When we got up just after dawn, one could look out over the holy city and see the heat already beginning to make the rosy-golden air tremble over the flesh-pink hills set out with gray-green olive trees. We sipped tall glasses of rather chocolatey-tasting coffee with milk and ate some leathery fried doughnuts still dripping with hot oil. All of these things were carried in to us by a solemn sloe-eyed toddling child who teetered in with a tray from the unseen part of the house where the women lurked. Only our hosts, the husband and his infant son, could freely go back and forth. We left without ever setting eyes on the women of the household but with that common uncomfortable feeling one always has of having been spied on in every detail of our persons by them.
Even as we started out up the dusty lane, my left sandal began biting into my foot. It needed a cobbler but it was much too early to find one already by his bench in his shop, and no question of waiting for the heat of the day to come up, so I had to set out bravely trying a little mental manipulation on my foot. We crossed through the silent streets of the white-washed town as the cocks crowed and the gray and white doves took to the air, looping stupidly under the unwavering eye of an earlier hawk still higher up. Preoccupied as I was by my effort to ward off the pain in my foot, which I was busy switching from extreme heat to extreme cold, I was startled to look down at least one hundred and fifty feet into a gorge right under our path, gazing down for another timeless second onto what I learned later was the original Roman hot spring, a circular stone bath which is still in operation. A man entirely naked was somehow suspended there directly below me in exactly the pose of Michelangelo’s Adam creating God and the World, fainting back in the bath at the effort as he reached out to touch Nature and make the world Be. All that lacked was to hear him speak the Word but, of course, we were much too far away, so I just hung there like the hawk hung above me, not knowing whether I looked down on him or whether I was back in some other life looking up at a painted ceiling through my binoculars. For that momentless moment, I was suddenly everywhere at once. My man slowly lifted an earthen jar of water and poured it over his own glistening head, in the very act of creating himself. I stumbled over my own sandal, almost falling, but was pushed on ahead rather roughly by one of my Hamadcha Brothers. I held my picture of that man firmly in my mind all the time we were crossing the mountain in the gathering heat of the day.
We toiled on up a long dusty path through the fragrant pines and under the olives and cork-oaks until we came to the heights of the bare ridge covered with thyme. The heat all around us hammered hard on the stones. Suddenly from the summit, the plateau of Meknes spread out a good many miles in length below the ridge we had crossed. The sky rippled over the plain like a pale blue silk tent but the floor of the valley seethed. The jumbled blocks of Meknes’ houses and factories burned white-hot on the distant horizon hazed over with heat. A green gorge, gashed into the brick-red earth, split the mountain right under our feet. Sidi Hassan lies there in his white-washed tomb at the bottom of this ravine, which reminded me later of the cleft the Hamadcha make in their heads with an ax. Directly below us was a steep slanting meadow where the thousands of pilgrims had strung up their tents, tying torn sheets and old ragged rugs together with pieces of string, pinning them down with rocks or spinning them onto twisted trees and scrub, until the whole camp covering them and their women looked as light and as strong as cobwebs in the sun. Hobbled pack animals and sheep slated for slaughter; all wide-eyed, all nervously nibbling down their last useless meal, all jumped at once and skittered away as a wild pack of Black drummers padded up the path in scarlet silk tunics and black cone-shaped hats covered with cowrie shells, pounding on big-voiced African drums. The Black Brotherhood of the G’naoua gathered a group of Adepts in a minute but we came slithering and sliding right down on top of their crowd with our hysterical pipes blowing full blast. I just slumped down under an old wrecked cedar tree and collapsed.
A child offered me water in an earthenware cup but just as I was going to put my lips to its rim, the mother dashed the cup out of my hands, smashing it on the ground. I never did figure out why but I thought at the time that it must have been because she sniffed the Christian in me through my disguise. A cold shiver ran through me because I could see things were beginning to really hot up. A group of Aissaoua had begun to dance in a circle beside me: beside me, I say, but there they were almost on top of me, trampling me. As you know, they claim the Aissaoua once ate a Swiss tourist right after Independence; I don’t know if it’s true. Others say he was a German photographer who was filming them from the ledge of a crumbling wall when he fell into their whirling circle at the moment they usually throw a live sheep up in the air to catch it on their thumbs. Then, they tear it to pieces to eat it up raw before the sheep touches the ground. They ate the poor man, camera and all one supposes. Do you think that could really be true? Well, I did at that moment and I was even more scared when I saw that six or seven of them were brandishing live snakes in both hands as they flung off their turbans to let their long locks writhe about like a headful of hissing serpents.
The Aissaoua were hissing and kissing their snakes on the snout when a woman broke into their circle with a couple of live frogs or toads in her grip. She waved the poor things wildly about by their legs, showing them off to the crowd before she crammed one into her mouth and half-swallowed it, gagging on it a while. One long-fingered webbed-foot still kicked, trailing out of the corner of her mouth. With another big gulp she got the thing down but the frog in her stomach set her jumping and screaming more than ever before. While trying to cram the second frog down, she vomited up the first one and was ignominiously dismissed as a charlatan. For a moment I thought they might tear her to pieces for wasting their time. I watched her trying to fight her way back into the circle of trance-dancers but her place was taken by some other wild women with eyes revulsed back into their skulls. Their long wild black hair was lengthened by ankle-length ponytails of braided black wool, which whipped the faces of nearby spectators who began clapping along in unison to the hysterical beat of the music. When this whirlwind moved on away from the foot of the tree against which I was resting, I noticed crowds of young country yokels and boys a few feet away, packed tight around several pitchmen under rusty umbrellas running three-card games or the old shell and pea game on flimsy little portable tables which they could collapse and clear out when their lookout man called the Arab equivalent of “Hey Rube!” But, of course, at this sort of a feast there were no policemen about and no trouble. The locals apparently loved to be robbed for they threw their poor pennies away with more frenzy than I ever have seen around the expensive green tables of Monte. I got up painfully and staggered over to look closer at what they were playing. The charlatan running the deal squinted up with a grin: “Hi, Hakim!” he wheezed.