard, because danger may lurk anywhere in a pile and possession is a punishable offense according to the desert’s law.

The beautiful woman, who was joyfully overwhelmed by the treasure, dismissed any misgivings, however. When sad, we accept advice; when joyful, we tend to ignore prophetic counsel. With the mirror the beautiful woman achieved a beauty greater than she had ever imagined before. With this beauty, the woman was able to gain control of the community of men. By controlling the male population, the woman gained control over the world. Then she lolled around by herself while she sang, “Who am I?” A mysterious voice in her heart would respond, “You are the mirror.” She would ask, “What is the mirror?” Her double — speaking inside her — would answer, “The mirror is a woman.” She would ask, “What is a woman?” The voice would reply, “The woman in the mirror is a belle.” With childish waywardness, she would ask, “What is a belle?” Her double would respond, “A belle is the desert. The belle is the world.”

The belle finished her recitation of her epic about the belle who discovered her truth in the mirror and then, panting, flung herself down beside him. The jenny master was reeling from his admiration for the poetry’s beauty. They swayed together by the light of the inscrutable, full moon, chanting couplets. He took the belle in his arms and departed with this sorrowful song for the land of Longing. She too repeated the refrain. When she expressed her astonishment at his ability to repeat stanzas of a long ode he had only just heard for the first time, the strategist felt compelled to confess the truth to her. He said, “No secret can be hidden from the secret’s master.” The folk epic she had sung could not have become a proverbial tale for the minds of generations unless someone had composed it. “In ancient times, desert creatures normally searched far, far away for their true reality and ignored, while gasping for a distant mirage, the small jug in which was concealed the amulet for everyone. Indeed, future generations did not merely ignore the jug, they even recklessly threw stones at it or piled dirt over it in cemeteries.”

He said as well that he did not wish to tell her the story of his struggle with these generations but preferred to disclose to her, instead, the moral of the story of the mirror. “You, my beauty, don’t know that Mirror is one of my names, since I am a mirror for everything. I am the mirror that does not show people their faces but reflects their souls. Anyone evil sees evil in my face. Anyone good, sees good in my face.”

Tafarat was the first to decide to reveal her true nature to him via a question: “Is a woman who does not bear offspring really a woman?”

They had met by appointment on a night when the moon turned full. Stillness prevailed over the empty plain. The descendants of the water nymphs sat in a circle around the tomb’s entrance. Tamanokalt hummed a tune before responding to her sister’s question: “Of course not. A woman who doesn’t bear children isn’t really a woman.”

Tafarat objected, “But she’s not a man, either.” At this point he decided to intervene in their discussion for the first time: “A woman who does not bear children is neither a woman nor a man.”

A laugh escaped from Taddikat. Tamanokalt resumed crooning the mournful tune.

Temarit inquired maliciously, “A woman who isn’t a woman or a man: What type of creature is she?”

Tahala asked disapprovingly, “Is this a riddle?”

Tamanokalt continued crooning the ancient song of longing. For a time, the strategist of every generation repeated her refrains. When none of the water nymphs’ offspring took up the words of the song, the spirit world’s messenger decided to take charge himself. He started by solving the talismanic riddle: “A woman who does not consider herself a man will never carry a man in her belly as an embryo.”

Tahala continued her attack: “Is this another riddle?”

He intoned the song for a time. He rendered the tune as if the secret was to be found in the melody, not in the physical world. Before the tune carried him too far away, however, he let go of it and said, “A woman who has lost the man inside her is exactly like a man who has lost touch with the woman inside him.”

More than one tongue asked, “Tell us, master of gnosis, about the man who has lost touch with the woman inside him. Tell us, master of intuition, about the woman who has lost touch with the man inside her.”

He stopped humming the song altogether to respond to the question. “Do you water nymphs know why a man throws himself into the arms of a woman?”

They waited for him to continue, and so he added, “A man does that when he has lost track of the woman inside him, for a man feels an unbearable hunger when he misses the woman inside him, not the man.”

Tafarat said, “I never imagined that a man could carry a woman in his belly.”

“Woman, too, does not enter a man’s bedchamber until she loses from inside her the treasure called man.”

“I’ve always assumed a woman carries only a woman in her belly.”

“In her belly a woman carries an embryo that could be a man or a woman. In her heart, however, a woman carries only a man. In a woman’s embrace, a man searches for the woman he has lost from his heart. In the arms of a man, a woman searches for the man she has lost from her heart.”

Tafarat marveled: “Did our master search in our arms for a woman he had lost?”

Without any hesitation, he replied, “Certainly. Had I not been searching within you for my lost woman, I would not have granted you those amulets from my loins.”

“Did you say amulets?”

“I gave you my offspring. My offspring are my names. My names are my amulets. My amulets are seeds for journeys, not the kernels of a sedentary life.”

“Have we returned to talk about the law of travel?”

“Every discourse leads to a discussion of the law of travel in the customary law of the Messenger of Travel. Had your covey not been six in number you would not have been able to dominate men.”

More than one voice asked, “What does our master mean?”

“I mean that the spirit world has inserted into your descendents as a talisman the number six. In the arithmetic of the spirit world this is an unlucky number and over the course of time an evil omen for the nation.”

Stillness prevailed. In the sky, a cloud stormed the moon, blocking it from sight.

Tamuli shouted, “We inherited six as a lucky number from our grandmothers.”

“Your lucky number is the secret of your lost coordinate.”

Silence returned. Then Temarit asked, “Does our bevy have a lost coordinate?”

“According to the law of sorcery, six is a dangerous number until we add another unit. So where’s the seventh beauty for the bevy of water nymphs, I wonder?”

Tahala stammered, “We’ve never thought to ask that question.”

“Because. . because the seventh of you is an unknown coordinate; because the seventh of you is a man; because the seventh of you could not be a man, unless I were he.”

More than one tongue exclaimed, “You?”

“I am your secret. I am your amulet. I am your lost name. I am your lost coordinate. I am the one who searched in your embrace to find himself there. I am the one in whom you searched for your unrecognized man so you could discover in his embrace your lost truth. I am the seventh coordinate.”

“Is Seventh Coordinate our master’s seventh name?”

“This is something I cannot disclose.”

They expressed their disapproval in unison: “But you told us about the names and sowed your names inside us.”

“I sowed in your wombs six of the names. I cannot, however, divulge the secret of the seventh name.”

“Why not?”

“Because the seventh name is the only amulet I still retain for myself.”

“Curiosity will ravage our hearts tonight.”

“For your hearts to be ravaged by curiosity tonight is the lesser evil than for my heart to be ravaged by the Unknown tomorrow.”

He was walking back from the fields, when the fool waylaid him by suddenly leaping out of a clump of palms. He stood brazenly in front of him and stared vacantly at him, as if looking in his direction without really seeing him but focusing instead on some more distant point. This look has been perfected only by idiots, prophets, and the walleyed. He did not budge or speak; so the strategist commented: “You’re not satisfied with blocking my path on the roads but persist in blocking my path to the people’s hearts.”

He thought the fool released a contemptuous laugh, but it was more like a hearty, newborn cough than a laugh of someone with his wits about him.

He would have said more, but Edahi blurted out, “The mission of the street urchin is to bar the street.”

“I’ve never once called you a street urchin.”

“But the others do.”

“The others to whom you block my way?”

“I knew you would criticize me for that, but idiocy is my blanket excuse.”

“Use that line on someone who has no doubts about your idiocy.”

“I know you doubt everything. I know you raise doubts about everything. I know you believe nothing.”

“Wretch, how can you be so certain about this?” The fool chortled, tipping his turban back, but then straightened to say, “It’s the same certainty that leads me to carry loads for other people who detect nothing but idiocy in my intellect. It’s the certainty that shows me the truth you’re hiding in your heart.”

He examined the fool with interest and studied him for a long time. Then he asked, “What do you mean?” “I mean that your precepts will destroy the life of fools.” The strategist laughed hoarsely, adjusted his veil to cover his cheeks, and asked, “Do I destroy the life of your fools by criticizing lethargy?”

“They’re happy with their life; why do you want to agitate them?”

“They’re content with their distress, not with their life.” “A person who is content with his level of distress is luckier than one distressed about his happiness.”

“Ha, ha. . tell me this: Are we the ones who choose our message or is it the message that chooses us?”

“I would have to be the bearer of a message to reply.” “If you weren’t yourself a messenger, you wouldn’t have blocked the way of a messenger. So stop playing the fool.” A gleam shone in the fool’s eyes but he looked down at the ground. With a worn leather sandal he raked the earth into cryptic designs before he finally acknowledged, “Fine, I think the message chooses us, not the other way around.” “Had you not answered in this way, I would not have doubted your idiocy, but one messenger is another messenger’s mate, even if some enmity flares up between them. So how can you wish me to set aside something I did not choose myself, since you understand that a message — like a life — chooses us, not ever the other way round?”

The fool, however, obstinately replied, “You didn’t choose your message, but I didn’t choose mine either.”

“Oh! What intense hatred is sparked by a message!” He groaned with pain and then added, “I’m afraid we’ll part without ever concurring. I fear our separation will be eternal.” In a shaky voice, however, the fool interjected: “We’ll never part if you leave us on our path.”

“Ha, ha. . do you mean we’ll converge if we go our separate ways?”

Edahi nodded his head in the affirmative. The strategist laughed sadly. Then in a different voice he continued, “It’s preposterous to think that two men separated by a message should ever meet. It’s preposterous to think that one who comes to rescue the commandments should find common ground with one who wishes to bury them.”

“We often hear expressions of zeal for the welfare of the commandments from heretics.”

“Yes, certainly. . I don’t deny that liars have frequently misled the tribes into the Unknown through a pretense of saving the commandments, but you also will not deny that sedentary life in the oases has destroyed more commandments than have been forgotten over the course of countless generations.” “Loss also occurs with wandering. Migration also entails suffering.”

“The body is wasted by the travel; sloth lays waste to the intellect.”

“Is it a violation of the Law to rest our bodies, if we are still able to migrate in our hearts?”

He stared at him with bulging eyes, although the fool did not even flutter an eyelid. He too began to stare back at the strategist with blank but determined eyes.

With the candor of a priest revealing a prophecy, the strategist declared: “If you find a way to achieve that, you’ll have accomplished a heroic feat.”

“Unless a man has traveled with his heart, he’s not really a traveler.”

“That is a gift of the elite, not of the others.”

“Why don’t we teach people how to protect the commandments with journeys of the heart instead of journeys by the body?”

“This is the message of one who believes in people — not that of a person who has despaired of changing human nature.”

“Is there no way?”

The jenny master sighed despondently and raised his eyes to the horizon, which was being assaulted by the evening’s gloom. He kept his eyes fixed on the horizon for a long time. Then he said, “Had I not tried everything over the years, time would have spared me the pain.”

The fool, however, stepped closer, until he almost brushed the stranger with his scruffy turban, and gazed murkily into his eyes.

Then he asked, as if begging the stranger for a favor, “What do you think of me?”

The strategist glanced at him inquisitively; so the idiot said in the same tone of voice: “Has my master discovered any evil in my heart?”

The jenny master shook his head no. Then the fool clarified his question: “That’s the merit of journeying with the heart.”

The strategist acquiesced with a glance and muttered, “Certainly.”

“If we don’t risk our hearts, we’ll never risk anything.”

“You’re right, but the others will hardly understand that.”

“Perhaps the best way would be for us to spoon-feed them.”

The strategist shook his turbaned head no and muttered: “Futile!”

The idiot bowed his head. Then the strategist explained, “They’ll never have a dynamic heart unless we prod them with a poker as if they were pack animals.”

Encircled by a wall that was intersected by another older one, which had once been the oasis’ version of a fort, the chief ’s house sat on a hill overlooking the homes of the oasis from the north. The exteriors of the walls were topped by the symbols of the goddess Tanit, who was represented by triangular, earth-colored clay panels.

The elders assembled in the heart of this house while voices clamored outside. The assembly, however, was still. Everyone was waiting for the ruler to speak, but Ewar cloaked himself in silence. So the fool volunteered: “Should we expect any good from a man who substitutes a she-ass for a camel?”

Smiles showed in the eyes of some men, while others exchanged knowing glances, which said that when the elders fear to do something, fools will take charge. Although it stirred those men in whom respect for the desert people’s customary code had not died out, Edahi’s statement also awakened a sense of shame in the souls of the nobles, who had no right to reproach the visitor for substituting a she-ass for a camel, since they had accepted a similar humiliation the day they turned their backs on the desert and chose as their way of life dependence on the land and oasis languor.

Outside, the hullabaloo began to bluster again. Inside, the anxious silence continued. Eventually the diviner said, “I would almost claim that life in a land without water is easier than life in a land where the water is polluted.”

The ruler retorted, “Is this a declaration of surrender to the stranger’s will?”

Yazzal looked questioningly at him before replying, “I don’t know whether this is a submission to the stranger’s will or a surrender to the spirit world’s.”

Elelli intervened, “What I know is that a place becomes uninhabitable once the water is contaminated.”

Ewar again disagreed, “If the water becomes contaminated from some unknown source, we would consider the calamity a message from the spirit world, but everyone agrees that the secret is related in some way to the stranger.”

The diviner Yazzal said, “The reality of the affliction remains the same no matter what causes it.”

Ewar straightened himself, fastened his veil across his nose, and breathed deeply, as if preparing for a long debate. Then he said, “I wanted to say that our grandfathers’ stories did not teach us to flee from an enemy we can see and hear.”

Elelli retorted gleefully, “But the disease is an affliction that we cannot see or hear, and we have yet to grasp its secret.”

“We’ve seen the affliction with our eyes and heard it with our own ears, since we have seen the perpetrator.”

The diviner protested loudly, “What proof is there that he’s the perpetrator?”

“When this intruder openly lambastes our sedentary life and advocates nomadism day and night, should we quarrel about the necessary level of proof?”

Elelli, however, became even more stubborn: “Words are not deeds; a curse is not a cause.”

The warrior Emmar laughed, and then the chief merchant intervened, “If the stranger has brought the affliction to the oasis, he has also brought relief.”

Ewar said disapprovingly, “What relief are you talking about?”

Amghar was silent for a time and stole a glance at the swarm of elders. He also glanced at the chief. Then he bowed his head and stammered, “The antidote!”

Outside the wind howled. Inside, silence prevailed. Suddenly the idiot shouted, “What antidote do you mean?”

The nobles exchanged glances. Some dug in the earth with their fingers, carving obscure symbols. Ewar replied, “Perhaps he has helped those who have consulted him in order to put people off the scent. Perhaps like any strategist he had his own reasons. But we should not forget that the series of miscarriages has not ceased.”

Edahi shouted at the top of his lungs, “The miscarriages haven’t ceased because the scoundrel hasn’t stopped sprinkling his hateful herbs in the spring’s water. I told you his secret right from the start, but you didn’t believe me.”

The chief merchant protested, “A person who treats infertility would not deliberately cause miscarriages.”

The diviner supported his opinion: “How can we accuse a man of starting an epidemic when he treats its victims?”

The idiot once again exploded, “The depraved fellow only does that to ward off suspicions. The strategist only does that to camouflage his trap.”

Ewar shouted, “You’re right. He’s only done that to hide his trap. I add my voice to this idiot’s.”

The chief merchant said, “We can’t accept Edahi’s testimony, since we know the fool has publicly declared his hatred for the stranger from day one.”

The chief took up the defense, “We can’t term a spontaneous outburst of emotion ‘hatred’.”

Elelli yelled, “Yes, definitely, spontaneous hatred is the worst form. So watch out!”

The idiot again shouted, “I don’t deny hating him from the first day, but that’s because I grasped his secret.”

More than one voice inquired, “Do you really know his secret?”

The fool remained silent, and the warrior said, “Tell us his secret.”

Edahi bowed his head. His eyes glistened with pain and he began to tremble. He stammered, “I can’t.”

The nobles exchanged astonished looks, and the diviner asked, “Why not?”

The idiot said in a choked voice, “Because his secret is inseparable from mine.”

The diviner started on a walk. Whenever the townsfolk saw him set off across the northern wastelands swathed in dark shadows, they would say he was begging for a prophecy. That night, too, he was crossing the wasteland to the north when his path was blocked by a specter that appeared suddenly but said nothing. It walked for a few paces beside him before he recognized from its physique that it was the chief. After going some distance together silently, Ewar said, “A man is inevitably plagued by doubts.”

When Yazzal did not answer, the ruler asked, “Do you believe in omens?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I meant to say that even if the visitor hasn’t committed any offense, he may still be the kind of person who can be culpable without committing a crime.”

He was silent for a split second before offering this clarification: “I mean he’s from a faction that has inherited sins from ancestors.”

“I don’t know. What’s certain is that some people bring a promise of rain and others an ill omen.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear. I mean, even if the stranger doesn’t have some plot up his sleeve, he’s no doubt ill-omened.”

He was silent as they continued their hike. With his sandal he rolled a stone out of his way. Then he said, “Doesn’t the Law authorize banishment of an ill-omened intruder?”

“Banishment is a punishment. The Law does not authorize punishment on the basis of suspicions.”

Ewar was silent once again. He was silent for a long time and then suddenly stopped, blocking the diviner with his body. In a muffled voice he asked, “Answer this question for me now: When does the Law authorize punishment?”

Without any hesitation the diviner replied, “When there’s evidence!”

“Evidence?”

Yazzal did not respond, and so Ewar said menacingly, “But where’s the evidence? There’s no clear-cut evidence anywhere in our world.”

“Here, you’ve answered the question.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the difficulty of rendering a verdict against someone arises from the difficulty of obtaining clear-cut evidence.”

“But evil-doers will ruin the earth and turn upside down the lives of oppressed people without our being able to pinpoint the truth of what you call ‘evidence’ and I term ‘slander’.”

“Do you know why? It’s because the Law knows that there is nothing in the created world more difficult than passing judgment on a man for an offense.”

“Is that because we all commit offenses?”

“I don’t know, but generations have learned from trial and error that it is the lesser of two evils for the masses to experience injustice than for one man to be wrongly convicted.”

“I bet this is, in and of itself, a scourge. I bet this is what the tribes call a calamity.”

“We are not heroic when we punish. We are heroic when we forgive. That’s what the Law says.”

Ewar swayed to the right and left and repeated, as if wailing a lament, “The Law, the Law; how inhumane are the commandments of the Law!”

Ewar, however, did not yield. The following night he went off with Elelli to debate what constituted decisive evidence. While they sat together on a hill overlooking the buildings of the oasis from the north, he told his companion, “Yesterday I spoke with Yazzal about punishment. Today I want to ask your advice about deliverance. So won’t you open your heart to my words?”

“You find me all ears.”

“The fact is that I’ll tell you a secret that may serve as evidence.”

Elelli gazed at the area cluttered with mud-brick homes and flooded by the evening’s darkness while Ewar added, “The jenny master once saved my life.”

The intellect’s advocate, however, did not turn or evince any curiosity. He continued to stare out into the open, without displaying any interest. So his companion explained, “During one of my visits to the oasis I was stricken by smallpox. When I returned to the desert with the infection, the tribe scattered and left me all alone in a tent.”

The expression in Elelli’s eyes was indecipherable and so the narrator rushed on with his story: “My body was wasted, I had abandoned the desert, and insolent jinn were circling my head when a messenger stormed into the tent.”

He fell silent and gazed at the deserted area, which was flooded by the gloom of evening. He added even more precipitously, “The jenny master cared for me and brought me back to the desert with a herbal balm.”

He stopped. He was hyperventilating. The right word deserted his lips, but his companion did not come to his rescue. Silence reigned until he continued, “Do you get my drift?”

His companion did not reply, and so the narrator said, “Herbs are an ancient weapon in the jenny master’s hands.”

Noticing an inquisitive expression in Elelli’s eyes, Ewar explained, “A person who can use herbs as an antidote can use herbs to cause an epidemic. You can see that.”

The inquisitive look in his companion’s eyes was replaced by a disinterested one. He did not budge from his position, facing the wasteland.

Ewar said, “Don’t you see that what I say confirms what the fool said? Isn’t this evidence enough?”

Without forsaking his prayer, which was directed to the wasteland, Elelli responded coldly, “This does not constitute evidence.”

“Why not?”

“Evidence assumes witnesses, and there are no witnesses for your claims or for those of the fool.”

Ewar was silent, and then said despairingly, “You two seem to be acting as defense attorneys for the plague’s perpetrator, not as prosecutors.”

“What?”

“Anyone who listens to the diviner or to the sage would inevitably assert that.”

“You shouldn’t forget that we are speaking for the Law, not for ourselves.”

“I don’t believe the Law can authorize neglect of an affair that spreads ruin through the land.”

“To authorize a punishment, the Law requires only clear evidence.”

“But clear evidence may be elusive when the case concerns the work of a strategist.”

“If the evidence is elusive, then the affliction is the punishment.”

“What are you saying?”

“We shouldn’t punish an infectious person if we ascertain that the infection he brings is itself a secret punishment.”

“Shouldn’t we defend our people when annihilation threatens them?”

“Your defense is moot if the affliction is a punishment for an offense.”

“Offense?”

“Doesn’t the jenny master consider sedentary life to be an offense?”

The chief jumped to his feet and asked pointedly, “Is everything the jenny master thinks true?”

Elelli responded coldly, without once ceasing his spiritual journey through the empty spaces, “I don’t know. Only the spirit world knows. Time will reveal the truth.”

Some days later, the ruler invited the nobles to a banquet. He slaughtered several head of livestock and provided meat and other foods for his guests but did not disclose the secret reason for these propitiatory sacrifices.

The elders gathered inside his home. As usual, the fool got the ball rolling at the assembly: “Today we have the right to saddle the mount.”

As usual, smiles were evident in their eyes, but the elders waited for the ruler — not his shadow — to speak. After a strained silence, the ruler was forced to take charge: “The time has come for us to defend ourselves.”

The nobles stealthily exchanged glances but waited patiently.

The ruler added, “If we wait any longer, the oasis will be destroyed and we will have endangered the lives of our citizens.”

Strained silence reigned once more. Then Ewar continued with all the authority of a ruler, “You entrusted me with sovereignty over the oasis one day. I will have betrayed your trust if I refrain from action any longer. What do you think?”

No one spoke. Ewar gestured to the diviner. Yazzal swayed as if in pain. Before speaking he sketched a design in the dirt. “The question is not what we think but what you want us to do.”

“What do herdsmen do to a mangy camel when it enters a herd?”

Edahi shouted loudly, “It’s chased away in the most vigorous fashion.”

Smiles were visible in most eyes. Elelli intervened: “We know what herdsmen do when a mangy camel comes to a herd but don’t know what desert elders do when a descent group’s tents are invaded by a plague’s carrier.”

He gave Ewar a telling look, which the ruler ignored. Instead he remarked, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I meant to say that the wise men of the desert do not banish a plague-ridden individual under such circumstances. They abandon the camp site to him and flee with the tribe to another land.”

The two men exchanged a glance, a covert glance, a coded glance that not even the cunning could decipher. Ewar averted his eyes and then said with artificial coldness, “That’s what the base man is betting on.”

Edahi, however, again shouted, “Do you want us to give up without a fight?”

The diviner shot back, “Acceptance of a decree of the spirit world is not surrender.”

Amghar spoke for the first time: “What harm would it do us to shake off lethargy’s dust and to try living as nomads again?”

The fool burst out laughing. Inclining his skinny body toward the chief merchant he whispered loud enough for everyone to hear: “I’m afraid you’ll be the first to suffer, because you’ll have to be extremely clever to find customers for your wares in the wasteland.”

The chief merchant replied confidently: “The astute merchant will never lack for customers to purchase his merchandise. According to the customary law of merchants, doing business in an oasis or in the open countryside is equivalent, because our calculations are not based on the lay of the land but on the man who moves across the land.”

The warrior decided to speak as well: “I am ready to serve our master. If you resolve to resort to force, my sword is yours to command.”

Elelli smiled disdainfully. After staring at Ewar for a long time he asked, “Does our master recall our discussion of the Law?”

When Ewar nodded his turbaned head in the affirmative, Elelli added, “If you reach some decision, I hope you will not decide on something contrary to the Law.”

The chief asked in a chiefly voice, “Should the commandments of the Law pose a stumbling block for someone who decides to defend himself?”

“The Law will not be a stumbling block when clear evidence is presented for the case.”

“Are we revisiting the issue of clear evidence?”

“It is the Law that demands clear evidence, not us.”

“But isn’t the leader of the people justified in violating the law when he thinks this necessary to save his people?”

A buzz of comments traveled through the group. Turbans bumped against one another and bodies drew closer together. Some tongues murmured confidentially. Other tongues publicly expressed their disapproval. Even the fool huddled in a corner with his head down. Meanwhile, to express his indignation, the warrior brandished in the air his fist, which resembled a camel’s hoof. The turmoil was followed by a charged silence.

The diviner asked mournfully, “Does our master understand the implications of willful disobedience of the Law?”

Ewar did not respond, and so Elelli spoke on behalf of the diviner. “This is what — in nomenclature passed down by previous generations — is known as injustice.”

On the way back to the settlement the diviner walked with the sage. They followed the western trail that cut through the palm grove before turning south to head toward the houses. They went some distance in silence, but before they reached the lush grove of palms, Yazzal asked, “There must be some secret motive for Ewar’s determination to punish Isan.”

Elelli did not respond and so his companion goaded him to speak: “I discerned a prophecy in the look you two exchanged. Don’t deny it!”

The sage laughed before confessing, “Even if I wanted to conceal a secret, I couldn’t hide it from a diviner. Ewar confided to me that they had once been fond of each other.”

“Fond?”

“If you don’t care to term it fondness then call it vengeance.”

“Is it really vengeance?”

“What should we call an attack that recompenses a good deed, if we don’t use the technical term: vengeance?” “I understand. . ”

“The jenny master saved Ewar’s life from smallpox once.

He found him all alone in a tent after he had been deserted by his tribe.”

“Oh, I understand. We should never save the life of one whom the spirit world has never considered saving.”

“He saved his life with a blend of herbs.”

“Did you say herbs?”

“Ewar quizzed me a few days ago to learn whether a good deed someone performed in the past can be used as an argument against him today.”

“How did you respond?”

“I responded as I was obliged to. I told him the matter requires witnesses.”

The diviner was silent for a time. He dodged a date-stalk that blocked the path. Then he said confidently: “If he had asked me I would have told him that the evidence would not be binding even if there was a witness.”

“The fact is that another doubt troubles me.”

“Explain.”

“I have an intuition that there’s some other secret.”

“Intuitions are more convincing than proofs at times, for occasionally an intuition is a prophecy.”

“A man does not take revenge on another man simply to punish a good turn.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“An antidote for a man’s hostility is never lacking unless a woman is involved.”

“I was sure you would say that.”

“You would not be a diviner if you did not believe that.”

“But does the affair with the woman go back to the years of desert migration or to. . ”

The sage interrupted him, “Tahala confided to me Tamanokalt’s indignation.”

“A wife’s indignation opens the door to a conspiracy.”

“Each of the sisters was able to become pregnant thanks to the stranger’s amulets, except for Tamanokalt.”

“No one else has told me that.”

“Did Taddikat really not tell you?”

“Absolutely not!”

“A woman would not marry a diviner unless she’s awed by his status.”

“Skip reflections on women right now and help me predict whether Ewar will dare violate the Law.”

The sage was silent for another stretch before finally replying, “It’s rash to speculate about the conduct of a man who has assumed sovereignty over a group of people, but even so I doubt that he will dare commit such an offense.”

“But a desire for vengeance is stronger than a plague.”

“If you were in his place, what would you do?”

The diviner was silent for a long time before he replied, “I would set a trap.”

The sage shouted jestingly, “A passing comment from the mouth of a diviner is a prophecy.”

Isan bathed in the spring-fed pool, spreading powder from the pouch that he had tucked under an arm. Then, after slipping back into his garment, he retreated to a sandy, secluded spot overlooking the fields. Of late he had gotten used to going off by himself to the sandy, southern banks once he finished the bathing rituals to which he had become accustomed both as a pleasure but also as an opportunity to sow his suspect amulets secretly in the water while hoodwinking spies.

That day the head merchant, whom he had not seen for a long time, sought him out in his refuge. From a distance he shouted jokingly, “I thought people visited oases to mingle with other folks, not to isolate themselves.”

In a joking tone as well, he replied, “I would have thought that the ultimate form of isolation is to be surrounded by people, not by the desert’s vast expanses.”

“I’ve found it nearly impossible to run you down.” “That’s inevitable, because I never disobey my law to keep moving even when I relax with others in oases.”

He gave vent to his weird chortling but suddenly suppressed it to say, “I wouldn’t throw stones at oasis life, if oasis life did not gnaw into the commandments.”

Amghar sat down on the bed of sandy, virgin earth. He cast his gaze below him, across the deserted expanse of golden sand that spread out until its depression suddenly was stopped to allow for an extensive, green, farm field crowned with palm trees that stretched haughtily toward the sky.

He freed his feet from their sandals, which he thrust into the sand as one might thrust a piece of dough into hot ashes to cook. He sighed with the relief of one from whose shoulders the burdens of the world have been lifted before he said, “The commandments will be lost in any circumstances, regardless of our druthers, because even if we could protect them against our forgetfulness we could not guard them against time.”

“Time! Time! If given a choice, I would prefer to pass away with the commandments when time decides to erase them from my mind.”

“But ponder this: Does our passion for the commandments justify our use of force to change something that people have freely chosen as beneficial to themselves?”

He turned so their eyes met. They gazed into each other’s eyes for a long time. Isan averted his gaze first to stare far away, across the empty land. Then he said, “I know that no one has the right to choose for someone else, but it’s also not right for a person to keep another person from proclaiming the truth.”

“Does the truth sanction the use of force?”

His companion suddenly turned toward him to respond to his question with a question: “What do you think?”

“I mean: Do we have the right to save a man who has decided to die?”

Without any hesitation his companion replied, “Yes, certainly; we have the right.”

“Don’t we trespass against him by doing that?”

“We might trespass against ourselves, but not against him.”

“This is what I wanted to hear.”

“Explain!”

He looked at his companion, and their eyes met once more. The chief merchant said in a significant tone, “You truly trespassed against yourself the day you saved from abandonment people destined for it.”

“I’ve never regretted that.”

“It takes courage to do what you’ve done and even more courage to have no regrets about it, but you shouldn’t forget that the reward for a good deed is ingratitude.”

A mysterious smile gleamed in the strategist’s eyes. Then his companion added, “You weren’t content to do a good deed. You committed an even more serious offense by denying the man’s wife the amulet for offspring.”

“I’ve not been stingy with the water nymphs with my amulets, but I can’t bring dead bones back to life.”

“Do you mean. . ”

“If his wife did not become pregnant after I deposited my amulet in her, she must be barren. Yes, Tamanokalt is barren. Is that my fault?”

He was silent, and the stillness was widespread. From the west came the squawk of a crow.

Ewar kept his eyes on the fool and tried to decipher the look in his eyes whenever his companion lowered his veil to uncover his lips. Edahi seemed even more lost and miserable. Each time, however, he would raise the end of his veil again to hide the weak spot the Law identifies as a man’s lips. He glanced stealthily at the chief from time to time as if wanting to tell him a secret, only to reconsider and look far away.

This cat-and-mouse game continued for some time before the fool’s tongue launched a question: “But who is this Isan?”

He gazed miserably at the ruler, but Ewar’s eyes fled from his companion’s gaze and roamed into the distance.

“No one knows.”

The fool was not satisfied. The skeptical expression of his eyes was inescapable. Smiling mysteriously, he asked, “He’s been wandering the desert for ages, and no one knows?”

Ewar answered coldly, “No one has ever been able to name his father or mother.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Why not? The desert people are superior to unknown creatures whose lineage no one can trace.”

“It’s said that in his heart lives the ancient foe whom the Master of the Orchard expelled for allying himself with the wretched Mandam. Is that true?”

The ruler smiled as his gaze wandered through the empty space outlined by palms to the south of the oasis. He replied, “That’s what the griots report.”

Silence reigned. Then the braying of a male or female donkey shook the stillness. Taking this for an evil omen, Ewar murmured some charms. The fool continued with his line of questioning: “But where do you suppose he learned the secrets of medicinal herbs?”

Ewar kept his gaze fixed on the empty space and then swept across it to the horizon. He transcended the horizons to the blue sky, which was innocent of any cloud. Its nudity — like the desert’s — was companionable and secretive. From this naked realm he pulled an answer to the fool’s question, and thus his companion heard the revelation of a prophecy: “Are the secrets of medicinal herbs hidden from one to whom the secrets of the spirit world are not?”

The fool roamed around. He went to the fields and hid behind a fig tree to place the spring under surveillance. Some children were playing on the bank above the spring, pelting each other with clods of mud and calling each other names. Then they dashed away, shouting at one another. He waited in his hideout, but no one neared the spring; not the farmers, the water sprites, or the strategist with his alarming herbs. He listened to the gurgling of the fountainhead for a time and then jumped out of his bunker and darted off. He climbed some sword-type dunes and walked far into the sandy belt that encircled the oasis to the south. He wandered aimlessly for a time. He lay down for a while. Finally he returned and the palm groves concealed him. When he worked his way free of them, he found himself in the secluded area leading to the mountain slope with the tombs of the ancients scattered across it. He climbed the slope, trod on some graves, and rolled aside some skulls before he stopped at the ruined mausoleum in which the intruder had taken up residence. He listened carefully but heard nothing and shot off again. He passed by the mud-brick houses to the north and then turned right. He started down a road where recently some homes had been constructed. He stopped by a house that was splattered with lime. A symbol representing the goddess Tanit surmounted the top. He knocked on a door formed from sections of the trunk of a palm. The sign of the goddess appeared on it too, as a brass triangle. The door opened and the beauty appeared. She smiled and stepped aside, but the visitor did not enter. Without any preamble, he blurted out: “Some people have told me that the water nymphs have fallen in love with the master tactician.”

She laughed and pulled her wrap around her face without withdrawing from the doorway. She replied scornfully, as if mimicking the fool’s tone: “The water nymphs are merely women, and women only fall in love with men who pique their curiosity. Only strangers and geniuses pique their curiosity.”

He gazed at her for a long time, appearing even more squint-eyed. A line of saliva trailed down from his mouth, from which his veil had dropped. He stammered, as if to himself: “‘A woman’s jest is serious, and a woman’s serious statement is a jest.’ What they say is true!”

She laughed seductively once more and commented, “Add to that saying a second one: ‘A woman does not mock a man she loves.’”

When he looked questioningly at her, she added, “If a woman mocks a man she has loved, you know she’s fallen in love with someone else.”

The fool’s pain showed in his eyes. The fool’s saliva glistened. The fool’s tongue declared, “I can understand why your sisters rushed to the arms of that ignoble man — their desire for children won out — but I don’t understand why you did. . “

She interrupted him curtly, “The sisters did not rush to the arms of an ignoble man. The sisters rushed to the master tactician to receive amulets.”

“I know about those amulets.”

As she glared angrily at him, he added, “The sisters can hide the true nature of those alleged amulets from the oasis, from the people, from their spouses, but you will never succeed in hiding the truth about them from the fool.”

“When desire for a child overwhelms a woman, she will search for that child wherever it may be found. She will search for a child even in the arms of an ignoble man, because a childless woman is not a woman.”

He started to say something, but she slammed the heavy door, which was fashioned from planks cut from the trunk of a palm tree, in his face.

Amghar, who was carrying his glad tidings in his right hand and a message in his left, came to Isan and stopped by the tomb’s entrance as evening fell. He paused to catch his breath and finally said, “In my home a cry of glad tidings has finally resounded.”

Isan invited him to sit down and asked casually, “Boy or girl?”

The chief merchant trumpeted: “A boy!”

Amghar, who was still panting, sat down, and the strategist asked, “Have I now fulfilled my part of the bargain?”

“Bargain?”

“Have you forgotten? I received some fodder for my jenny and some food for myself from you in exchange for the glad tidings.”

The head merchant guffawed and then said gleefully, “There are glad tidings even in the homes of some from whom you did not receive commodities.”

“Really?”

“There is a baby girl in the warrior’s house.”

Isan shouted, “Tamuli?”

Amghar nodded. After a silence he added, “In the sage’s house too.”

Isan asked, “Tahala?”

Amghar nodded yes. He was silent for a moment and then added, “The diviner also will soon receive his glad tidings.”

“Taddikat?”

Amghar nodded yes. The strategist remarked, “But in Ewar’s home there is lamentation in place of glad tidings.”

“I’m sad to have that confirmed.”

They were both silent for a time. Then the chief merchant said, “There’s lamentation also in the fool’s heart.”

Isan asked: “Temarit?”

An anxious silence followed. Amghar gazed at his companion from behind his veil and said in a tone of voice as expressive as his words, “Is there any hope?”

His companion looked back at him and they exchanged a furtive glance. Then the strategist said, “What need do fools have of children?”

The master merchant smiled and said jokingly: “Even fools cannot live without children.”

“But Temarit’s not married to the fool.”

“She’s the fool’s sweetheart.”

“If we let a lover have kids with his sweetheart before getting married, we will distort the Law.”

“But, as you know, it’s the Law that forbade the marriage of fools.”

“If the fool acknowledges to the general public that he is a fool, and if the Law does not permit a fool to marry a beautiful woman, by what right do you want me to create for this wretch a fetus in the belly of a water nymph?”

The visitor was silent. Night had fallen and stillness shared joint sovereignty with it. In the distance grasshoppers chirred. The visitor said, “The truth is that I’ve brought you a message from the people. It’s directed to his excellency of glad tidings.”

“Bring it on!”

“After all these households have received glad tidings, the men of the oasis feel certain. . ”

“Ha, ha. . ”

“They want their share of the amulets.”

The jenny master laughed hoarsely. It was a long, choking, wicked guffaw, which he finally capped: “I’m afraid the time for that has passed.”

Amghar asked in astonishment, “What are you saying?”

The strategist replied coldly, “The amulets have been exhausted — like the provisions and like everything else in our transient world.”

“But. . but sterility is currently at epidemic proportions in the oasis. The women’s bellies are empty.”

The strategist interrupted him sternly: “When there is no medicine left, there’s no way to combat a disease.”

“But the oasis. . ”

“There’s no way!”

Where a master merchant goes, news always accompanies him. Merchants seem to convey the news on their tongues in the same way that their pack animals convey merchandise on their backs. The master merchant brought him fresh information when they met in the market. He reported tersely, “They’re migrating!”

A questioning look from his companion elicited this explanation: “The citizens. An entire caravan left the oasis today.”

“Bravo! Bravo!”

“They said that life in a land without water is easier than life in a land where the water’s contaminated.”

“I heard the diviner Yazzal repeat a phrase like this once, so bravo and bravo once more.”

“I heard one of them say that when the water is contaminated, it becomes a lethal poison, but the desert without water might bestow water generously.”

“It always bestows water generously. The desert is never stingy with its water for the faithful. The proof is that we have never heard of a nomad dying of thirst unless this thirst was a punishment for an unknown offense or unless a nomad had stopped migrating.”

A childish glee was apparent in his eyes. In the master merchant’s heart a suspicion was awakened: “Strategist, all that’s left for you to do is to rub your hands together in delight.” He kept his suspicions to himself, however, and jumped to another subject: “The fact is that I’ve presented you the good news about the migration in order to trade it for something else.”

“Bargaining’s the law of the world too, not just of commerce.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

“Make me an offer!”

“The matter concerns the fool’s sweetheart.”

“Ha, ha. . didn’t I tell you that fools don’t need to bring children into the world?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Because fools are not begotten by fathers; because fools are fatherless offspring, hee, hee, hee. . ”

His hoarse, sadistic laughter rattled on for a long time. When he stopped, he wiped away some tears before he added, “Didn’t this fool of yours say he was different, because his father wasn’t on earth but in the heavens?”

“That’s right.”

“Even so, what I love best in your oasis is your fool. So why would you want me to put a shackle around his neck and produce offspring for him by his girlfriend?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s the girl’s wish not the fool’s.” “Are you her emissary?”

“You can say that.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means her sister is the one who proposed this commandment for me.”

“Tafarat?”

“That’s right.”

“That she-jinni is crazier than all the others, but. . but I won’t be able to violate the Law, no matter what.”

“The Law can always discover a justifiable exception. The Law always acts as a panacea for the miserable.”

“I’m afraid my amulets may cause harm if I sow an embryo in the belly of an unmarried woman.”

He retreated into the fortress of silence and stole a glance at his companion. Then he said murkily, “Even if the Law allowed it, the amulets wouldn’t.”

“The amulets wouldn’t?”

“Didn’t I tell you the amulets are exhausted?”

“I thought the hyena’s den never lacked bones.”

“Don’t you think you might be wrong about that?”

The master merchant did not respond immediately. After a period of silence he said, “What a shame that some of the amulets were wasted.”

The strategist turned toward him curiously, and so the merchant explained: “Tamanokalt!”

The strategist looked away and said in a superior tone, “Lost amulets are always a matter of regret.”

Once night had settled, the guest he had long awaited halted by the door to his entryway. Like some spectral jinni, he stood at the entrance without uttering a word of greeting or making any gesture. He did not fall back on any commandment of the lost Law to justify his suspect stance, as nobles generally would have. He stood erect among the stones of the ancient cemetery: as alone, isolated, and deserted as if he were the stubborn holdout from a migratory caravan.

He, too, did not make any movement or hasten to attend to his guest. He did not move a muscle to ease the awkwardness for the other man. Indeed, he continued to sit at the entrance to his vault, gazing out at the emptiness and spying on the spirit world in the stillness as he had learned to do during his eternal wanderings across the eternal desert. Finally, the specter spoke. He heard him declare with the clear enunciation of haughty folk who feel insulted: “I did not come either to beg for reconciliation or to request a truce. I have come to tell you something that the chaos prevented me from telling you once.”

“I’m happy to hear Chief Ewar acknowledge the existence of a concept like ‘chaos.’”

How could I not acknowledge chaos when our life is nothing but chaos in chaos, from beginning to end?”

Without moving or fidgeting, he countered, “In the languages of oasis residents chaos is an innovation. In the language of the desert people, there is no word for chaos.”

“Actually, I have not come to debate chaos theory with you but to ask about certainty.”

He replied in a tone that suggested disapproval, “You ask about certainty?”

“Of the nomadic life.”

“Ha, ha. . we have spoken more about wayfaring than about anything else in this transitory world of ours.”

“I wanted to tell you that it is the desert that has abandoned us — not we who have abandoned the desert.”

“The desert has never once abandoned anyone.”

“The desert abandons us when it is stingy with its water.”

“This argument is fit only for the masses. People always mention the desert’s stinginess with water whenever anyone needs an excuse to justify his own betrayal of the desert’s law. Despite all this, I’ve never heard of a creature who died there from hunger or thirst. . except for that miserable faction seduced by their selfish interests to violate the desert’s customary laws.”

“We’ll never agree as long as you continue to construe deliverance as transiting physical space.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that your misery is caused by your certainty that Waw exists in some physical place.”

“I’ve never said that in so many words.”

“Your entire world view is erected on this certainty.”

“Do you want to sell me the fable about migrations of the heart, which I heard celebrated by your disciple the idiot?”

“Migrations of the heart are easier than migrations of the body. A migration of the heart is of greater significance than a migration of the body. That’s certain.”

“We don’t migrate across the desert in our heart unless we migrate across it with our body. An exodus of the heart is a heresy fit for fools. If we were to rely on a place free of space’s depredations, that would be much easier, but the place to which we resort while attempting to flee from chaos or when attempting to satisfy a yearning must inevitably take a bite out of our heart. Indeed, it may consume our whole heart, even though we possess but one, and a small, fragile heart at that.”

“I would like to share a proverb with you: ‘Wretched is he who searches for deliverance in a physical location.’”

“Ha, ha. . I think I’ve heard that proverb before. Have you borrowed that from the mouth of your disciple, the idiot, too?”

“Wretched is he who searches for Waw in a geographical location. I shall never grow tired of repeating this charm, even if the strategist of all generations rejects it.”

The strategist suddenly released his hoarse, alarming laughter but swallowed it just as suddenly. With surprising sadness, he said, “You should certainly not think that obedience to the call to nomadic migration is easy. Who can proclaim that travel is easy when our hateful but unique body pegs us to physical space in a thousand ways?”

“I’m pleased to hear you move closer toward the truth.”

“The difficulty of a matter, however, never justifies surrender. You know one of the Law’s commandments says we must only do what is difficult for us. Likewise, when a matter is difficult, that shows its nobility, since the ancients used to say: ‘The noblest matter is also the most difficult.’”

“Here you grow colder again. Why don’t you answer my question: Does true reality exist in physical space or in some other place beyond physical space?”

“Ha, ha. . you shouldn’t have asked me this question.”

“Why?”

“Because to answer it in the negative is a mistake, whereas to answer it in the affirmative is also a mistake.”

“There’s no question the master tactician cannot answer.”

“If the master tactician answered every question, he would fall into diverse snares and would lose his title of ‘tactical strategist.’”

“You may consider my question another riddle.”

“I know that the heart is place’s secret soul just as I know that place is the heart’s veil. Does that suffice?”

“Is this another riddle?”

“The only way to answer a riddle is with a riddle. Similarly, a talisman can only be broken by another talisman.”

“We’ll never reach an agreement without clarification of terms.”

“Fine. How can space be the depository of true reality if place is merely a vessel for the heart?”

“I like that.”

“And how can true reality find a home for itself outside of physical space if what is beyond physical space is nothing more than a void in a void?”

“I can grasp this too.”

“In the end, the only alternative left for us is to embrace our truth within our hearts and to flee faraway, across the wasteland.”

“It does us no harm to preserve our truth wherever we settle, if its place is in our hearts, not in some physical location.”

“But the ‘color’ of the vessel is affected by the color of the container; so beware!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Truth in a heart — like a date at the bottom of a brackish well — is a body requiring physical support, and both are destined to perish sooner or later.”

The specter was silent. He was silent for a long time. Then he asked: “Does this mark the parting of our ways?”

The strategist immediately replied, “Our parting did not begin today. It began the day I brought you back to life after the epidemic felled you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that ingratitude for a good deed always motivates us to take revenge.”

“I can match your unjust suspicion by asking: Isn’t it a violation of the Law’s code to bring back to life someone the fates desire dead?”

“Bringing the dead back to life is a sin, but to save a person on the brink of annihilation is a duty for the elite.”

“You did not know whether I was not merely on the brink of death that day. You did not know whether I had crossed the tipping point that day. So why did you bring me back to life once I was as good as dead?”

“I fulfilled a debt I have never regretted.”

“Why did you expose me to annihilation again after the fates had granted me repose?”

The strategist did not reply. Turning his back on the specter standing above him, he continued to gaze at the gloom. He heard the specter exhale and inhale. He heard his heavy breathing, the beat of his heart, his certainty, his yearning, and his choked voice, which resembled the rattling of a snake: “The spirit world granted me life the day it banished me. You killed me the day you saved me. Why? For what reason?”

For the first time he budged. He jumped to his feet and took a step toward his ancient mate, then a second. He came so close he almost bumped against his chest but did nudge him with his turban. He puffed jets of hot air in his face before flinging this prophecy at him: “Don’t you know that I kill only those I love and revive only those I hate?”

When Edahi slipped into the entryway toward the end of the night, the setting moon still shed its wan light on the depressing empty area adjacent to the base of the mountain. Because the light was so feeble, he had difficulty making out the steps that led down into the vault, but as he progressed further he could see clearly once more, for he found himself in a space illuminated by a hole overhead. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened carefully. The whispered breathing of the ignoble man sounded like a viper’s hiss to him. The strategist! His breathing was like a viper’s. His laughter sounded like a viper’s. His conduct was like a viper’s. His cunning resembled a viper’s. The tribes’ elders were not mistaken when they labeled him ‘the strategist’ nor were those sages of previous generations mistaken in calling the viper a strategist as well. Each of these two was formed from the same substance and derived from the same stock. The offspring of the desert would never flourish until they exterminated both with this magical knife. He felt for the knife, which was concealed in his sleeve. He opened his eyes and the room seemed even lighter. He drew a deep breath. He gazed at the corner where the bare-headed strategist was curled up. His large ears resembled those of a she-ass. O Tanit, Goddess of the Desert, how large his ears are! How hideous his ears are! Temarit had told him about these alarming ears, but he had not believed her. The man’s close ties to the hateful she-ass were not accidental. In his substitution of the she-ass for the camel lay concealed a secret truth that no one who ever saw these ears would question. Ha, ha, ha! Here the evil fellow lay at his feet. Here the ruse master was stretched out limply beside him, lost in his frightening dreams, plotting new snares even as he slept. He did not stop working even in his sleep. The scoundrel! The wretch! But this magical knife will put an end to his work, his dreams, his snares, and his evil. Slaying him will save the desert. First off, the oasis will be saved, but the desert will be saved as well. His own hands would wreak this salvation. He had warned people they needed to slaughter this scoundrel the first day he intruded into their settlement, but the people had hesitated. As they always did, the people had gotten caught up in a debate and had neglected their duty. Groups of people always prefer debate over action. Groups of people always spend their lives debating, not doing. For this reason, groups of people perish, because they have emphasized debate over action. He had, however, taken charge of the matter. He had decided to take charge of the matter some time ago. He had decided to take charge of the matter on the sly. No one had guessed his intentions except the strategist Ewar, who had attempted to get him to confess once, but he had escaped. Ewar had tried a second time, but he had ignored the look. But Ewar knew. And he knew that he knew, just as Ewar himself knew that he knew that he also knew. But the noblest affair was one known without having transited a tongue. What was known and also said was inevitably badly tarnished. The noblest matter was concealed even if it was known. He had gone to intercept one of the caravans and there had discovered a sorcerer from the forest lands far to the south. He had told him about the true nature of the strategist. Thus he had learned from him that unlike other beings the ignoble creature could not be slain with just any weapon. From his sleeve, the man had extracted an extraordinary knife with secret designs carved on its handle. He had told him that it was the only one that could spill the blood of strategists. He had exchanged for the knife a bag of precious Madjezzan salt. Here it was now in his possession, in his palm; its hilt in his hand. Its tongue gleamed in the sinister light from the opening overhead. Its tongue was as ravenous as a viper’s tongue. It was as symbolic as a viper’s tongue. The blade was coated with poison like the venom of a viper, because the strategist was a viper. The knife was a viper. And only a viper could kill a viper.

He brought the knife down on the man’s breast. It plunged into his breast with alarming ease. It plunged into the man’s chest as if into a pile of dirt or a sack stuffed with wool. When he drew it out, it emerged all bloody. He smelled a strange odor. He observed the color of blood coat the blade of the knife. The strategist emitted a hoarse, choked, rattling groan and shivered like a meek hare. He brought the knife down this time on the throat of the man, who groaned with pain. He shook violently and rolled over in bed.

He struggled to free himself. He lay on his back and the gurgling rattle in his throat continued on and on till it changed into a hiss. It became a genuine, protracted hiss capable of giving a person goose flesh. While he waited for the body to cease its hideous hissing he felt little bumps all over. But the hissing grew louder. Then he witnessed the body go through a terrifying transformation. It suddenly took on a pale color and matted hair swept over it too. It finally revealed itself as a terrifying serpent that was writhing and complaining with a hideous hiss. He tried to leap back, out of the vault, but. . but another transformation stopped him. The serpent began to disperse and dissolve the way a mirage does. The hissing too became muffled and began to die away until it ceased. At that time. . at that moment, he could not believe his eyes. The viper that had enveloped the body had vanished and another body had taken its place. . a body he detested finding there. . a body he could not believe he would be capable of allowing even a breeze to profane. It was inconceivable that he would attack it with a magic knife. The body swimming in a pool of blood before him was Temarit’s; it was not the strategist’s body, not the viper’s.

Vassals led the fool, who was bound with ropes of palm fiber, to the council of elders. He had a crazed look in his eyes and was foaming at the mouth. From his tongue came a repeated refrain like a charm: “It dispersed like a mirage. It dispersed from her like a mirage.” He repeated this to the council many times over before the sage Elelli was able to quiet him with a wave of his hand. Edahi fell silent but his wheezing did not cease. Indeed, it may have intensified, and he exhaled liberally on the nobles’ faces.

The men consulted one another with their eyes. Ewar retreated behind his blue veil, which he had drawn across his face until even his nose and eyes were concealed. In a corner Amghar whispered with the warrior Emmar. The sage and the diviner exchanged a dejected glance. Yazzal signaled with his eyes and the sage began the proceedings. He motioned for the vassals to untie the fool. The poor wretch started to repeat his charm, but sage gestured for him to desist.

The interrogation commenced.

The diviner asked tersely, “Did you kill the girl?”

The fool answered with certainty: “Absolutely not!”

“But you left the stranger’s residence holding a knife smeared with blood and when people hurried into the tomb they found the belle, slain.”

The fool glanced round the circle of eyes as if seeking support. He was looking even more squint-eyed than usual. His eyes showed the misery of someone frustrated by the inability to express himself. He said, “I did not kill Temarit. How could I kill Temarit? But I. . killed the strategist. I swear by the Law that I killed only the strategist.”

“Do you want to say that you meant to kill the strategist but killed the girl, because it was so dark?”

The fool looked around the circle of eyes again, as if to search for an answer there, but all he discovered in the nobles’ eyes were question marks. So he said, “Not at all. Darkness was not to blame. The moon illuminated the area through a hole overhead. I saw the strategist, who was asleep and bareheaded. The ears on his head resemble those of a donkey colt. You can check on that yourselves. This ignoble fellow’s head has two donkey ears hanging from it. Then. . ”

“Then what?”

“Then he changed into a snake after I stabbed him with the knife.”

“A snake?”

A murmur ran through the group. Voices were raised. The warrior laughed, but Ewar did not make a sound or join the uproar. The fool shouted, “I swear he changed into a hideous snake before he turned into a girl.”

The group murmured amongst themselves once more. The sage Elelli said disapprovingly, “At times you say he changed into a snake. At other times you say he changed into a girl.”

“At first he morphed into a snake. Then he morphed into a girl. When I saw Temarit flailing around in a pool of blood, I couldn’t believe it.”

The diviner asked, “Why don’t you confess that you went to the home of the jenny master to kill your sweetheart in revenge?”

“I did not go to kill the girl. I went to kill the stranger who has devastated our oasis, but he dispersed like a mirage to leave behind. . ”

The diviner interrupted, “Do you admit that you went to the stranger’s home to kill him?”

Again the fool searched their eyes for assistance but encountered only disapproval or indifference. He turned for help to the ruler in the corner, but Ewar hid his eyes behind his veil, as if he had decided to absent himself. He said desperately, “I don’t deny that I wanted to kill the stranger. I told you from the first day that he had ulterior motives, but you did not believe me. You did not believe me even after he caused the women to miscarry with his lethal herbs, which I saw him throw into the spring’s water with my own eyes. Yes, certainly, I wanted to kill the strategist, but he defeated me, because I thought he was only a cunning strategist. I did not suspect that he was also a sorcerer; but I never thought of killing Temarit.”

The diviner and the sage exchanged a glance. Elelli asked, “But who gave you permission to kill the stranger?”

Edahi immediately replied, “Do I need to wait for permission from the council to kill a killer?”

The diviner said, “We haven’t received a single piece of evidence to substantiate your murder accusation against him.”

“I saw him throw the suspect herbs into the water.”

“Even if we believed you, throwing herbs into the water can hardly be considered proof.”

The fool stared the diviner straight in the eye. He stared at him until his pupil disappeared from sight. He asked confidently, “Doesn’t the evil one’s public declaration, repeated night and day, suffice as proof?”

Then he bowed his head and added regretfully, “You don’t want evidence. You’re waiting for annihilation, not for evidence. For this reason, I decided to take the matter into my own hands, and I don’t regret it at all.”

“Do you admit you would have killed the strategist if you had not killed the girl?”

“Definitely.”

Then he corrected his statement: “But he beat me. If I had known he was a sorcerer, he wouldn’t have beaten me.”

Stillness followed. Then they consulted one another, first in whispers, next out loud, and finally in public debate. The diviner repeated loudly a prophetic aphorism he attributed to the lost Law: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. If a killer isn’t slain, the Law will be diminished.”

He repeated this three times. Then silence reigned. The elders heard wisdom’s ring in this maxim, but the punishment filled them with dread. The sage attempted to ease the matter by returning to his interrogation of the accused: “Idiocy has never been an evil, but the evil is insanity. So skip the metamorphosis story now and tell us the way you used to speak with us in olden times when you were our companion in the council: Did you discuss the matter with someone who directed you to punish the stranger without a verdict from the assembly?”

The men exchanged knowing glances, but the accused did not turn his head in anyone’s direction. He looked down at the ground before him and shook his head no.

The sage said, “But you were seen leaving the ruler’s home that night before you went to the stranger’s mausoleum. Did you discuss your intentions with him?”

The accused looked toward the chief, but Ewar did not utter a sound or uncover his eyes. So he bowed his head again and said, “Certainly not!”

“Why not?”

“I was not obliged to discuss my plans with people.”

“Are you sure?”

The fool gazed at him with a hurt expression and did not reply. There was a long silence. Finally the sage proclaimed, as though reciting an elegy: “We have loved you as a fool, because idiocy assures certainty. We have disavowed you as a killer, because murder is a form of insanity. We have acquired you through your idiocy, because in your idiocy is your presence of mind. We have lost you through your loss of your intellect, because when the intellect is lost, the man is lost. So farewell, former comrade. Farewell!”

Isan had finished eating supper and was setting off to roam the empty countryside in response to a call to wander, but a specter blocked his path before he could shoot away. So the two faced off atop the mound, which was composed of the tombs of the ancients and surmounted by the ancient mausoleum. They confronted each other for a long time. In the end, the chief said, “Here I’ve donned the night to visit a man who once saved my life out of hatred not love.”

“Which do you prefer: a man who kills you from love or one who saves your life out of hatred?”

“I can’t begin to answer this riddle.”

He bowed to invite his visitor to be seated. They sat down, facing each other. The jenny master said, “How could the question not be a riddle when everything in this desert is a riddle? Our life is a riddle. Our death is a riddle. Our passage through this world of ours is a riddle.”

His companion groaned with pain. After a silence, he said, “The fact is that I would not have set aside my self-esteem to come to you after we parted had the riddle you mentioned not generated another one.”

The strategist opted for silence and so the visitor completed his statement: “I merely want you to confess to the assembly that you are able to shape-shift.”

“Shape-shift?”

His companion said nothing, and so the strategist asked, “What good would my admission that I can shape-shift do?”

Ewar replied with sudden zeal, “It will help. If you admit that, the penalty will be altered to banishment.”

“Banishment?”

“Exile. He will spend the rest of his days as a rootless wanderer; just the way you’ve always wanted him to live.”

“Can a man become a wayfarer after the time has passed?”

“I don’t understand.”

The strategist was still. After a silence, he said, “But how can the punishment be changed when the result of the crime is the same?”

“The elders think this will lighten the punishment considerably.”

“Do you mean to say that your Law makes a distinction between killing a woman and killing a man?”

“Certainly not.”

“Or that it distinguishes between a stranger and a resident?”

“Certainly not.”

Ewar fell silent. After a pause, he said, “There’s another secret to the matter that I’ll share with you if you tell me the secret of metamorphosis.”

“Ha, ha. . is this a deal?”

“Everything in our world is a deal.”

“How can you ask me to confess to something that I haven’t done?”

“You’re not going to disappoint me?”

They exchanged a look, and their eyes glowed in the generous light of the stars. Each man discerned a prophecy in his companion’s eyes. Ewar said: “I’m going to tell you a story.”

Since his companion did not comment, the chief continued, “Many years ago, when the desert was smothered by grass and by tribes, there lived two close friends who could not bear to live far apart, even though they clashed whenever they were together. Their love for each other was so intense that whenever one fell in love with a woman, his buddy did too. Once, one of them married a beauty from a neighboring tribe and they had a child, who was all the man possessed in the whole world. During the first quarrel that erupted between them, however, the woman confessed to him that his friend had fathered the child. He thought this was a lie she had concocted to sear his heart, since women are capable of transforming a lie into the truth and the truth into a lie, but she reminded him of the snake that he had once found coiled around her body and that had then dispersed like a mirage. She said that this apparition had been a snake only to his eyes. In point of fact, it had been his disputatious colleague, from whose loins she had conceived the child. On seeing the suffering in his eyes, she told him that she had acted in this way for his own good, because a sorceress had informed her that he belonged to that group of men fated never to beget a child for the desert. Do you know what that she-jinni did the day her spouse reproached her for her conduct during the first argument after this admission?”

He raised his head to the stars and let out a moan of distress. With his look still fixed on that void strewn with stars, he said, “She took the child to the pasture and left him in a herd belonging to a neighboring tribe. When he questioned her, she told him she had done that to sear his heart, for she was a person who could have children for the desert, whereas he never could.”

He fell silent, but his eyes clung to the celestial sphere. Afterwards he asked in an emotionless voice, “Do you know who that buddy was?”

“I’m not a diviner. How would I know?”

Ewar said dispassionately, “Me.”

The strategist clung to his silence, but the narrator added, with the same lack of emotion, “And do you know the identity of the faithful friend who fathered a child with my wife?”

When his companion did not respond, the narrator filled in the blanks: “It was you!”

“Me?”

“I found you coiled snake-like around her. So why deny your ability to shape-shift?”

“Ha, ha. . ”

The narrator, however, continued to decode the talismans of the prophecies he beheld in the sky’s stars: “Do you know what became of this child you fathered with your best friend’s wife?”

The strategist braced himself but did not reply. Meanwhile, the narrator continued with the prophecy: “He’s the fool!”

Without meaning to, the strategist yelled, “No!”

“Believe it or not, Edahi is your son.”

He was silent but then added, “Just as he is my son too.”

“Did you make up this story to convince me to confess that I can shape-shift?”

“You yourself do not believe that I could invent a story; why are you so contrary?”

The narrator returned from his travels through the sky, and stillness prevailed. Then the strategist remarked, “I don’t mind telling you that I have felt a greater affection for the fool than for any other man. Is this what people call fatherhood?”

“By confessing, you will not only save my son; you will save yours as well.”

“I don’t believe admitting that I have the power of metamorphosis will help.”

“Rest assured that it will.”

“What makes you so certain?”

Ewar said nothing. He made a visual sweep of emptiness enveloped in darkness. Suddenly he said, “Because if you confess, I will too.”

“You’ll confess?”

“Your confession actually won’t help unless I confess.”

The strategist remained silent while the visitor explained, “Didn’t you once say that we only kill the one we love and only save the one we hate?”

“I always say that.”

“I goaded the fool and encouraged him to lift his hand against you.”

The strategist found nothing odd in this. He said coldly, “I was expecting you would do that one day, since revenge is our punishment for doing a good deed.”

“Not long ago we agreed that what you did the day you brought me back to life was not a good deed, but rest assured that my confession to the assembly that I goaded the fool will turn the affair head over heels. . if preceded by your confession.” Stillness prevailed. The strategist raked the earth with his finger, tracing an arcane symbol there, before he replied, “I don’t think I can do that.”

“Would you rather surrender your son’s neck to the rope than renounce your fraudulent arrogance?”

“Refraining from a confession of shape-shifting is a secret matter, not a display of arrogance.”

“But the son. . ”

“The fool is your son, not mine.”

“He’s your son too: my son by the heart but yours by blood.”

“I did not want to have a descendent to recite an elegy one day for me in the desert.”

“What’s that?”

“I wouldn’t have acquired a reputation for cunning tactics had I not refused to leave a trace behind me in the desert.”

They were both silent. The visitor waited for a long time before he said, “We have heard of sons who sacrifice their fathers but have never heard of fathers who sacrifice their sons.”

“It’s hard to forgive a son who has raised a knife to slay his father.”

“Forgiveness is the secret of our happiness. Woe to anyone in our world who does not learn how to forgive.”

“A father can forgive, but the spirit world will never forgive, even if the father does.”

“Is that your last word?”

“I can’t mock my own law.”

“To which law do you refer?”

“‘We should only revive the ones we hate and only slay the ones we love.’ Have you forgotten?”

The night before the fool’s execution, a tempest raged through the oasis. The onslaught of that storm would not have upset people if it had not violated the law for storms. Unknown regions of the western desert had unleashed it — heavily laden with dust — one night, thereby violating an ancient rule, passed down from generation to generation, that chastises the west wind for night travel with this well-known phrase: “I’m not a slave; so why should I travel by night?” The winds from the west, however, traveled by night this time. That was unprecedented and they traveled over night and arrived with malice unparalleled in the memory of the oasis. This animosity was not merely apparent in the storm’s violence but revealed itself as well in the heavy dust borne by the winds. The tempest burst free of its bonds shortly after sunset, like a demonic jinni, and attacked the oasis with a savagery people had not experienced, not even in the pillaging attacks the oasis experienced in ancient times. The tempest continued its painful wailing all through the night, and individuals with psychic powers thought the wailing an ill omen. The storm sent huts on the outskirts sailing through the air, ripped roofs off houses, and flattened some walls. The next morning, the firebrand was visible on the horizon, but dust lost no time in bringing night back to the oasis, and darkness prevailed once more. In the deserted expanses of the oasis, the wind roared again. Residents wandered blindly in search of each other, and the demon felled them in the streets. Others tried to search for their livestock only to be stopped short. The tempest did not calm down until it had taken some of them as its prey. After helping itself to these propitiatory offerings, it quieted down, as if it had decided to cut them a little slack, but this was a threatening respite, since the atmosphere continued to be heavy and gloomy. The enemy seemed to have staged a strategic retreat to muster its forces for a new attack, not for surrender. It was, however, respite enough for the residents to discover the devastation that had descended on their land. People passed on news of livestock wiped out, palm trees destroyed, sword dunes advancing from the south toward the spring, and crops strafed by flying dirt. The residents might have been concerned about the threat posed by the sands’ advance toward the spring had they not been so preoccupied during this lull in the storm with searching for missing persons, whom the wind had carried off to parts unknown. During the height of that chaos, the diviner went to heroic efforts to gather all the elders for an emergency assessment of the catastrophe but only succeeded in contacting the sage, whom he bumped into outside. He tied the other man to his own body with a palm-fiber rope and then ushered him into the nearest building, a deserted house, which had just lost its whole roof, although the walls blocked the wind.

Elelli said, “We loathed the calamity with the water-borne epidemic, but this is an even worse affliction.”

Yazzal said, as he sheltered against the house’s west wall and pulled his companion with him, “No affliction is easy until a worse one arrives.”

“We need to contact our companions immediately.”

“Indeed, we must quickly carry out the punishment.”

The wind was howling as it attacked the wall. The sage shouted back, “What punishment?”

The diviner, who was seeking the wall’s protection from the deluge of dust, replied, “Whoever delays in carrying out a punishment, brings punishment down on his own head.”

“Do you mean the storm’s a curse we acquired by being too slow to punish the fool?”

“If you promise the spirit world a sacrifice, don’t be slow to deliver. This is what the lost Law has taught us.”

“Many disagree with your view.”

“The majority is a handful of wretches who never understand what must be understood.”

“They say that the wind is the spirit world’s angry reaction to the sentence against the fool.”

“Rubbish! The spirit world is only angry when it seeks a blood offering.”

“It has seized many blood offerings. Indeed, the entire oasis has become a propitiatory sacrifice.”

“When people are stingy in their sacrifices to the spirit world, it takes a dreadful toll of victims, whether people like it or not.”

The wind roared; so the diviner shouted, “It’s threatening us. If we don’t make haste, the walls’ turn will be next. Haven’t you heard of the tribe that was too stingy with the spirit world to sacrifice a kid, and so the spirit world sent its messenger the wind to annihilate the whole tribe? The wind always brings a message from the spirit world; so heed it.”

The sage raised his head, but a gust struck him, ramming his skull against his companion’s breast. He muttered to the diviner’s chest. “I fear nothing on your behalf so much as the Law’s effect on you.”

The diviner yelled, “Is the Law’s effect something a man should fear?”

“The Law’s impact on a man is fearsome, because the Law’s commandment is a fetter.”

“Did you say: fetter?”

“A prophetic commandment is true during the moment of inspiration. A prophetic maxim is true while it remains unrestricted. Once we imprison it in a thin-necked jug, however, it becomes a self-parody.”

“A prophetic commandment is a prophetic commandment, no matter where or when. Space and time exercise no sway over prophetic dicta.”

The sage, however, said defiantly, despite the wind’s assaults: “A prophetic commandment is a danger even when time hasn’t touched it; so what if time has?”

“I would not be astonished to hear statements like this from foreigners. What astonishes me is to hear it from a close friend.”

The sage burst into alarming laughter and then stammered, “It’s a mistake to allow anything time touches to astonish us. Time speaks through my tongue. Don’t blame me!”

The day of the execution, when the vassals brought the fool, who was bound with ropes, the wind cast generous puffs of dust into the faces of the procession so the men could barely see one another. They were forced to call out to keep from becoming separated. Behind the hill, the elders assembled, although the chief had vanished from the group.

Two days later, the chief merchant ran into the jenny master at the sword dunes, which the wind had shifted forward to split the oasis in half. The chief merchant said jokingly, “All the homes lost their roofs, except the stranger’s.”

The strategist replied slyly, “Winds don’t carry away the roofs of roofless homes.”

When Amghar looked at him askance, he added, “Tomb vaults lack roofs.”

The chief merchant, however, leapt to a different subject: “Didn’t the demon wind throw you to the ground?”

“The demon wind would have to dig into the earth for a long time to reach a creature whose fortress is the tombs.”

Amghar stared at him suspiciously and remarked mischievously, “But I went to check on you and found the vault vacant.”

“The vault’s a place. The jenny master does not dwell in physical space.”

“You don’t live in physical space?”

“It’s inconceivable that one who lives for wayfaring should live in a physical location.”

The head merchant smiled as he drew closer, his head bowed to examine the great changes the storm had made to the earth’s crust. Without looking up, he said, “I’m fairly certain that the wind was your handiwork.”

The strategist asked nonchalantly, “What would make you think that?”

“You’re definitely a wind demon that can polish off the remaining debris of the oasis.”

“I’ve never resorted to magical practices.”

He stared at him suspiciously once more and said in a tone with a concealed barb, “How can you avoid recourse to magic when your powers of metamorphosis far outstrip those of the most cunning sorcerers?”

“Now you’re repeating your leader Ewar’s conspiracy theory.”

“It’s not a theory. He said as much in the assembly during his final attempt to save his darling fool.”

“Did he really try that?”

“He confessed everything, even though his confession served no purpose.”

The strategist retreated into silence. After a while, he said, “Did he also admit he was the wretch’s father?”

Amghar glanced stealthily at him. Then he muttered: “Yes.”

“Did he claim I was the wretch’s father, too?”

The chief merchant gazed at him from behind his veil and their eyes met. He signaled yes. So the strategist asked, “What else did he say in his summation for the defense?”

“He told a tale of metamorphosis.”

“Rubbish.”

“But Edahi is your lost child; isn’t that so?”

“We only recover what we lose.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean I have fulfilled my task and have definitely reconciled you to a life of wandering.”

“Is this your farewell?”

“Tomorrow I shall mount my jenny and once again become a wandering wayfarer.”

Amghar drew a deep breath and said regretfully, “I’ll miss you a lot. I’ll miss you more than I shall ever miss anyone in this ill-fated oasis.”

“You won’t miss me, because you will soon catch up with me.”

The chief merchant groaned with pain and said, “You’re right. We’ll meet during our migrations, sooner or later.”

“No, sooner.”

He was silent but then added, “Have you forgotten what the wind did to the spring?”

“We complained because the water was contaminated. Now we’re complaining because there’s no water anymore.”

Raising his head toward the distant horizon, the strategist said: “I’ll just allow my jenny to say what the jenny of all generations said when she quenched her physical thirst from a well the way the Law quenches our spiritual thirst: “‘Now let the leather bucket be slashed, let the winch be smashed, and let the well be dashed.’ Did I get that right?”

Hünibach, the Swiss Alps San Remo, Italy Tripoli, Libya 2003 C.E.