But, when you open those windows, what strange sneaky smells come crawling up from the surrounding streets! And what noise! I almost fell off my various iron balconies, leaning out to see where such a din could be coming from and, let me tell you, we were used to the African drums. I tried ringing down to the desk to complain but, of course, no one answered the phone, so I ventured into the long stuccoed halls and down the marble staircase covered with dusty red carpeting into the Moorish lounge: no one about. I rapped on the ground glass of a mahogany cubicle and out stepped a very tanned man with prematurely white hair, who said: “I am the management. Can I help you?” That was my very first meeting with Amos and you heard what he said: “I am the management.” We have learned always to take people precisely at their word. Amos Africanus is a big help, you’ll see; he still manages things for us and he will, now, for you, Hassan, too.
When I asked him where all that weird racket of Arab music was coming from, he laughed: “Some American beatniks next door, as a matter of fact. They’ve settled into an Arab house and become Adepts of one of the local ecstatic brotherhoods.” I knew the sort of thing he meant because we have that in the Farout Islands where I was brought up. The servants all used to get psychic relief by chanting and dancing all night until they passed out. My amah, my nursemaid, took me to their secret services almost as soon as I could waddle and I became an initiate at a very early age. I introduced myself to Amos Africanus: “I’d like to contact the local mysteries,” I said, offering him at the same time a grip which I thought he might know and he did, apparently, for he refused it with another laugh, saying: “I’ll introduce you if you like, but I’ll not go inside with you.” I knew what he meant. The Sephardim are exceptionally careful, even coy, about the magic which surrounds them in North Africa although they have always been practically the only authorities open to us on the subject. Amos took me through the outer cubicle of his office into a vast old library built in ornate Moroccan style and filled with books on North Africa in six or seven languages. “This is the French section,” he said; “added by me. I would have taken my degree in anthropology under Levy-Levant at the Sorbonne if the war hadn’t interrupted all that.”
“How about a little fieldwork next door?” I suggested.
“On Lenny and Lorna? Or on the Hamadcha they’ve called in to dance in their house? I’m afraid the Levines are getting in a little over their depth with the Brotherhood, as a matter of fact. The Hamadcha think they’re just Americans and, what’s more, the Brotherhood wants to go on thinking the Levines are just Americans because of the money involved. Lenny plans to take a clutch of Hamadcha back to the States, to get people trance-dancing in the East Village basements before he takes over Madison Square Garden and the Fairgrounds and the West Coast, Gulf Coast and Canada; until he’s got the whole continent dancing. Mexico, Central America, Honolulu, Japan.… They tell me that kind of fantasy comes from shooting amphetamine in the mainline or do they call it: ‘mainlining amphetamine’? Well, anyway, Lorna comes here from time to time to confide to me that she’s afraid in the house because everybody seems to be trying to poison them. Their Moroccan maid, who is not a Hamadcha and disapproves of having the Brotherhood dancing in the house at all, told them that the only antidote was to eat a bat’s liver. So, they went out to the Caves of Hercules on the Atlantic beach about fifteen miles from here and paid a small boy to kill them two bats. They ate one of them fried.”
As Amos was telling me all this, he piloted me through a maze of dark corridors to the back door of the hotel, which opens, as you know, right onto the gate into the teeming Arab alley that leads to Dar Baroud. As I slid off the narrow step, I was almost sliced in two by a bicycle-boy flying past like a steel bat with a knife-edged tray of bread balanced on his head. Underfoot was slippery with veiled women and litters of nearly naked children everywhere even at midnight. I remember feeling that one false step might send me slithering into a roaring bake-oven fire, wide-open on one side of the narrow lane, or into a medieval urinal on the other. I looked up to see Amos was knocking on a handsomely studded door in the blank wall of a sordid cul de sac. A tall dark young man as handsome as a Hindu god in a nightshirt splashed us with light as he opened the door inviting us in. That was Lenny. Amos tried to wriggle away from the invitation, insisting he’d come only to introduce me but I could see he was fascinated by what the Levines were up to so, when Lorna came up behind Lenny in a flame-colored Moroccan caftan of silk, looking exactly like the beautiful Rebecca in Ivanhoe, we all went inside; almost pushed in, as a matter of fact, by the growing crowd of little snotty-nosed Arab kids in the street behind us.
The house itself was enchantment. Maybe you know the house I mean or have been in one like it: until then, I never had. The colored tiles in the patio and the lights and the flowers and, above all, the people in their gorgeous robes! People furnish a house in Morocco, I could see that at a glance. There were over fifty Moroccans present, including more than ten musicians in spotless white robes and turbans who sat apart on a golden straw mat to one side of the marble patio, looking peculiarly picturesque and what I call “historical”—as if they were floating there in some sort of golden jelly of the past through which one could really reach into the past and touch them. I guess some of the effect was produced by clouds of keef smoke and gum-Arabic incense, which they kept tossing into the pots of red charcoal over which the musicians warmed and tightened the skins of their drums.
Everyone was grinning at me as if I’d just come home. I grinned and bowed back at them as I took out my little asthma inhaler, my Bronchomister of isoprenaline, which I get from France. You’d think it was the trick of the century, the way they all reacted. Applause! “They think you’ve got pranna in there!” Amos hissed in my ear as he drew me aside to give me an extramural lecture on what the Paris school of social anthropology led by his Professor Levy-Levant thinks of ecstatic practices. I know quite a lot about all that myself but I’m always ready to listen if there isn’t some simply great music going on at the same time. When the beat picked up, I began joggling and jiggling, much to the annoyance of Amos. When they began swinging in earnest, four or five barefooted men and one woman, whose long mane of black hair fell over her eyes, began hopping and flapping their arms to the beat of the drums, swaying and bowing to the long shuddery raucous railing of the big bamboo flutes. I began jerking myself, losing Amos completely except for the supercilious sneer on his face, full of sheer disapproval. My elbows were thumping up into my armpits while my calves began pumping something into my knees to give them a little more jump. Before I knew what was happening to me, I was up in the air and over the heads of some fat Arab ladies all wrapped up in white on the floor like a row of bundles of laundry and I was clearing them all. I looked down at them from my orbit to catch their broad smiles of approval as I hurtled past over their heads toward the drums. When I landed, I landed in a new world: I was out there front and center, leaping and twisting for the Hamadcha music along with the best of them. A break eventually came when someone beside me fell to the floor with froth on his lips and had to be carried up close to the drummers for shock treatment. I went back to slump down on the floor beside Amos and the Levines. I could feel Amos beginning to bristle as some old gink with one eye leaped up in the orchestra and started apostrophizing us. When all the Moroccans began swaying and bowing and chorusing back: “AAAAAmen! Aaaaaamen!” I knew right where I was in the service, I’m a bishop after all, so I brayed: “AAAAAAmen!” along with the rest of them. For, did not the Prophet say: “He who does not cry aamin with the Sufi is recorded as one of the Heedless”?