In Present Time, you are the great-grandson of Ma el Ainin, the mahdi or miraculous leader who stirred up the Sahara a couple of generations ago. In his time of triumphs, your great-grandfather sent your grandfather to America to meet Marcus Garvey and the man called Elijah, a predestined name. In the time of his troubles, your father was smuggled out of the country to the States as a babe and the, ah, dynasty died out — or seemed to have done. You will not be asked to preach but your great-grandfather, old Ma el Ainin, was a fiery preacher, fulminating at the Foulba about what he called a “Desert Democracy,” with him as sole chief of state and, ah, immortal, of course. He turned out not to be, but, as no one dared prod him, and everyone around him was blind, they didn’t even know it until long after he was dead. In the heat of the desert, he dried up into a leathery mummy under which they staggered around and around through the sand with it on a palanquin, carrying it around on their shoulders for years. Your great-grandfather was called Ma el Ainin, which means: “Watery Eyes,” because he had very highly contagious trachoma all of his life. He could always manage to see out of one eye until the day that he died but he blinded everybody around him by sticking his dirty fingers into their eyes. You know the phrase: “Le borgne est roi! In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!” It was a very efficient way to govern these people. It ensured him the utmost in love and fearful respect that the Sahara enjoys. Prince Pio would have liked to, ah, pull something like this but he was not a man of such caliber. The Sahara is a harsh and scurvy place, is it not?
Before I begin to go into what we envisage as your role in all this, let me break out this bottle of American Borbor — ah, excuse me: I meant American Bourbon, of course. Alas, we have nothing glamorous to offer you with it, like ice. No one around here seems to be able to keep the generator going … well, cheers! Now, the Board originally intended to have Mr. Himmer teach you faith-healing, as being more in the line of what the UN approves these days but, now that Thay has fallen silent, I really don’t know. The Board felt very strongly that your official title should be released immediately to the world press — a scoop for this Media woman, perhaps, but it may be more than she deserves. We’ll see. In any case, there is still the question of your title itself. The Board felt it should in-corporate all the singular strength of the Sahara. If you do not object to the word; its Soul. The natives all tell us that the spirit of the Sahara is named Ghoul. The Africans fear and respect Ghoul. Therefore, one suggestion was Great Ghoul or Grand Ghoul. Both voted down. You can imagine, perhaps, whose suggestion it was that, in order to impress the impact of immortality on your people, you should be called The Ghost of Ghoul. It has been decided that it will have the greatest possible impact everywhere and, above all, in the American States where the, ah, television culture and the Garveyite heritage of Black Power must be considered, if you were to be known quite simply as: The Ghoul. How does that strike you: powerful, is it not? I need hardly give you a detailed exposé of the latitude this title allows you. Everything is permitted to Ghoul, they say, and nothing is true. Nothing … well …
Ah, yes! Now, where was I? Living down here in the Sahara on this blank page of history, I have become a little mystical myself. Mysticals are much more common than you might think, in our Switzerland; despite our republican sentiments. My first mystical meeting was with Princess Mya — Madame PP Strangleblood, as she was then. I was utterly “grammatized” the minute she laid eyes on me. Then, later, “Hello Yes Hello,” gave me the ability to communicate with people like the naked Foulba out there where you see the lights of their camp-city; with your primary friend, Hamid; with you. I am a very down to earth Swiss person of business who can begin to grasp the amplitude of Madame Mya’s magnificent design. Madame knows how to take things: that’s Swiss! Quite apart from her stupendous advantages of beauty, intelligence, power, culture and wealth, she holds the final inestimable trump. “I am yellow!” she can proclaim, as she did to the huge Chinese delegation we received here and sent on their way. The Chinese offered to build her a solar-powered water-distillation chain-project to be strung right across the Sahara from “Malamut” to the Red Sea, but Mya just thanked them sweetly and said: “I am a poor Asiatic colonial victim of the whites.” Now, who else could say that and mean it; I ask you? The woman is colossal, immense!
Just let me brief you on some of the, ah, shape of our projects; going through them alphabetically.
A: stands for: Ability, the Creation of (see GRAMMA), then: Affrica, Mrs. Francis-Xavier Fard (see AFRICANUS, family). All the headings in capital letters refer you to the very complete electronic library we have here; those panels over there and that screen. Alas, as I have already said, the generator …
B: stands for: BIO-KEY. Bio-Key is the name of our pharmaceutical combine based on Mexico, producing steroids for the Pill. Fundamental Funds won the patents to the thirty-two-stage process for extracting steroids from the Mexican giant yam. Weight for weight, steroids are worth about seventeen times the value of gold; some ninety-one million pre-devaluation dollars a ton. Today? Pull any figure you like out of the air. Right here directly below us, Madame Mya is sitting on the biggest steroid bank in the world. Unfortunately, steroids have to be refrigerated. Every time I become aware that our generator is not pounding away, I shudder to think of our steroid stock. After all, that’s a good many yams. Mya is always complaining, too, that changes in temperature are not good for her Charles Heidsieck champagne.
There is no file for Borbor, you will notice: maybe she keeps the bubbles of that in her head.
C: stands for: Chemicals: (Private File). This file contains all her work on the hallucinogens in Basel. You might find the Borbor formula in here but only Mya knows which one it is.
D: stands for: DOMINGUEZ (Lindissima Reuther y Dominguez, deceased). Poor Lindissima, she was really a very foolish woman. “All attraction and then no traction,” Mya once said of her. It was a bit cruel because Lindissima was no match for her. This file contains all the transfers, the property transfers by which this little corner of the hump of Africa became ours. There is a rumor, put out by the Spaniards, that Mya did away with Lindissima but that is as absurd as the story that she killed Prince Pio, Dr. Labesse. La Reuther had a terrible barbiturate problem and she tried to keep up with Mya, drink for drink. She was found on the floor with a broken glass in her hand. Pio died from sheer megalomania: he thought he was Hakim, Caliph of Bagdad, and walked off in the desert alone; trailing his gold encrusted burnous to wipe out his footsteps. He shouted: “I’ll be back in no time!” as he disappeared over a dune. Mya ran him down in her jeep but he died in her arms, whispering: “Assassinate everybody!”
This little file must not fall into the hands of the Spanish authorities, who claim that the entire ex-Reuther estate, including Cape Noon and “Malamut” is still under their authority and jurisdiction. The UN has still not yet set a date for the last of the Spaniards to leave but we are asking for a plebiscite, the day that they do.