I’d begun by giving myself a few little slaps with my new belt as I danced to the music and it felt so tingling good, like a shot in the arm to my dancing, that I gave myself quite a few more belts when I found that I liked it. “Belt! Belt! Belt!” the drums kept belting out, so I gave myself quite a belting until the blood came before all the guests arrived. I just pulled somebody’s shirt on so as not to catch cold when I went to the front door to greet them. Their entry stopped all the music dead in its tracks, of course, but when I turned around to get the musicians to play again as if nothing had happened, a couple of Mingih barflies began to shriek at the sight of the blood oozing out of my shirt in the back, it seems. I was quite unaware of it. Dr. Labesse, like an officious medical fool, insisted on putting a dressing on my back right then and there so I was made to feel an idiot; badly humiliated, they put me to bed. Mya insisted on staying to nurse me but when I explained to her that I needed quite a big sum of money for my initiation in the mountains which the Hamadcha had promised me, I caught her exchanging such a look with Labesse over my prostrate body that I knew right away that Mya was going to be stuffy about money from now on out. I was so furious I never mentioned the word “money” again until the day we got married, years later this spring. Then, I made over all of my money to Mya and that’s the way it still stands, today. I don’t want to have anything to do with money any more than PP did. Just counting One Two Three used to make him nervous. I began by shutting up about money and my next move is going to be shut up about everything else.
But back to the Brotherhood! You may know that in those days their political situation was so unstable that they had to draw in their horns a bit and be careful about public demonstrations. All that was of interest mainly to Muslims and I found that I’d gotten in deep with the Hamadcha before it really dawned on me that all my new Moroccan friends took it for granted that I was a Muslim or was about to become one. As I once said to Amos Africanus, the Himmers always were pantheists — it made no difference to me. When someone intoned slowly for me to repeat after him: “There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is His Prophet,” I said it, why not? One great-aunt of mine actually became the abbess of a Shinto convent in Japan after the war. My next goal was Moulay Youniss, the holy city where no Christian or Jew had ever slept until I did. The millennial ban was lifted by the late king I believe, but the town has no hotel and none of the inhabitants would think of socializing enough with non-Muslims to invite them into their houses to spend the night. I’d stopped drinking alcohol entirely and gotten quite handy at Moroccan manners and ways but as I didn’t speak Arabic and still don’t, really, I didn’t say much. My feet were killing me but my asthma didn’t come back even when I traveled along with the Brothers on foot through Morocco in harvesttime. We were climbing up to Moulay Youniss to spend the night before going on to the Hamadcha feast at Sidi Hassan on the other side of the mountain.
It was one of those celestial African days in June when you could look back down the steep ravines full of spiky cactus candelabra shooting up as high as telephone poles from the acid-green aloes. The ruined marble columns of Roman Volubilis stood higher still on the tremendous sweep of the green-golden plain far below. The whitewashed cube-houses of Moulay Youniss hung over us, capping the hilltop. Quite apart from the celestial beauty of the spot there was the thrill of climbing up into a forbidden city on foot. We were quite a woolly-looking little group with only one pack-donkey for twenty or thirty of us as we scrambled along, but when we caught our breath, our drummer picked up and our wild wailing music skirled out under the big green silk banners of the Hamadcha flying in the crystal clear air. We stormed into town hopping and howling in a pack with me in the middle, quite unnoticed. I was looking as wild as any poor postulant could be expected to look, barefoot, with my head shaved, bonethin and hollow-eyed from our practices, hung about with some picturesque Arab rags I’d bought very dear from a Brother. The townsmen received us with honor, leading us off to one of the most imposing houses in town, which the late Cadi had built to hang out over the chasm so that he could see from his deep-set windows everything that was going on in the town. The Brothers, with me last as a postulant, filed into the big cool square room which had been the Cadi’s judgment hall and sat down quietly all around the floor against the walls. It was very like being inside a giant lantern into which the fierce Moroccan light bounced back up from the white terraces of the surrounding houses where the volubilis-purple morning-glories cascaded over the trellises of cane. While the Brothers muttered their long litanies, I leaned back exhausted, gazing up at the marquetry-maze of the inlaid rafters which fitted together like a giant wheeling Indian mandala overhead, holding up the high hollow pyramid of the roof.
At that point, an intense young man bristling with hostility plumped himself down beside me in a synthetic city suit. “Never in one thousand years, no Christian except a slave ever spend one night here in Moulay Youniss holy city.” I looked him straight in the eye, pronouncing in Arabic as well as I could: “There is no God but Allah and Mohamed is His prophet.” He went away sulky but apparently satisfied and, in a short time, they brought us in food which we ate where we lay on the floor — at least, I did: the others sat up around little low tables and dug in with their hands. During dinner, our host, a young man under thirty in slick city clothes who did not eat with us but surveyed the service, came over and sat beside me, feeding me little choice bits by hand. I was really exhausted but, gradually, I picked up when he told me that his grandfather had built this room hanging out over the precipice at such an angle that he could predict what was going to happen in town. You can imagine how I drank in that kind of talk! He said: “Oh, it was all very easy in those days! Until less than ten years ago, now, time simply stood all but perfectly still, here, for more than one thousand years. When Grandfather saw a man coming down one street with a knife in his hand and another man coming down another street carrying a club, he knew they were going to meet and to fight and, that in less than half an hour the whole affair would be brought here to him for him to mete out our justice. He knew everything: past, present and future, you see.”
True enough, there in Moulay Youniss for a momentless moment I saw life in the simplest terms of a man with a knife and a man with a club, inevitably bound to meet in the market-place, but I saw no one around, not even my host, on whom the old cadi’s mantle might have fittingly fallen. They were all rather city-soiled young men in ready-made suits and plastic sandals. Yet, I had to argue back with myself that, if they had not been, they would never have let me in here at all. The old man with the beard, whose enlarged hand-tinted photograph still dominated the hall, would never have seen fit to receive me, I was sure, but the last of the patriarchs had been killed off by the change into Modern Times. That night I slept in the spruce little whitewashed house of one of the young married men of the holy family of saints of the place. He lived down a long crooked lane hugging the inside of the old walls of the sanctified city but his tiny upper windows, mere peepholes like eyes, looked out over the battlements, down another plunging gorge choked with all the greens of myrtle, olive and aloes down to the distantly burnished newly-harvested plain. The moon came up, turning it all into one great silver tray before I could sleep because all the dogs of Moulay Younis were insanely barking the incredible news down to the astonished dogs in the faraway farms that someone who smelled like a Christian was spending a night in a house. “Ha houwa” they barked in hysterical choruses: “Ha houwa! Ha ha! Ha ha!”