The Day of the Falling of the Stars and Searching for the Original Face
Nobody knew the origin of his history, of how he happened to be there. One could only speculate. Perhaps — so the theories went — he had been abandoned by some passing fugitives. It could be that he was the offspring of pioneers who had moved through these barren regions, tried to settle, and perished, overcome by the hostile environment. Or else that he had been kidnapped while still very young and then left for dead somewhere among the dun-coloured dunes by gangsters who’d lost their gamble and fallen out with one another. It would be tempting to think that he was a young prince, illegitimate for sure, left to die there because of palace intrigues. It would be even more tempting to imagine that he’d had some choice in the matter, that he had escaped to this paradise — the paradise of neither knowing nor questioning. What if — sacrilegious thought! — he were some weird mutation, dropped by one of the creatures among which he now lived? But nobody really knew and no one would ever know how to solve the riddle. (And even so he could never be lost. Is it not written in the Book that He is closer to us than the artery in the neck?)
Neither was it ever made clear how his presence among the wandering herd of gazelles was first observed. People later claimed that an old tramp, or a schnorrer crossing the desert to a far-off marketplace to flog his trinkets and his rags, first saw him. Others maintained that it must have been nomads. Or explorers. (Though we do not read that either Livingstone or von Humboldt or Burton or Speke or Scott or Saint-Exupéry or Münchhausen ever passed over these wastes.) Or tax collectors then. Or ash-tongued missionaries with embers in the eye sockets. Or mapmakers. Or American tourists. Or game-thieves. . The first inkling of his existence became as obscure as his very origins. Time is a desert. The minds of men sift away with the sand. Winds flow over the sands, erasing tracks. Factors are obfuscated. But in this expanse, white and treacherous as a page slowly being eroded by words, facts serve no function in any event. Horizons are too abstract here. It is recounted that some clan leader in the dusty past had moved his eyes above the fluttering veil over the illimitable nothingness, that he had squinted at various points along the edge of his vision and that he had named these, rather lyrically, Abd el Kadel, Mesrour, Ahmed Madrali, Israfel, Al Sirat, Nour ed Deen.
A place once named is not afterwards supposed to move again. Naming is taming. It is casting the arbitrary over the unknown. It may well be that these name-places took root in man’s mind, became reference points, barriers to the boundless. However it may be, it would seem that they constituted roughly the points of the star over which the herd and its adopted human lived. It was the birthplace and the lair of the sirocco, and other fever-laden winds shooting forth their rustling tongues to insatiably lick up any moisture or coolness. Distances were hazy from a lack of obstacles. Around the rim the sky was cemented to the earth by a thinnish grout of greyness. Water was a pittance always to be searched for all over again. Flora was scarce, nondescript: in good years a meagre crop of frutescent growths to sustain the earth, and strewn across the floor of a wadi some pots of small shade perhaps sprouting a rare miniature cyclamen. Fauna was even more rare: lizards and ants living off ants, the odd sand-tinted jackal harbouring incongruously the human wail, at times the grosbeak and the poult. But through this landscape, light, speckled, free, the gazelles in their fugacity. And with them the boy on all fours, naked, as rapid as his companions, nibbling grass, of the same smell and the same destiny, unburdened by any knowing.
Poachers probably first brought the rumours of this strange deer to the dwelling places of man. And from these outposts the rumours spread until they eventually reached the ears of the Academy. It is the function of the Academy to raise questions and then to run these to ground. How, the Academy asked, could this be possible? How could any human — for by all accounts it, the boy, was said to be of the Homo species — how could he survive in such frugal surroundings? and what ought to be done? Must he be captured and brought back, introduced to society? Some argued in favour of this step, others against — as it is the custom of an Academy to disagree. The rumours of the existence of the culturally unclassifiable creature were confirmed. A party had gone out on horseback and through their binoculars they had managed to observe (after a search of many days over this uncharted region) the fugal movements of the gazelles and the boy. The boy, they reported (continuing to refer to him as Boy even though they could glimpse that he had a beard), even acted as a sort of fugleman, leading the high-stepping herd in their flight.
The question of cruelty had to be considered too. What would be the most efficacious way to apprehend this unique hart? For the Academy by its very nature decided the need to know to be paramount: they felt that it was the destiny of man to advance. Or, as some secretly knew, that man must inevitably be brought to fall from grace. One leader stood up in the assembly and justified the general decision by quoting from the Book:
I died from the plant and reappeared in an animal;
I died from the animal and became a man;
Wherefore then should I fear?
When did I grow less by dying?
Next time I shall die from the man,
That I may grow the wings of angels.
From the angel too must I advance;
ALL THINGS SHALL PERISH SAVE HIS FACE.
An expedition was fitted out with nets and gaffs and set out to capture Boy. For days they criss-crossed the rufous labyrinth without walls, with scouts flung out far ahead of the main party. Dust caked their moustaches and their goatees and whitened their garments of fustian and gaberdine. At night the stars whispered of winds and a lone predatory jackal mocked them with the disembodied howl of a knowing human. They succeeded in sighting the gazelles and although it was repeatedly attempted to cordon the herd off or to drive it into some convoluted canyon, they failed. They failed and they saw the rippling fugue of movement as the deer disappeared through cracks between earth and heaven.
And Boy the boy? Will anyone ever know what impressions entered by his senses and what kind of mind these constituted? He reacted to these foreign animals as a deer would. But did he not sense, issuing from some atavistic instinct, the unavoidable defeat brought by these creatures encroaching upon his unknown existence which he knew so exclusively? Of course, like all gazelles, he had come across one of the strangers at some place in the past, fallen in the sand, dead and infested by flies. He had recognized no affinity between himself and such an object. It held no attraction for him. It was inedible and not even moist. It stank, and not just with the familiar putrid smell of decomposition. It was in no way like him, sleek and pure as a buck with a light fuzz over the skin. No, it had had other loose skins around it, fusty and frumpish, a strip around the neck, a glittering string across its paunch, so that its body had been divided into darkened because covered private parts and exposed and thus obscene public parts.
Then — but “then”, time in sequence, could have no contour or contents for Boy in his unmapped being with its fixed edges of nothingness — then these creatures had multiplied like invaders and were now returning, ever after them, perched high on other four-legged beasts with the appearance of bigger hornless deer, each carrying also an upright and sometimes reverberating object. How could he know that these frightening things were fusils, employed to herd them into some cul-de-sac?