Most monuments in the desert are flat on the ground: laid out, stone beside stone, in a place where the wind is least likely to cover them. We came across graves of the Faithful who had dropped from some caravan and, even, whole little camps of Muslim graves marked by stones all pointing to Mecca, showing where an entire caravan had gone down. We came on a mosque which is famous in all the Sahara. It is said to be composed of exactly one thousand and one big stones, laboriously carried to the spot to be laid out in the dotted pattern of a mosque. We halted our camels nearby but neither of us entered this impressive “building.”
I began to have a little trouble with my mind when it started playing about like a mind in the parallel mirrors of a barber-shop. At times, I had sharp visual hallucinations in which I thought I saw myself from about twenty paces behind. As my Tuareg rode on another twenty paces in front of my visionary self, that made three of us out in the Sahara and all three of us seemed to be singing. I could tell which one I was only when he would stop singing. Then, I knew I must be the one who mumbled old Hit Parade songs to drown out the monotonous horror of my own thoughts. I hated the song the Tuareg sang so much that at times I found myself imitating him until my throat ached. He forced a reedy falsetto out of his throat or his head which sounded so much like the wind that I could not tell where his voice left off and the wind went on crying and sobbing. His treacherous tune was nothing like Singer’s black music, which still warms my blood. I could feel this cold, windy air in my bones and I knew I had heard it before. Horror suddenly gripped me like a big monkey jumping up on my camel behind me, growing bigger by the hour until Fear rode my camel, onto whose hard saddle I clung as best I could. Someone kept singing, over and over again, inside of my head: “He is going to sell you. When we get to Salah, he is going to sell you!”
When we did get to Salah, I had lost count of the days. All I wanted was to get into that town where, I hoped, I could give my guide the slip in the marketplace. My most rational fear was that he would denounce me to the fort. We left our camels hobbled out in the Sahara on the outskirts of town and walked together into the market. As we passed a tiny sandal-maker’s shop as big as a telephone booth, I stepped up to the low wooden counter across his door because I knew I had come to the place. This man was a Brother, I can always tell by the signs, and he recognized me. As I gave him my sandals to cobble, he invited me into his shop smelling of leather and feet to sit on a pile of tanned hides in a corner. My Tuareg, sure of me, strode grandly off to visit the town. I slumped down on the skins, pulling out my withered bag of Ketama to fill us a pipe. My Brother let down his shutter, closing me up in his shop while he went to get strong green tea, bread and a plate of beans, which we ate by the light of a kinki lamp, both putting our right hands in the same dish. While he poured out the tea, he told me the Brothers were dancing that night in the dunes far outside the oasis where their drums would not be heard by the fort.
We found the dancers in a big, rolling dimple of sand. They were already in trance; sometimes a dangerous state. We jumped in and joined them, loudly professing and naming the zikr. When the Brothers took me by the hand, I became a Link: I found it pleasurable enough to indulge myself all night. We switched rhythms back and forth faster than ever I heard them called in Morocco where I first fell into a dance of this sort with Hamid. Here, no one knew who I was and, very soon, neither did I.
Our bare feet drumming on the hard, hollow sands made the dunes rumble and thunder beneath us. We may well have been dancing over a foggara; one of those many thousands of miles of underground waterways which the sedentary people of the Sahara have dug, throughout the long centuries of their survival since greener days, to bring water from miles away under the sand. Many thousands of specialized slaves died digging them and, even now, many are lost when the foggara they seek to repair caves in on them. The foggara are deep but, of course, not nearly as deep as the artesian wells sunk by the captains. From their artesian borings more than a thousand feet deep in the earth have spurted congenitally blind fish who lost their eyes during eons of waiting in the dark. From a well of this sort once came a fossil crocodile which has given the drillers of oil wells to think.
As we danced all night with the Sahara vibrating beneath us, I felt through the chain of Brothers in the usual manner, following the usual procedure, but, finding none as inviting as Youngest Brother in Tam, I ventured outside of the circle. This is something I rarely permit myself because it means leaving the body untended. Once out there, I thought: Perhaps, I can get into the network of the foggaras? I was feeling foolhardy that night, almost relishing an encounter with Ghoul. I knew he was out there; no doubt of that, and along the way I must go. The moon rose, rode high and away. Some Brothers began falling to the ground in fits of possession. Two Guardians, called assas, strode about the leaping gaggle of dancers, having made themselves deaf to the zikr. When anyone fell, they ran up to thrust a stick like a bit between his teeth while they reached into his head with their slim, indigo-dyed fingers to fish out his tongue before they dragged him up close to the drum. This must have happened to me for I thought I was out under the sands on a long, eerie chase after Ghoul through endless, whirling tunnels when, abruptly, I heard the drum again as a drum. That finished the zikr for me.
I found myself laid out on the sands under my burnous, not at all sure where I was for a time. My Brother the sandal-maker came up with my Tuareg guide, finding me tongue-tied; afraid to admit I was afraid. They bundled me forcibly back into the tall saddle. As my Brother helped me up, he whispered: “There are no Brothers!” thus revealing his rank. He added: “You will find the Old Man of Buffalo Bordj in Algol.” At that, he slashed at my camel with a whip which suddenly leaped into his hand like a snake. Clinging desperately to my saddle, I was swept along after my inscrutable guide.
For the next eleven days, he rode on before me at that same constant distance; perched high on the top of his giant racing camel like a bundle of indigo rags whipped by the wind. We pushed on all that first night without stopping, over a vast beach as hard as cement glowing blue in the faltering starlight. When day broke, it was not rosy dawn which hung across the horizon but a smooth wall of black basalt seven hundred feet high; the Table of Stone. My truck had crossed the Tademait in a night and a day but my guide counted a day for each finger; ten blazing suns for those who must cross it by camel and stay out of sight of the trucks. We rested “in hiding” that day; flat as stones on the desert near our camels, who lay trussed up beside us like boulders swinging their swan necks as they ruminated. I lay there under my burnous thinking how ridiculous this was but, apparently, nobody came by to see us. There is only one way to get up onto the Table, along the ramp called the Akba at whose foot we waited until night covered our quick dash up the ten miles or more of zigzagging incline which no truck would dare navigate after dark. Just at dawn, we stepped onto the slick surface of the Tademait, burned black as an elevated parking lot in hell. A dusty trail for trucks took the easy way across; we had to take the other.