I had caught the trick of the saddle by then so I could ride all day, reading the only book I carried in the hood of my black burnous; that odd “Report” of our Brother, Ibn Khaldoun the Historian. The Great Desert, according to him, is Life. No one can tell which way he has come into it, for the wind covers his tracks as he moves and the prospect looks, in all directions, as if no man had ever traversed it safely before. There are almost no animals but that winsome rodent, the dancing jerboa or gerbil, and the foxlike fennec who hunts him. No birdsong is heard. This land consists of shattered mountains, rotted valleys and shifting bare plains in an infinite variety of desolations. There is nothing at all to eat and travelers are not allowed their own dreams. Ghoul is Master of the Sahara and his abrasive voice moves the traveler in the very fiber of his being, for Ghoul’s voice roars out like an endless pasture of camels but it is only the hollow and disembodied wind, grinding together the infinite and never-to-be-numbered grains of sand.
When a man rides by night through the desert, he often hears voices, and, sometimes, they may even call him by name. (Hassan is an easy name for the wind.) Calling upon him, the voices may make him stray from his path so he never can find it again. Many, many travelers have been lost and so perished. Even by daylight, a man in the desert may hear these siren voices or the strains of musical instruments; the fainting, dancing voice of a flute or the rattle of drums in a sandy defile, as if some army was coming over the crest to fall upon him and his camels. Many a traveler has been led away or has fled only to die of thirst. Through the endless, echoing silence comes, like the song of an ant, the faraway grinding clatter and throb of a diesel or, sounding more like the swarming of wasps, the whine of an oil driller’s rig — but that is only illusion. Many, many have fallen victim to this last illusion for it, too, is part of the mirage of which all travelers speak but few can explain.
All day long under the white-hot silvery tenting of the sky we advance through the Country of Fear. We march in the eye of the mirage with the dancing and swooning horizon a full wavering circle closing us in. Heat billows up out of the ground like the breath of a glass factory rolling out the mirage. Mirage is that quicksilver stuff you run through with your car on the rise of a macadam road in midsummer but, here on the desert as out on the sea, the round swell of planet Earth is your rise in the road. You and your guide and your camel, or you in your diesel, are shrunk down to the size of an ant dragging a straw — only smaller. The watering eye of the mirage is the great Show of the World. On its dazzling round screen you assist at the creation and destruction of the world in flames. This overwhelmingly present act of erosion, scouring and pulverizing the landscape under your eyes, throws up a demoniacal vision of glittering marshes forever just out of reach. But, this is neither water nor fire. Perhaps, it is a vision through eons of time, back into the unthinkable past hundreds of millions of years, into that long Mesozoic afternoon when protoplasm fumbled with blind fingers through boiling-hot shallows on the baking shores of a planet which cooled. Your camel suddenly lets out a terrible bellow and roars off to take a deep gulp of the stuff.
When you get your camel in hand again, there all of a sudden, are more of those piled-up stones. Who can be piling them up? A black disk neatly balanced on a big white stone carries two red blocks topped by another white stone, round as a ball, on which stands a blade of basalt to twist into a spire — and it does! Mirage bends the air, throwing out long veils to catch up these stones into one little show. While you look, the stones swell into a fortress seen from a distance; a citadel with turrets and towers. No, it is a gaudy temple of Shiva somewhere in Hind and, now, it falls back again into a pile of stones as you approach.
The Sahara is a place of running shadows but no shade. Other white stones are scattered about. Out of the corners of your eyes, you catch them jumping up quick as snipers to drop down again, changing place. White turbans and burnouses the color of sand; yes, of course, these are snipers and wherever you look there is one who has you in his sights and, at sunset, they fire off a shattering volley as day is done. The stones burn all day in the sun and, when night falls, they are so seized by the sudden cold they crack and scale off razor-thin shards of basalt which have become this endless, fathomless heap of broken black bottles we cross.
So end the terrors of the day and, now, the terrors of the night begin. Contrary to what may be true elsewhere, the terrors of night in the Sahara are easier to bear. All day long, I can hold the snipers at bay only by being totally aware of each one. My being is drawn up tight as a bow; the terrors of the day are the terrors of the mind. At night, I know the stones cannot shoot me for they are not my Assassins. It is Ghoul who is putting me out of his desert at the point of a stone.
Another nightfall, with its by now familiar rattle of gunfire, reassures me. I lie in the lee of my camel to unstring the bow of Me; chuckling a little in sympathy with the animal’s ever-so justified moans and complaints. The desert fires off a last broken volley of exploding stones and I laugh. Do they think they are chasing the sun? I shiver under my stiff black burnous, scratching the itch of the sun from my skin. Sun collapsed down in the west like a blazing balloon and is gone. The black rack of night, frosty with stars, clamps down on the Great Desert and me. Now is the Good Time; so, I pull out my pipe and rattle the matches. Night and I settle down to the perilous pleasures we know. Yet, even here, many travelers have been lost and have perished, for they may not have their own dreams to guide them and they hear the voice of Ghoul like the bellowing of a legion of camels, as numerous as the grains of sand. Travelers start up and run off without knowing whither they run and are so lost before sun seeks them out in the morning.
I wake to the greasy glitter of stars mirrored back by the slick, sand-polished basalt sea all about me. My evil-tempered camel bucks and bellows to find his hobbled knees buried in the drifting sand. I seem to be floating above him and a bundle which well may be me; if that can really be my body half-buried there like the dried carcass of some mythological bird. The drape and fold of my woolen burnous is sculpted in sandstone. The lunar Sahara about me is cindered over with a fine blue ash of frost. Time has stopped. A familiar indigo rag flutters out of the sand where I look for my guide to find him, too, buried in moondust. I think we both may be dead. I glance up to see it is six o’clock by the winter stars and a light like a comet comes soaring up from the south. The night plane out of Black Africa, I think first, and, when I realize it must be a cosmonaut, I put that out of my head. My mind boggles at the idea that someone like me could be up there, locked into an Iron Lung of that sort. I struggle back into the ruin of my half-buried body to waken my guide with my voice. A bundle of indigo rags breaks out of the sand-crust, over there by our other camel, and sits up to stretch. From somewhere back in the folds of his tagelmoust, the yards of fine muslin with which we both wrap our faces day and night, I see the light of his eyes and in them I see what I know. I have never seen more than this of his face, for we both go disguised through the Country of Fear. We reach out to stroke palms in the briefest of greetings. It is enough; we can go on together another day.