Mister Barigou showed me into a bare little room with mud walls where I threw myself down on the iron army cot, rolling up in my own burnous. Barigou hung his black moon-face in the crack of the door, playing me his desert version of “Poor Mister Bones.” I can hear that sound, so I slipped him a bill as I told him to close the rough plank door. I was in a hurry to light up and, as soon as I did, I began to pick up the Chaamba boy’s low-frequency delta waves pulsing through the bed. The rhythms set up by such a young creature are just what I need. Here was a wild young postulant under a bad master who seemed to be learning the ropes by himself as any young Adept should. A bright shaft of sunlight fell through a chink in the door directly onto my closed lids. I fanned out my fingers, flickering them through the ray of light at something like the delta rate. Deep waves of migraine red, blue, purple and green pounded through my head in the heavy color-language in which Deltas talk to themselves.
My interior screen was swept by psychic static like a color 3-D TV screen in a blistering electrical storm. Some people, finding these visions as intolerable as real sandstorms in the desert, run screaming for a doctor at this point; for me, to know these wastes is to love them. Limitless bright pastures of light exploding on the never-to-be-numbered grains of sand flashed through my skull until, somewhere out there on a great burning beach, I picked up his tiny, cowering figure. Chaamba nomad herdsmen call such barrens a pasture when one spindly, rapidly-flowing plant every fifty paces springs up after a rain. And it did rain across my screen; rain like driven shards of glass under which the boy, Ahmed Chaamba, huddled against the goats of his mother’s tent. Then, as a tiny jeep raced like a maddened mechanical beetle across the scoured and polished floors of my visionary Sahara, the boy started up like a gazelle but in less than a minute they ran him down with the jeep. There he was, broken and panting; slung over the fender. Black Mister Barigou and the colonel, all in white including his ten-gallon hat, tied the boy up in a sack and threw him into the back of the jeep. “Caught me another one live!” the colonel exulted. I suppose these were the first words in French on the boy’s new sound track. That is the way I really like to see them; when they bring one in fresh. I wish I had been there. My ways are not this Old Man’s ways, of course; nor, I expect, are they yours.
There was a long period of mending and brooding in one of the colonel’s dark underground rooms. I thought I caught a glimpse of the boy’s astral pattern in the buzzing pinpoints of light; his path in the stars, learned since childhood through the seasonal migrations of his tent. When Mister Barigou pushed him up the ladder to the colonel’s iron army cot for the first time, the boy Ahmed saw by a glance at the stars that his tent had moved far away after fresh pastures, almost certainly counting him dead. The Old Man took him there night after night while he stared at the stars and, plotting the position of his tent, bided his time. As the tent moved back toward Algol with the returning season; nearer and nearer, from pasture to pasture known only to the Chaamba nomads, he counted the nights until his escape. Yet, when the time came, and the False Southern Cross rode high overhead as he lay under the stars with the colonel, he could not raise a finger nor move a limb but lay there impaled while the voice of the Old Man rumbled in his ear like the voice of Ghoul himself: “I can see you, Ahmed Chaamba! I can see you from here on the top of my tower through my telescope. You run in the wind.… I can see where you run … I follow wherever you go. You may run, Ahmed Chaamba, and leap from dune to dune like the tender gazelle I bring down with one crack out of my rifle but, now, you are falling … panting and sliding down a whirlpool of sand. There is nothing in front of you, Ahmed. You are falling, falling, falling.…”
If I am yours, you are mine. The boy began stealing into his Master’s head, now he saw how the thing was done. He lay there, taking it all in night after night as they linked under the stars. He slipped into a garden called “Lafrance”; garden after garden over the whole land with no Sahara between the gardens. He stole like a thief into cold rooms, schools, barracks and bars where Christians drank the forbidden Arab poison called Al Cohol in public while they stumbled about to music with their hands on almost naked women; held, unbelievably, to be their wives. He glided with a knowing smile through a world of shadows who pounce on boys in underground lava-tories and shabby Parisian hotels where the dapper young captain ogled them through his pince-nez as in a series of old curling yellow photos which faded when he took them in his arms. The Old Man’s life died as the Chaamba boy took it over. The Old Man’s life will soon all be mine, he gloated: when I have the very last gasp of him in me, he will be dead. He took the colonel with growing pleasure, starry night after starry night. I’ll soon be the colonel and all this will be mine, he thought, but Black Mister Barigou still ran the house.
At that very moment, Mister Barigou was shaking me out of my torpor deeper than sleep to say that the colonel had a contraband truck waiting for me at the edge of the oasis. It was night and the sandstorm was screaming high in the air over the narrow, whitewashed court in which the colonel stood to bid me good-by. Barigou held up a blazing torch a pace behind him, leaving the Old Man’s face in leaping shadow. His voice betrayed a very thin frosting of politeness, as he bade me: Adieu! Barigou led me out the main gate and down an avenue of wind-lashed palms to where a truck with its lights off throbbed in the crashing confusion of the dark. All of a sudden, the Chaamba boy reeled out of the night to throw himself like a parcel at my feet. The truck ground into gear as I picked him up, kissed him on top of the head and took a deep breath of his perfume before I climbed into the cabin, slamming the door as we moved off into the sandstorm. Thus, I took him with me while leaving him there; a neat trick.
One of the most popular perfumes in the Sahara comes in a bottle the size of your little finger with the picture of a naked Black girl on the label, which reads: “Bint El Sudan” in Roman letters. More correctly, it should read: “Bint es Sudan,” of course. In very small letters beneath the girl’s feet, it says: Hackney E.8, I think. All the boys in the desert like to pour a whole bottle over their heads before they go out in the Sahara: they smell very nice.
Impossible to express my feelings when I climbed into that infernally hot metal truck-cabin to find I must share a single seat again and, this time, with a sour-smelling, wiry, old Frenchwoman, wearing a White Hunter’s hat. She was known on all desert trails as the Rock Scorpion. This scourge of the sands traveled everywhere for years under more or less official protection as the widow of one of the First of the Sahara. All winter long she sped from fort to fort, bordj to bordj, like a hornet with gossip, while posing, back in Paris, as a Dissident like the doctor in Tam. Her voice carried over the wind and the hammering diesel as she launched into the history and function of the bright orange jupe-culotte she wore; very visible from the air, she assured me, in case we got lost. It was a sort of combination skirt and shorts, very handy for doing pi-pi on the flat desert, she explained. “I am seventy-two; same age as the colonel!” she screamed: “I’ll show you all!” I winced away from her but that meant I sat half on the diesel in a position so uncomfortable that the heat later peeled all the skin from my left buttock and thigh. Her dry little bones poked into me on the other side until she subsided in a heap as her metabolism, altered by the near-zero humidity, dried up her saliva along with the rest of her mucus.
She had drunk all her own water and began croaking to me for some of mine. Mr. Barigou had handed me up a guerba at the last minute: a whole skin flayed from a goat, used hairy side out with its sleeves tied, as it were, in which water is carried everywhere in the Sahara. I untied the neck and she drank greedily of this water which seems to have been excessively charged with magnesium. The colonel must have ordered it drawn from the most brackish of his wells. The old doll fell back on my shoulder, gurgling. I barely had time to push back the cabin window for her to be sick. She went on retching for hours, until we were all splattered with her vomit and the cabin was whirling with sand because she insisted on keeping the window open. She collapsed by dawn, giving me a little more space, but Black Greaser turned around, insisting: “That Roumia is dead!” They still use the word “Roman” for all of us Christians; even me. Greaser poked her into violent convulsions, during which she screamed that I had poisoned her. Poison is common enough among women, here in the Land of Dissent. She dug into her sack for an antidote, coming up with a Eubyspasme suppository. I turned away, preferring to lean on the red-hot diesel while she struggled to place it: apparently, her jupe-culotte was not so practical for that. When the Eubyspasme took hold, she dropped away into some other world, leaving us her old sack of bones between me and the window, where they took up almost no space at all. I breathed easier.