We sailed on blissfully all that next flaming morning over salt-pans as bright as mirrors, through a sandstorm blowing about like golden chaff in the wind. Driver steered by the compass, shoulders down at the wheel. The Old Girl next to me called out deliriously: “Driver! Driver! Even though there’s no road, you can’t run away from me …!” No one else opened his mouth. Greaser taught me to communicate glotally, with mouth closed to save saliva. Driver and he kept up an inane conversation in this engaging baby talk at which they were incredibly proficient until, finally, they began to sing together in a gurgled duet that old desert favorite:
Oh, I got a girl got so much gold
She can’t get ’round
Get up gazelle, ’cause I’se you’ guy!
We’ll swap you’ gold for a taxi, love
I’ll throw in my clutch an’ never stop goin’
Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara an’ never turn back!
We drove on that afternoon, west south west, with the red sun in our eyes until it dropped out of the sky and we steered by the stars.
I woke with a start to find we had drawn up under the half-ruined arch of a formerly fortified refuge. This is the caravanserai at the shrine of Hassan-i-Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain and Great Sandy Waste. A hair of his beard is said to be preserved here at the heart of the tons of desert cement which they have piled up and whitewashed, calling it his koubba, or tomb. Naturally, it is a refuge for Dissidents. Few travelers pass this way, ever. Our Old Girl was asleep and would never even know she had been here. I made an only half-humorous hypnotic pass over the old harridan, to knock out her subconscious recording system, as I climbed over her carcass to force my way out of the cabin. The truck was surrounded by a gang of hoarsely shouting desert-drifters and ragged riffraff of Broken Boys who swarmed over us like pirates taking a prize. A handsome, old, white-bearded man with a turban came out of a dark doorway carrying an iron-shod staff with which he cleared me the way. Driver agreed we would leave in an hour.
“You may not pass this way again in a lifetime,” said my guide as he led me through a pitch-black passage. A great blaze of sudden light broke through the tall wooden doors which swung back at his touch to let us step into the narrow Heart of the Diamond, as the inner court of the sanctuary is called. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet!” As I stooped to loosen my sandal, I stumbled for fear I might fall into the intense hallucinatory patterns of the ceramic-tile floor. Each pattern exactly covers the grave of a Brother fortunate enough to lie buried here, just outside the Shrine of the Hair. The tombs are fitted to cover the ground, wall to wall, with a dazzling variety of geometric patterns in combinations of colors which seem to flutter and jump, playing back and forth with perspective and perception. These magic carpets in tile can catch up the soul into rapture for hours. They begin with mere optical illusion in which colors leap and swirl but the effect goes on developing to where pattern springs loose as you move into the picture you see. You step from this world into a garden and the garden is You.
I stood barefoot on a grid of electric-blue while, below me, revolved a firmament of candy-colored flowers through which flowed streams of incandescent stars. I stood on a glowing grid of red while a sea of flames boiled like a caldron of transparent naked bodies bobbing up and down in uncontrollable lust under my feet. I stood on a grid of budding vines, writhing like jeweled serpents whose eyes flashed with all the colors of the rainbow prism. I stood on a grid of melting gold while worlds fell away beneath my feet and I looked up. I lifted up my eyes to the golden honeycomb walls of the court and my heart welled up within me for each cell in the comb was the diamond-shaped pattern of Man as seen by da Vinci and each one set the Golden Number echoing out like a gong. In each identical cell burned a diamond-white kinki lamp set on the clean woven mat of pure gold where a Master sat gazing on the burnished face of his Adept and each Adept was someone I loved: Carlos, Costa, Andonai and Nico; Philippe and Giovanni; John, Mario, Robby, Mirko; Antonio, Juan, Alberto, Julio; Hamid, Targuisti, Ahmed Maati and Ahmed Marrakshi; “Verigood,” Franco, Francis, Benaïssa, Mustache and “The Prince.” … Named and unnamed, they rose up tier upon tier; all the ones I ever had burned for. They truly sat there but they were not Flesh; they were Fire, the color of a burning rose. They sat cross-legged, smiling at me in absolute love and confidence, for they had no bodies but flame. They were not human images in the flesh but the Real Thing, which is Light. I looked up, higher and higher, as the honeycomb rose to the skies, where all the faces were One, melded together in one fiery river of light. I rode on the surge of the Fountain, straight up out of this sphere into the Other, from where I thought to take a good look at the Masters who all turned their backs on me when they gazed at their Adepts — and mine. With all the passion of my earthly mind, I sought to force them to turn and they turned: all of them turned with one familiar, identical smile, for all of the Masters were Black. All of them had chosen to put on the image of Me.
My guide coughed politely, touching my arm to lead me away down a dark corridor toward a big room full of smoke and the hoarse sound of men shouting; the bawdy laughter and coarse joking of the porters and desert-drifters who had swarmed over our truck at the gate. He just left me there, standing in the arched door of this vaulted room, awkwardly holding my rucksack, startled by the wild faces which gleamed up at me from around a small fire which the Broken Boys had lit in the middle of the room, on the floor. “Salaam aleikoum,” I mumbled, conscious that Muslims do not like to hear these holy words of greeting from other than Muslim lips. “Why doesn’t the Merikani take a plane?” shouted one rough voice. “Because he is Black!” answered another. Roars of laughter. “The white Merikanis won’t let him, so he has to travel like us!” I took a deep breath and stepped boldly over some of these people, taking a place in the far corner where I got my Primus stove slowly out of my sack before I replied — giving myself time to say it correctly in Arabic: “This gentleman wished to give himself the pleasure of visiting the Great Sandy Wastes of the Sahara where he knew he would meet such distinguished travelers as yourselves.” There was a general roar of applause and, before I could light my stove, someone had handed me a shot-glass of smoky desert tea and a pipe of keef. I smoked it and refilled it in turn with what I had left from Ketama and handed it back. More pipes were offered out of the dark and refilled.