‘Let’s move a little further down. This is the house of Hercules with a mosaic representing the labours of Hercules. As you can see, the tableau represents three different subjects. In the middle we see Ganymede kidnapped by Zeus in the form of an eagle and taken to Mount Olympus. Inside the squares we find the seasons in the shape of the upper part of a woman, and finally we see the labours of Hercules: Hercules strangling serpents as a child, Hercules taming the Cretan bull, Hercules hunting the Stymphalian birds with arrows, fighting the nine-headed hydra, defeating the queen of the Amazons, battling the Nemean lion, and Hercules picking golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides. There might be other labours in the mosaic that I have forgotten.
‘Look at the details carefully. You will see extraordinary feats and other extremely simple ones. I personally consider every human being a greater or lesser Hercules. Had I enjoyed a similar reputation, I would have appeared on a huge mosaic: Al-Firsiwi strangling the scaly forest serpents of Zarhoun, Al-Firsiwi bringing Diotima back from the underworld, Al-Firsiwi committing to memory a poem by Hölderlin at the night university in Frankfurt, Al-Firsiwi concluding a winning deal to rent the Hall of Oil at the Zawiya, Al-Firsiwi building the Zaytoun Hotel, Al-Firsiwi burying Bacchus, Al-Firsiwi changing into Antaeus and twisting Hercules’s arm before exiling him to Bu Mandara.
‘You laugh because you are drawing sharp boundaries between reality and legend. A mistake, a grievous mistake. Are you sure, sir, that you never did something miraculous? You don’t remember. Just like that, you don’t remember. As if it were possible to forget a heroic act you performed! You want us to joke? Let’s joke, sir. I can assure you, that sometimes shit itself is a miracle!
‘In the good old days, I made something akin to a contemporary mosaic with a Roman spirit. If you ever visit the ruins of the Zaytoun Hotel, you can see it in the lobby. There you will still find the scene of Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi on his white horse submitting to the French. Orpheus is with him, playing his lyre while the beasts of colonialism crouch at his feet. Then there is a scene of Al-Firsiwi senior carrying a gazelle from Mount Salfat on his shoulders and your humble servant fighting a snake from Ain Jaafar.
‘I am the only nation whose founder saw it as workshops and ruins during the same era.
‘In all the mosaics of the hotel, there are Roman tesserae that I took from bags in the storerooms, where they were piled up for decades without anyone aware of the scenes that were destroyed in the haphazard gathering at the hands of your blessed ancestors. No one is able to recognise them nowadays. In return, you will easily recognise the new style, characterised by a mocking cubism that cost me next to nothing. The work was done by a painter from Asila, called Abd al-Wahhab al-Andalusi. He used to drink in the hotel lobby and tessellated me and my great ancestors while he talked at length about his aversion to Andalusian mosaics, which were imprisoned by blind geometric squares and devoid of features and movement.
‘To return to our subject, the labours of Hercules are simply a metaphor for the unattainable that clings to the human. Since, as a professional guide, I am required to present you the information in complete neutrality, I will spare you my opinion about the possible and the impossible. We had a teacher at the night university who used to say, “The most widespread possibility in our lives is the impossible!” This is, however, just German philosophising that neither suits us nor for which are we suitable!
‘After the public fountain on your left, you will find the northern baths which I will let you visit on your own, the bath being the only place I can’t enter dead or alive!
‘What a bore having to repeat the same thing every day while trying to make it exciting and enjoyable, as though it were being said for the first time. If Bacchus, Orpheus and Hercules knew how much I talked about them and celebrated their life histories, they would make me king of their stupid tales.
‘Let them all go to hell, them and their northern baths, and all Romans as well. I will wait for my Myrmidons in this wasteland whose only shade is my own. I am the tree and the man resting in its shade. There is no hope of a breeze and no need for one. No one has died of the heat in these places. If they take too long visiting the baths, I will have to occupy myself by thinking about my tragedies. Then they might find me crying like a child whose mother has forgotten him in these ruins.
‘Come along. Didn’t you like the baths? You say you did? You must admit, however, that the tour of the mosaics that I have devised is the most beautiful tour of all.
‘Good, I am flattered by your admiration. It is rare for anyone to win the approval of the German people! I have to tell you a secret, though. I conceived the tour of the mosaics for myself, because in this darkness that surrounds me, the mosaics are like an inner vision bursting with colour and movement. Blindness has helped me become part of a magnificent mosaic for all time. Whenever I think about that I feel better and sense that I am close to the logic of life.
‘During this tour we have to visit the house of the knight, where the bronze of the horseman was found — one of the most beautiful pieces in the collection of bronzes. It also houses the mosaic I told you about where Bacchus finds Ariadne.
‘If you insist on learning about Roman daily life, on your way back you may visit some shops, oil presses, houses and the modest districts. My advice to you, however, is to leave all that to the experts who see the wonder of the age in every stone, and only take away with you the myths of the big houses.
‘Now, we are descending once again towards the small bridge on the River Fertassa. I would like you to take one last look at the chain of green hills, which at this time of the afternoon will have a light-green hue under the glossy veil of a blue sky. Does anyone remember the sea-blue colour of the mountain at nine in the morning? Of course no one does. We all see the wonders of nature once or twice and then forget them. In spite of the eternal inherent in these wonders, the most awesome thing we remember is the forgotten and the fleeting. The mountain does not care about us. It does not see that we see it and love it passionately, it neither expects nor wishes that, and it does not worry about that never happening. It is like a rose described by an ancient poet in these words:
The rose does not ask why
It blooms because it blooms
Not caring about itself
Not anxious to be seen.
‘Yes, yes, it is the teacher I told you about who recited those verses, expecting us to be transported in rapture, the way you were now. But instead, we roared with laughter, and he was upset with us and declared that the older humanity gets, the more it loses its poetic inclination.
‘I do not know what devil made me say to him, “It is people who age. Humanity is ageless.”
‘He asked me, “Where are you from?”
‘ “From Greco-Roman civilisation,” I replied.
‘ “I am not surprised,” he said.
‘I do not know how to recover the sense of humour I appreciated at once in those verses. Do you think they are funny?
‘No, you do not find them amusing. Good, let’s drop the subject.
‘I have a last comment to make before we bid the mountain goodbye. I always found the streams of water rushing out of your German mountains amazing. Do you see any water connected to this mountain? Do you see waterfalls, the expanse of a lake, or flowing springs? Nothing at all? Yet right at the foot of this mountain, cold springs flow, some profuse, others scarce. No one hears them, and their charm is only visible in the gardens and through the birds living in the valley. These mountains cry or laugh in silence. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a mountain!