My father looked as shocked as Nostril did. “Mafìo,” he cautioned, “on this open desert we are terribly exposed to thunderbolts. Your criticism is a novel one in my experience, perhaps even original, but I suggest you temper it with discretion.”
Unheeding, my uncle went on, “Their putting fetters on human sexuality was like cripples writing the rules for an athletic contest.”
“Cripples, master?” Nostril inquired. “But how could they have known they were cripples? You contend that my sensations have been blunted. Since I myself have no exterior standard alongside which to measure my own enjoyments, I wonder how anyone else could possibly do so. I can think of only one sort who might qualify to judge even himself. That would be a man who has had experience, so to speak, before and after. Excuse my impertinence, Master Mafio, but were you perhaps not circumcised until midway in your adult life?”
“Insolent infidel! I never have been!”
“Ah. Then, excepting such a man, it seems to me that no one could adjudicate the matter but a woman. A woman who has given joy to both sorts of men, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, and paid close heed to their comparative heights of enjoyment.”
I winced at that. Whether Nostril spoke in snide malice or sheer ingenuousness, his words hit very close to Uncle Mafìo’s true nature and probable experience. I glanced at my uncle, fearing he would blush or bluster or maybe knock Nostril’s head off, and thereby confess what he had so far kept concealed. But he bore the seeming insinuation as if he had not noticed it, and only continued to muse aloud:
“If the choice were mine, I should seek out a religion whose scriptures were not written by men already ritually maimed in their manhood.”
“Where we are going,” my father remarked, “there are several such religions.”
“As I well know,” said my uncle. “That is what makes me wonder how we Christians and Jews and Muslims dare to speak of the more Eastern peoples as barbarians.”
My father said, “The traveled man can look with a pitying smile at the crude pebbles still treasured by his home folk, yes, for he has seen real rubies and pearls in far places. Whether that also holds true for the home-kept religions, I cannot say, not being a theologian.” He added, rather sharply for him, “But this I do know: we are at present still under the Heaven of those religions you so openly disprize, and vulnerable to heavenly rebuke. If your blasphemies provoke a whirlwind, we may not get any farther. I strongly recommend a change of subject.”
Nostril obliged. He reverted to his earlier topic and told us, at stupefying length, how each letter of the Arabic fish-worm writing is permeated by a certain specific emanation from Allah, and therefore, as the letters squirm into the shape of words and the words into reptilian sentences, any piece of Arabic writing—even something as mundane as a signpost or a landlord’s bill—contains a beneficent power which is greater than the sum of the individual characters, and therefore is efficacious as a talisman against evil and jinn and afarit and the Devil Shaitan … and so on and on. To which the only rejoinder was made by one of our bull camels. He unfurled his underworks as he strode along, and copiously made water.
5
WELL, we did not get annihilated by any thunderbolt or whirlwind, and I cannot recall that anything else of significance happened on that journey until, as I have remarked, we did come to a second green oasis in that dun dreariness, and again made camp, intending to luxuriate there for two or even three days. In keeping with my resolve, I did not this time let Aziz out of my arm’s reach while we drank our fill of the good water and watered the camels and topped up our water bags and—especially—while we bathed our bodies and laundered our clothes, during which time he and all the rest of us were necessarily naked. And when again we were disposed to pitch our tents privily apart from each other, I made sure that his and mine were side by side.
We did, however, all cluster together around the camp fire for our evening meal. And I recollect, as if it were yesterday, every trivial incident of that night. Aziz took his seat across the fire from me and Nostril, and first my uncle sat companionably close beside him, and then my father plumped down on his other side. While we gnawed gristly mutton and munched moldy cheese and dipped shriveled jujubes into our water cups to soften them, my uncle gave arch sidewise looks at the boy, and I and my father cast wary looks at both of them. Apparently unaware of any tension in the group, Nostril casually remarked to me:
“You are beginning to look like a real journeyer, Master Marco.”
He was referring to my new-grown beard. In the desert, no man would be fool enough to waste water on shaving, or vain enough to endure a lather that must get mixed with abrasive sand and salt. My own beard was by then of a manly density, and I had ceased even to use the easy depilatory of the mumum salve, letting the beard grow as a protection for the skin of my face. I took only the trouble to keep it clipped to a tidy and comfortable shortness, and I have worn it so ever since.
“Now you may realize,” Nostril chatted on, “how merciful it was of Allah to give whiskers to men, but not to women.”
I thought about that. “It is clearly good that men have beards, for they may have to go into the scouring desert sands. But why is it a mercy that women have them not?”
The camel-puller raised up his hands and his eyes, as if in consternation at my ignorance. But before he could reply, little Aziz laughed and said:
“Oh, let me tell him! Think, Mirza Marco! Was it not considerate of the Creator? He did not put a beard upon that creature who could never keep it shaven clean or even trimmed to neatness, because her jaw waggles so!”
I laughed, too, and so did my father and uncle, and I remarked, “If that is the reason, then I am glad for it. I would recoil from a whiskered woman. But would it not have been wiser of the Creator to create females less inclined to wag the jaw?”
“Ah,” said my father, the proverbialist. “Wherever there are pots, they will rattle.”
“Mirza Marco, here is another riddle for you, Mirza Marco!” chirruped Aziz, merrily bouncing where he sat. The boy was admittedly a soiled angel, and in many respects more worldly-wise than any adult Christian, but he was, after all, still a child. His words almost tumbled over each other, he was so eager to get them out. “There are few animals in this desert. But there is one to be found here which unites in itself the natures of seven different beasts. What is it, then, Marco?”
I knit my brow and pretended to think ponderously, and then said, “I give it up.”
Aziz crowed with triumphant laughter, and opened his mouth to speak. But then his mouth opened wider, and his big eyes got bigger. So did the eyes and mouths of my father and uncle. Nostril and I had to spin about to see what they were staring at.
Three shaggy brown men had materialized out of the night’s dry fog, and were regarding us with slit eyes in expressionless faces. They wore skins and leathers, not Arab garments, and they must have ridden far and fast, for they were coated with dust caked by perspiration, and they stank even from the distance where they stood.
“Sain bina,” said my uncle, the first to recover from his surprise, and he slowly got to his feet.
“Mendu, sain bina,” said one of the strangers, looking faintly surprised himself.