“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.
3 Vengeance
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.
4 The Jenny
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.