A tall, dead-black Sudanese waiter came in with the coffee, all dressed up like the head eunuch of the late pacha’s harem. I had him bring me back the sommelier with a big snifter of poire and asked them to turn out the lights as they went. I sank back in my chair to look at the firelight through my colorless poire in the belly of the glass. What I saw made my hand tremble, for I was thinking of my journey, of course, and there I was in a bright red movie of fire which was being shown like a miniature TV on the convex side of my glass. I peered into the fire where I saw myself like an ant in a torrent of ants, being whirled along by the wind on a burning leaf like a litter or palanquin all in flames, carried on the shoulders of a streaming throng of naked people, themselves all in flames, who ran me along through a country on fire, in which trees, grass and the very sky were blazing around me. We rushed through a river of fire, down which we paddled to an ocean of flames, where I ran up the red-hot iron ladders of a fire-boat under whose grated decks burned a seething, white-hot caldron of Whites. In the flaming red wind, we sailed like an arrow from one burning port to the next fiery town on which we swept down to stoke up our ship’s boilers with a sizzling stream of white Colonials, who flared up and burned like a gem or the core of an atom exploding. I rubbed my eyes, shivering. It was cold in my chair as the fire died away. A second later, I shot up almost out of my skin, utterly startled by the sudden preternatural racket of wakening birds, all screeching at once in the palm trees outside my window. When I looked out it was morning.
Two days later, when I had bought a rucksack and a little gasoline Primus stove, I said thanks and good-by to my sponsors with my hand over my heart. That is where, along with my U.S. passport, I always carry my money. I caught a very early train out of Algut, up country to Blida, and that afternoon I rattled through the high mountain passes to Boghari on the rim of the Sahara where the train track ends. There, I caught a bus to Djelfa in the bare metallic mountains of the Ouled Naïl; a tribe of tinkers whose women are prostitutes, loitering around like painted idols, suggestively clinking with lucky gold coins. Long after dark, I changed to the back of a Berliet truck in a rising sandstorm. In the hours after midnight, we passed through Laghouat, where the French painter Fromentin was the first White to spend a summer, more than a hundred years ago, now. He mistook that one idyllic oasis for all of the Sahara, while we barely stopped there at a filling station, under some palms whose ragged heads were whipped down into the driving sand. The yellow headlights of our truck drilled out a sandy tunnel through the roaring streets of the town as we bored our way back out into the thick of the Sahara. The wind scoured the track we followed, tacking across a vast howling plain until, several hours later, we landed in the lee of the long walls of a desert caravanserai. We charged through a banging, broken gate, stampeding the hundred camels of several caravans which had taken shelter in the vast open courtyard. On the far side of this harbor, light streamed out from the tiny windows of one small room, like a cabin built to huddle against the far wall. Someone in there, on the floor, was making tea by the light of a hurricane lamp. Inside, I came across an old Visitors’ Book without a cover in which there were signatures and comments dating back into the last century. I added my name: Ulys O. Hanson, III, of Ithaca, N.Y. Moroccans tend to pronounce my name like Hassan, so that is what they all call me back in Tanger: Hassan Merikani. I signed that as best I can in Arabic. I had no comment to make.
The following day, we got to the sly and secret city of Ghardaïa, the outlaw capital of the Mozabite Dissident tribes who were driven out into these desert potholes where they found water many centuries ago. From this stronghold, the Mozabites have always ventured back into the orthodox community as small grocers who live in their shops which are real family affairs, crawling with children like mice. They are rapacious, good-looking, inbred people whose tiny children can do sums in their heads, running whole shops before they are ten years of age: experts at false-weight and short-change. For several hundreds of years, at least, they have sent every last penny of the money they amass back to their isolated city guarded all around by the Sahara where it is buried, they say, under their windowless houses. The Mozabite treasure of gold is greater than that of Fort Knox; gold goes in there and never comes out again. A Mozabite woman, on the other hand, may go out of her house twice in a lifetime; once to her wedding and once to her funeral. From the better homes, a woman never goes out: she marries a resident cousin and, when she dies, she is buried in the garden.
I tossed all night in an Arab hotel on a bed so hard it may have been made of gold. An odor of drains came gliding through the room, so strong it glowed in the dark like a ghost and left a faintly luminous trail of iridescent slime where it passed. Black Greaser, down in the narrow court of the caravanserai guarding our truck like a treasure, whimpered away all night on his flute made out of an old bicycle-pump; playing over and over the only windy tune that he could play:
Oh, I got a gazelle in Ghardaïa
She’s rich and loaded with gold
I want to marry but her father says: No!
Oh, we’ll buy a diesel, my love, I swear
They hung three millions in gold on your neck
But you can’t move out of that room!
We’ll purchase a diesel, my love, with the gold
Oh, we’ll cross the Sahara and never come back!
In the morning, I went out in the cool bright air just after dawn to find the whole city already afoot, doing business. In their handsome open-air marketplace, half as big as San Marco in Venice but with whitewashed arcades, I bartered my GI boots, field jacket and worn Levis for sandals, baggy sarouel pants with embroidered pockets and this fine black burnous which has made me feel invisible, here, since it first dropped over my shoulders. Shyly, I bought veiling; five yards or so of fine muslin to wrap my head and face against the dry desert air and the bite of the sun. Since then I go, automatically, more and more deeply disguised through their Country of Fear.
The silky surreptitious silence of the Sahara starts in Ghardaïa, where every soft footfall is shod in sand. A hush hovers over everything like the beating of invisible wings beneath which one hears the incessant hissing of the desert. Men, and even women, speak softly, knowing they will be heard. When desert-dwellers meet, they stand off a few paces to whisper sibilant litanies of ritual greeting, almost indistinguishable in sound from the rustling of stiff cloth, as they bare a long arm to reach out and softly stroke palms. They exchange long litanies of names interwoven with news and blessings until a spell of loosely knit identity is thrown over all the generations of the Faithful like a cloak:
… and ye shall drink no wine, neither shall your sons forever. Neither shall ye build houses nor sow seed nor plant vineyards but all your days ye shall live under tents that ye may live many years in the land where ye sojourn …
Everything crackles with static electricity as if one were shuffling over a great rug. Everyone in the Sahara is very aware; tuned-in to the great humming silence through which drones the sound of an approaching diesel from hours away.