The Tuaregs ever since that time like to tell of her expedition: Tin Hinan, riding a white female camel, is accompanied by faithful Takamat and a caravan composed mostly of women, young girls, white and black intermingled. From their country they carry with them dates and millet, rare and precious objects, the royal jewels of course, as well as the vases and urns required by the pagan religion they practice.
The route to Hoggar was long. In the final stages food became scarce. The situation became criticaclass="underline" to die of hunger in the desert!
Takamat on her dromedary or Tin Hinan mounted high on her mount — the story does not decide which of the two friends — sees the little mounds on the ground formed by anthills. Takamat, with the help of the servants, sets about gathering, grain by grain, the harvest of the hardworking ants! Thanks to her patience Tin Hinan and her cortège are able to continue their journey. Finally Hoggar is close, a green and fertile valley opens up before them. Saved!
They settle there west of Tamanrasset: Abalessa was a site of pilgrimage even before the mausoleum of the princess was discovered there.
One day in 1925 the Frenchman Reygasse and the American Prorok enter the chamber of the dead princess, seventeen centuries after she was placed there in the center of a vast necropolis containing eleven other burial places. Around it a road was laid out for the religious processions that fervently circled the dead women!
This funerary grouping, for its dimensions, its complex organization, the thickness of its walls, and its basalt stones, is the most imposing pre-Islamic necropolis in the region.
I find that I am always dreaming about the day that Tin Hinan was laid to rest at Abalessa. They stretched her out on a bed of sculptured wood. Her thin body, pointed east and covered with cloth and large leather ornaments, lay on its back with its arms and legs slightly bent under.
Tin Hinan — as the two archeologists verify by studying her skeleton — wears seven silver and seven gold bracelets on her left wrist and a single silver bracelet on her right; a string of antimony beads circles her right ankle. Precious and exquisite pearls cover her breast.
Near her, dates and fruits had been placed in baskets; nothing remains of them but pits and seeds. Facing the recumbent body there is a stylized statuette of a woman (her portrait?) that has not completely vanished, as well as some pottery, fragments of which remain.
A gold coin stamped with the likeness of the Emperor Constantine is still there; in a nearby room a Roman lamp from the third century is preserved. So, despite the distance of centuries, the chronological date of the tomb can be fixed.
But there is something especially troubling to my stubborn dream in its attempts to reassemble the ashes of time, to hold on to the traces around these miraculously preserved tombs. Especially troubling (even though I am just as disturbed by Tin Hinan’s removal to Algiers) are the tifinagh inscriptions found here. They are very ancient in origin and they can also be found on the walls of the neighboring chambers (the chouchatts), where each of the princess’s friends was buried in turn.
Libyan writings. Earlier even than the writing at Dougga, they are in Libyan script, no longer understood by the Tuaregs, who respectfully followed the archeologists into the tomb, then averted their gaze when faced with the recumbent Tin Hinan.
And so I imagine the princess of the Hoggar who, when she fled in the past, carried with her the archaic alphabet, then confided the characters to her friends just before she died.
Thus, more than four centuries after the resistance and dramatic defeat of Yougourtha in the north, also four centuries before the grandiose defeat of la Kahina — the Berber queen who will resist the Arab conquest — Tin Hinan of the sands, almost obliterated, leaves us an inheritance — and does so despite her bones that, alas, have now been disturbed. Our most secret writing, as ancient as Etruscan or the writing of the runes, but unlike these a writing still noisy with the sounds and breath of today, is indeed the legacy of a woman in the deepest desert.
Tin Hinan buried in the belly of Africa!
PART THREE. A SILENT DESIRE
“Confession is nothing,
knowledge is everything.”
“Fugitive Without Knowing It”
There are four of them, and when the message hanging from the end of a reed comes out through the closed window, it is only intended for the fourth man …
The four are captives and probably a sorry sight — all except this fourth man receiving the missive in Arabic (a language that is a mystery to him) that comes with a tidy sum of gold. This writing in the native language, translated for him by a renegade who is in on the secret, comes from a mysterious woman of noble birth, the beloved only daughter of her wealthy father.
That is the story of the Captive and Zoraidé from Don Quixote. I imagine (and why not?) that this entrance of the Algerian woman into the first great novel of modern times actually took place in Algiers between 1575 and 1579. Somewhere beneath a blind window this note of alarm was sent by a woman who was perhaps not necessarily the most beautiful nor the wealthiest nor the sole heir of her father, no, but certainly she was a woman who was locked away.
Because she has been secretly spying on the wretched world of the convicts doing their hard labor in prison but out of doors, the unknown woman boldly dares to initiate the dialogue from her enclosed and gilded prison.
The dialogue with the other: not particularly because he is this other, not at all, but because she is able to discern the true nobility and worthiness (that of the hero of Lepanto) beneath the tatters indicating this man’s temporary loss of place in the world. A voyeur, with her lynx-like gaze, like a madwoman, relishing the danger, she offers herself as the liberator of the person who will venture with her to make the ultimate transgression. Even as she plots the course, does she have any premonition that, at the end of the journey, she will find herself the wife of this Christian or perhaps some other, but that above all she will find herself a foreigner, a stranger in the language of Cervantes?
Of course, right from the start the fugitive woman will recognize the images of Marie-Mériem in the church. However, in return for making this eventful trip with a whole group of people among whom she shines like a jewel, in the end she will see herself reduced to the role of stunningly beautiful deaf-mute — but then she will write no more.
Freeing the slave-hero from the dungeons of Algiers, she sets herself free from the father who has given her everything except freedom, leaving him behind on the shores of Africa, and he will curse her for her betrayal. She exchanges her gilded cage (the richest house in Algiers, where she was queen) for an elsewhere that is boundless but uncertain.