7. SHE
She just took her money and went away, didn’t she … not one word out of her, did you notice? Typical … isn’t it? That old Berber witch … or whatever she is … seems to think this is her cave and I’m paying her rent for it. Well, never mind … one pays for being an American, I suppose … and we do screw them in so many other ways … all the time, don’t we? Calypso’s Cave! You can feel this really is Calypso’s old cave, can’t you? To Homer this was the end of the world where his little wine-dark sea ran away through these straits into nothingness … the Maelstrom … America! That fabulous coastline of southern Spain, strung out over there through the blue, must have looked just about the same … except for the lights, I suppose, that frame it … and this same big yellow balloon of a moon sailed up there between Gibraltar and Ceuta, the Pillars of Hercules. Funny, isn’t it, to think that our dollar sign comes from a snake wound around those two pillars … the serpent Baby Hercules strangled in his cradle. That’s a really mad image for money … now, isn’t it? What does it mean, Hassan … or don’t you care, really?
What do you care about, Hassan-Ulysses … only your keef and young dancing boys? Well, don’t fret … we have more and better of all that down in “Malamut” than even the Old Man of the Mountain ever dreamed a hashish-dream about. Why, all this cool green and blue country north of the Tropic of Cancer is nothing compared with what I’ve got going down south. You know it, yourself … the Sahara’s pure gold! You’ve heard of a people called the Foulba, of course … the Peuls … the most beautiful boys in the world, bar none. You must, at least, have seen books of photographs of their ritual beauty contests for which the young men begin preparing at puberty … when they’re first allowed to wear makeup and start earning their jewelry. Along with huge Floradora Girl ostrich-feather hats and a little leather apron they take off for the contest … that’s all they do wear … their jewels. Well, they’ll be holding their finals this month … and guess where! … in the courtyard of my castle down there. You see, Cape Noon is their capital rock and on that rock I built my house: “Malamut” … where the Tropic of Cancer cuts out across the Atlantic on the map. The Foulba first got there about the time anyone’s worm-white ancestors … and I’m afraid we’ve both got them Hassan … by the time those whites were first grubbing their way up out of the caves, the Foulba had written their own lengthy literature on several hundred long miles of mountain before the Sahara began to dry up all around them. Driving their lyre-horned cattle ahead of them, the Foulba went west … and wandered on out of history. When they did find the water they were looking for, it stopped them … the sea … the Atlantic. On the low, level shore they saw my big rock sticking up in that landscape as sudden as Mont Saint Michel on its tidelands. The Foulba say “Malamut’s” head touches heaven. Cape Noon, they calclass="underline" Heaven Rock. “Malamut” is my secret garden. “Malamut” and the Foulba, today … nearly two million in all of them … belong solely to me, Hassan: I own not only the Foulba … we’re absorbing new ethnic groups of previously nameless nomads in the southwestern Sahara every day. How many of them could you possibly have in a lifetime Hassan … or would you prefer to possess what’s left of your old enemies, the Blue Men? I’m telling you, Hassan … in Present Time, I am the most powerful woman in Africa!
The Word, Hassan! All you have to say is the Word … when you know it … and you can be Emperor of Africa! Emperor Hassan the First! You do understand … don’t you, the move Thay has made … was obliged to make only today at noon? You must, after all, because Thay laid his last words on you, my dear … not on me. That transfer of the Saharan Seal to you could make you the Master of Words when you know what to do with it … and no one on earth can tell you but you, you know. Thay calls it the Roller, rolling out all the words in the world over and over, again and again, since the first Word was spoken. What you hold in your hand is the emerald Beginning and Ending of Words, Hassan … as a woman, naturally I fear you! As a woman, too, all I can tell you is what not to do. … That’s my nature. Don’t … for example … don’t press the Seal into wax or putty or anything soft … you haven’t tried doing that, have you? Don’t do anything silly and artistic like inking the Seal and running it onto paper. Just don’t, that’s all … don’t! That’s printing, you see … rolling out replicas. We’ll go into that later. In Present Time, down on Cape Noon, we’re fed up with replica Foulbas, you see. They’ve bred true-blue for so long that they’re all practically identically beautiful! The one perfect specimen multiplied to infinity … and why not? … in some sort of biological barbershop mirror. Dr. Francis-X. Fard has produced a little prose-poem pamphlet praising the Foulba for being the one people we know in the world who have come up with not one single object of culture in all their lone history … not even a knot, let alone the cord to tie one in … not even a pot! They boil things by dropping a red-hot rock in a leather sack of water or milk. The Foulba have known exactly how not to let them themselves be tied down by things! They’re innocent … beautiful … pure! Until I laid hands on them, they’d always been as free as the wind. Long, long ago they gave up their writing … except just for fun and to teach the young ones … they write in the dust where the wind will be sure to erase it. So much for the Word. The one big problem with them is the one you can guess … over-weening vanity! That’s how I was able to grab them up cheap … the whole lot. When I buy, it’s always in lots … things come so much cheaper … and the cheapest one can get something for in this life, after all, is for nothing, don’t you think? That’s what I like to pay, really … nothing at all. You see, I have my own little ways of getting what I want in life. I have a trick or six I picked up right here in Africa.
This particular, ah, product … I owe to Dr. Pio Labesse, an Old African Hand who was … well, really … my second husband and not the sixth as the newspapers always say. I’m his widow … or was. I’m sure Thay has painted you the worst possible picture of Pio but, truly, I owe him a lot … poor Pio. He had all the lore of North Africa at his fingertips, literally … but he lost it. He left it where he is, now … in the Past. This one, ah, product … is something I’ve gone into scientifically … chemically … and refined it out of all recognition, you see, but … perhaps, essentially … it is the same thing the original Calypso brewed up when that other Ulysses dropped in. What I’ve done is bring the whole thing up the time-scale to bring it in line with Present Time, so … Hassan-Ulysses … in Present Time … Look!