You may not pass this way again in a lifetime. Our very modern train seemed to be suspended in air, as silent as a crystal box, while they pulled the Sahara out from under us. The dazzling desert sped past the big picture windows like the vanishing tail end of an enormous golden rug, now, more and more thickly embroidered with the snarled and yelping thickets of thorn and thistle which spring up like a catfight whenever they find a drop of water. I filled pipe after pipe of my good Ketama to share with my Brother the Conductor in his swaying broom-closet at my end of the train. “Who is that Muslim in the burnous covered with gold?” Conductor spat on the floor: “The Caïd of Bogdour, may he rot! Bogdour is a garrison town on the pass just ahead. The captains taught him to drink: to lie and steal he knew already. Beyond his town lies Oujda and the border. If you have no baggage, you can easily go around it. The World is a Market …” and he faltered politely as I had explained I was American. “The world is a Market for Muslims!” I finished it for him triumphantly as I passed him over the pipe.
The caïd, intrigued by our conversation, came staggering along the aisle looking for water, he said. He waved away a pipe and sighed like a man with a terrible hangover. He had very bad breath. He had gone to Bechar, it turned out, to do a little business and, there in Bechar, he had fallen in with some prospectors who taught him how blackjack differs from baccara. Their fee for this lesson had come very high. He had been carrying the entire budget of Bogdour with an eye to speculation on a big scale and he had nothing left. He tried to borrow a hundred francs from each one of us in turn. I listened to this dreary old tale with only one ear, for the fat French-woman at the other end of the train had burst into a richly detailed denunciation of Lourdes, where she had been the previous season. As the caïd’s oyster eye fixed on the bottle she waved, he left us to insert himself into their group where they received him with condescension. The conductor beside me spat on the floor.
Now, we were speeding through the long, knotted fringe of the desert. Clumps of oleander bushes covered with candy-pink flowers, the color and odor of circus floss, and thorn trees unclipped by the grazing of camels, whipped past like burrs caught in the last torn shreds of desert running up into rising country until we stopped beneath an escarpment of rock which is the true rim of the desert. A battered tin sign on two posts announced Bogdour. The caïd stumbled down the length of the car to fall dead-drunk from the steps of the train into the deep white dust of a deserted trail which runs from the train track up to his town. Silently, the little train began to rock again as we picked up speed and as the Caïd of Bogdour, lying back there like a fallen vulture, was drawn away into the improbable past.
In Oujda, I slept with a Brother who was the night watchman of a filling station. He laughed as he bedded me down on the floor of his “Shell Hotel.” In the morning, he took me to the house of a brother-in-law, where, by passing over a few adjoining roof-terraces, I crossed the frontier into Morocco. I slunk around to the railway station on the Moroccan side of Customs and bought a Fourth-Class ticket to Tanja. The wooden railway carriage was rather like an old-fashioned streetcar and there was nobody in it but three young Moroccan soldiers on the benches playing Ronda, a card game almost as simple as Snap! Filling my pipe with some crumbs of Ketama, I handed them over a smoke. They joined me in good spirit and, in no time at all, we were laughing together like lunatics. The youngest of these was a sturdy country lad from the very fairy-tale landscape near Taza through which we were running. He was so moved by the sight of the hills of home that he leaned dangerously far out of the window, shouting up at the mountains of Morocco. He spouted poetry until we had to hold him in by the legs. Then, he chanted bellicose verses from an old Berber epic called The Love of War:
See those oueds?
Those dry stream beds?
They flood
With blood
See the Laurel rose?
It blows
With Roman blood!
Gravely, I filled him a pipe. “I love you!” he cried. “I love you like a brother! You are the first Roman I have ever loved.” I replied as best I could with some doggerel picked up from Hamid:
I love these rills
Whose ripple fills
The Little Hills …
Perfectly spherical tears popped into the round eyes of my new little friend. I saw the entire moment, flying landscape and all, mirrored for an instant in their trembling crystal.
“I am a soldier!” he cried, snapping to attention, “and soldiers have nothing to give but their lives. So, I give to you three days of my life! Here, take my dogtag. When I report in without it, my lieutenant will give me three days in jail. This is my gift to you.”
I had to accept.
In the glare of the noonday sun on the railroad tracks, my soldier stands forever to attention where I left him on the platform of the station-yard in Fez, beneath a flowering cloud of magenta bougainvillea climbing into the enameled blue Moroccan sky through which the clouds go running to the Little Hills. In Morocco, it is spring and the hills wash in torrents of color, all the mountains patched out with vast tentings of flowers. One mountain is blue, the next mountain is red and the mountain behind is bright yellow with borders of purple. White valleys below are great lacy aprons of waterwort meadow, smelling even more hauntingly rotten-sweet than the orange-blossom odor of honey that sets my head spinning as it pours through this train.
Will Hamid be up in his village, Jajouka? Can I leap from this train when we get to Kebir and run straight up into those blue Little Hills where Hamid and his uncles, the Master Musicians, loll about easy all dressed in white, practicing Pan music on their pipes as they always have done these last twenty centuries and more?
2
Yes, Jajouka is always itself; a secret garden on top of Owl Hill. Of all the green regions of earth, I know of none more beautiful than Hamid’s leaping Little Hills but I had forgotten just how impossible it is in this pastoral place to be alone, ever, for more than a minute or two. To be left alone, strictly, is almost the supreme punishment up in Jajouka, so only the magic act of writing can excuse my eccentricity to my hill-village hosts. Hamid, however, has to know exactly what I am writing and why.
“Well, you might call it my desert diary, Hamid,” I tell him. “It’s my trip. It’s my account of my trek from here to there and back again. That’s part of the trouble, you see; you’re not supposed to come back the way you went. This desert, you know, can take a lifetime to make it from one end to the other. I feel I only zipped in and zipped out again, like a panic-stricken American. I might as well have been AMERICAN EXPRESS. I only tasted the Sahara, Hamid.”
“Who tastes knows,” nodded Hamid. What makes him so wise?
“Oh, I got beyond Barbary thanks to your passport of keef but, when once you hear the Sahara, Hamid, when you’re actually in it, why, the desert’s in you! You know that song the Sahara is singing right now this minute, down there on its long windy flute? ‘Oh, you’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!’ it sings. But I did, Hamid! I came back and I still haven’t seen what I seek: my Black Africa!”