Out of the corner of one eye, I did begin to notice that my hosts, who understood a good bit of Arabic, were looking less comfortable by the minute, while even my ear could catch an ominous edge on all these invocations of “Allah!” which swelled up in almost hysterical chorus around us. I got to my feet. They didn’t have to urge me to edge along around the outside of the crowd along with them toward the door but before we got there the old gink in the long gown and turban fixed me with his one good eye and suddenly shot a long skinny finger right under my nose as he shouted or screamed rather: “Ha houwa! There he is!” You don’t need the language to understand that: There he goes! That’s the man! That’s the one! and you expect the whole pack to be launched in full cry: “After him! After him! Don’t let him go!” I just stood there with my shoes in my hands and a sickly white grin on my face as the old man pushed his way through the crowd to throw himself at my feet, calling me “Hakim!” When I caught his eye, Amos translated: “Hakim’s a common name for a magician. Let’s go!” A whole lot more people were suddenly slobbering over my hands and my feet, so I gave them my most solemn Episcopal blessing until I remembered I shouldn’t be making the sign of the cross. Lenny and Lorna were delighted by the drama but Amos wanted to leave. Lenny insisted on walking us back to the hotel, pestering Amos all the way to tell us who Hakim was. “He must have looked just like Mr. Himmer, don’t you think?”
“Well, he may have at that,” Amos allowed. “Hakim was the caliph of Cairo about the time of Charlemagne and history says he was a blue-eyed Berber or, even, a descendant of Vandals with red hair. Hakim was a ferocious puritan who slaughtered so many thousands of his subjects by his own righteous right hand that he is said to have reduced the population of Cairo by nearly nine-tenths. The survivors revered him, of course, swearing that Hakim was the embodiment of divine justice on earth: the caliph became a cult in his lifetime, inevitably one might say. In the end he got tired of it: simply walked out. He got so disgusted with all these spineless Cairoites that he walked away alone out of an empty street into the desert one moonlit night, dragging his cloak behind him to efface his footsteps as he went. He never was seen again from that day until, maybe, this.”
“Oh, no, Amos!” I cried. “I am not Hakim nor was meant to be. Maybe the first rajah-bishops of the Farouts behaved a bit like that with the early islanders but I’ve always thought of myself as someone out of Russian rather than Arab literature — Aloysha the bore or the idiot prince Myshkin.”
“You know what that means in Arabic, don’t you?” laughed Amos. “Meskeen means ‘poor thing.’”
When we got back to the hotel we found that Mya had moved out in the middle of the night, leaving word that because the noise was too much for her she had gone bag and baggage up to the Hotel Mingih, on the Boulevard. Crawling up out of the Medina next day to get up there was like leaving one world for another. In her hotel, the desk sent me right up to her room without ringing and I found Mya in bed, with the doctor. She hadn’t been feeling well so she told them to send up a doctor. Dr. Pio Labesse was this Catalan specialist who ran his clinic in the bar of the Mingih where he could keep a close tab on his drinking patients; among them, some of the richest women in Tanja until Mya blew in. Mya may still have been just a backwoods Canadian girl in those days but she had a lot of other things besides several hundred million dollars and about thirty years on those other babes. Pio psyched Mya out immediately: in a way they were really twin souls. When Mya divorced PP, who had just turned twenty-one and come into his money, she walked out with everything he had in Africa, just for a start, and Pio knew exactly what to do with it. But that’s Mya’s tale and I know she expects to audit it all directly with you tonight at the picnic. By the way, I’ll not be there in person.
So, I went back down to the Hotel Africanus, had two stiff whiskies, and told Amos I intended going through with this Hakim thing. When he saw I meant what I said, he agreed to go along with me as a guide. He just dropped his hotel like an old overcoat to show me the ropes in Morocco, so, at first, I offered to take over the whole hotel as our headquarters; but when the Hamadcha, looking much less magical and even a bit shady by daylight, came trooping in to claim me next day I could see That Look on Amos’s face. When Arabs appear on his very-near horizon, Amos’s faculties are inclined to fog over in front of your eyes. Amos sees all Arabs through a glass darkly or through the wrong end of the telescope down which he can snap at them in perfect Arabic if you ask him to translate but he doesn’t necessarily hear what they say back; not real communication, you see. For example, I tried to find out from the Hamadcha about the old man who’d cried out: “Ha houwa!” at me, calling me Hakim. Nobody seemed to want to know what anyone else was talking about until I suddenly remembered the microphone dangling from the balcony. “Lenny must have a recording of his voice!” I cried. So we all went looping back over there to Lenny’s house and banged on his door. Lorna opened the door just a crack, fearfully at first, looking more beautiful than ever when she revealed herself dressed like one of those girls from Dogpatch in a pair of tight blue jeans sawed off at the knee. She was, obviously, not quite awake yet and the sight of us all in broad daylight seemed to paralyze her. “Lenny’s not back from the port,” she murmured in hopeless protest as we all swept inside. I thought she was going to faint at the mere mention of the microphone because it seems that they had been making a recording unbeknownst to the Hamadcha. “They’re acting kind of funny on us,” she muttered. “We thought maybe we should split.” The upshot of that was that Lenny came in with two tickets for New York on a Yugoslav boat leaving immediately and somehow, in the shuffle, I found myself the new tenant of the house in Dar Baroud with a full company of Hamadcha Brothers ready to sit around eating and smoking and dancing until Lenny got back. I never did get hold of that tape, by the way, and it had some pretty potent words on it.
Anyhow, I plunged into my new life and, as my trance-dancing improved, my asthma cleared up. I thought it had disappeared entirely by itself, until one day the little old one-eyed man showed up wheezing at me about money so I accused him of stealing my asthma, gave him my inhalator and sent him away. I could see that such an act of authority on my part was much appreciated by the Hamadcha. As their hopes of Lenny coming back from America vaporized in less than forty-eight hours, the Hamadcha Brothers came to look on me more and more as their leader, proposing to make me meet the grand chiefs of various different brotherhoods in Morocco. I began to learn Arabic, counting out money: “Food for four is food for six is food for eight …” More than twenty people and sometimes as many as fifty sat down to food twice a day in my new house. Allah was providing in the person of Thay Himmer and as I was just as delighted with the arrangement as they were, there were no complaints in the household. Instead, there was music running like a river through the house all day and all night as the Hamadcha practiced their peculiar beat to which I danced like a doll on a string — not that I didn’t know what I was doing all the time, of course, and loving every minute of it, too. I’ve been through every branch of Eastern mysticism, always finding it rather glum. I came to the conclusion, finally, that its meager telepathic fundament is only the result of centuries of overpopulation and overcrowding. Everyone knows just what everyone else is doing and thinking all the time, of course. Even as a child, I had felt suffocated by it. All the women in my family, for the last three generations in the Farouts at least, have been ardent Theosophists, followers of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, in close contact with Swami Vivekenanda and Krishnamurti; aunts, great-aunts always talking about Gurdjieff, “pranna,” and the hallucinatory effects of superaeration — and all that sort of thing — or trailing around in trances at home. Even Grandfather, who was the last Rajah-Bishop to officiate in the Farouts, used to meditate in the lotus position wearing only a G-string. So you see, I knew both the practical and the theoretical side of the business, since childhood you might say, and in Eastern philosophy I found no hilarity. For a while, I almost let myself become interested in Saint Teresa of Avila because I heard she kicked up her heels and went into long peals of ecstatic laughter, but when I found out she took deep whiffs of the incense pot into which she had probably thrown a handful of hemp, I left her flat. My asthma had always turned me against smoking but with the Hamadcha I ventured, now and then, to take a little whiff of a tiny pipe and after one particularly insane session I proclaimed to one and all that Morocco was the Wild West of the Spirit. I think that just about hits it on the head, don’t you? Every day — every minute — we did something hilarious.