Her eyes flashed with fear, innocence, despair, and beauty. I embraced her with both arms and hugged her to my chest, without knowing why. Perhaps the look in her wide, dark eyes was irresistible. Perhaps it was because the prophecy I detected in her deep eyes would never be repeated. Perhaps it was because the significance I read in the flash of her eyes was as intimate as it was painful, so that anxiety prevented me from discovering the secret of either our intimacy or her pain, because the call of greed suppressed the voice of truth in my heart. I did not hear it until after I had slaughtered her with a sharp stone, skinned, and eaten her.
Once her death cry fell silent, that voice grew louder. Anxiety was dissipated, the gloom faded, and the mysteries were revealed. I heard the statement her eyes had addressed to me in that look. Inspiration burst forth, and I recognized in the gazelle’s eyes the mother who had twice rescued me from destruction: once when wicked denizens of the spirit world, masquerading as the hare of misfortune, had enticed me and caused me to lose my way when I was searching for my father, and a second time when the world collapsed around me the day I slaughtered my father with a hunting knife only to find myself alone, abandoned, banished, a pariah. My situation in short had been tantamount to Anubi’s. My mother had arrived, thrust me into her skin, and fled far away to save me yet another time through metamorphosis.
5 Dusk
WITH THIS BLOODY ESCAPADE commenced my break with the herds. Thereafter my animal kin shunned me and braved the heights to cross over into unknown realms.
The gazelles migrated to the north, crossing lofty, sand-strewn peaks to cast themselves into the mighty sea of sand. The Barbary sheep clans migrated to the south, scaling the circle of southern mountains and crossing into the trackless deserts that lead to mountain chains with surging peaks, about which the tribes recount fantastic legends as part of epics handed down from their forefathers. I first followed the gazelles’ trail in their journey northward but then retraced my steps rather than tackle the sandy slope that cast me down to the oasis one day, for I remembered that gazelles are a species extraordinarily hard to capture when traversing sandy ground. I conjectured, on the other hand, that I could catch up with the herds of Barbary sheep, which are slow creatures on the difficult plains that dot the southern desert before it reaches the mountain chains of whose impregnable heights fantastic legends are narrated. The hope for escape for Barbary sheep is always weaker when they enter a sandy area. The hope for escape for gazelles, conversely, is weaker when they enter mountainous terrain, as time-honored proverbs assert.
I scaled the mountain but had trouble ascending the highest boulders leading to the summit. So I fell back on my wits and sought easier passageways through the chain’s westward extension. That took me the whole day, and dusk fell before I discovered a gap. As darkness overtook me, I cast about for a sheltered place where I could spend the night. Stretching out in a hollow at the base of a column-like boulder, which was suggestive in its majesty of an idol, I surveyed from my lofty perch the low-lying areas where my oasis looked a modest plot no different from the groves of acacia or retem in some of the valleys of the northern desert. When I cast my eyes upwards, the bare, dispassionate sky spoke to me in a stern tongue. As it addressed me, I pondered the cause for the temporary insanity that drove me to pursue creatures that shunned me. Had gluttony motivated me to chase after them? Was gluttony an illness, a need, or an appetite? Was I pursuing them and risking my life in their pursuit out of a longing to capture beauty, which for some unknown reason I felt I could not live without? Was my pursuit motivated by fear of solitude? Was my pursuit occasioned by some other unknown cause? Was I pursuing because man must always pursue, so that even when he finds nothing to pursue, he invents a prey, albeit fictitious, deceptive, or imaginary? Was I pursuing them merely out of stubbornness, because these creatures that had so recently constituted my kin had banished me from their ranks in the course of one day, leaving me a fugitive, alone, and shunned, so that I resembled no one so much as a bastard, desert Anubi? Or did my motivation actually lurk deep within a whispering appeal that told me this rejection was not a rejection but a portent embracing an awe-inspiring truth related to my truth, which no stratagem had allowed me to discern in myself?
I wondered and wondered until my head hurt so much it was ready to burst open. Sleep carried me off before I could reach any answer to any question. I awoke to a dawn that was still cloaked in darkness. I sped away at that early hour, acting on the counsel of the Barbary sheep community, which recommends: “Travel in the morning, rising at dawn, in order to reach your destination.”
I struggled past the stone monoliths until dawn receded and a firebrand was born on the horizon. I climbed a forbidding cliff face and found I was ascending the mountain’s summit from its western side. Because of the gloom, I was not able to discern the full extension of its foothills. I groped my way through a relatively easy opening but was unable to make out the lay of the land until the darkness was routed and light prevailed. The region was filled with mountainous knobs of gloomy hue and modest elevation. These were spaced out and scattered at some points and, in other locations smack dab together. They rose at times and fell in other places till the plains terminated them. All the same, their average height remained constant, even though they were paralleled at the rear by true mountain peaks. Thus the oasis at the bottom appeared to be in a pit rather than on a plain.
I discovered dung from Barbary sheep on the sandy blazon encircling the haunch of one of these knobs. When I rubbed it between my fingers, I found it was still fresh, but the ewe’s trail disappeared where the sandy band terminated. So I made for the heights, knowing that Barbary sheep would typically be satisfied with no other type of refuge. I persevered till midday without finding a single ewe. My throat was parched, my tongue and lips were dry, and my body had shed its sweat reserve. I saw that I had forsaken sound counsel when I failed to respond to the inner voice that had advised me all along to desist and turn back before it was too late. I searched for a shrub or boulder that would afford me some shade until the noonday heat passed, but the soil was of that grievous type the tribes say was cursed at some time; a fiery heat emerging from the center of the desert had scorched it, wiping out all vegetation until even plant seeds had disappeared. The only crop its dirt produced was stones.
I resolved to turn back but thought I would never survive unless I found a place where I could shelter from the siesta-time heat. I committed another error for once again I ignored the little voice and went forward, hoping to run across some shade behind the hill, which was bathed by waves of mirages.
I pressed forward, but the hill retreated ever farther away the more I advanced toward it, as if fleeing from me. I remembered the tricks mirages play in the northern desert and felt certain that I had fallen out of the pan into the fire and that confusion had once again led me into harm’s way. My vision was blurred, and I started to see double. My body shook from a weakness that struck without warning. I felt dizzy, dropped to my knees in a grim, eternal solitude, with a scorching earth beneath me and a furnace overhead. Only then did I understand that my crime lay not in venturing farther into the desert than I should have, but in entering the desert in search of anything other than water. I realized at last that although the fates had provided me with everything I needed, I had rebelled and set forth in search of something I had never needed. I deserved the fury and punishment of the sun-baked earth.
I perceived clearly that a sip of water was all I needed. Why had I disdained the bold stream, the springs, and life in general to set out like a madman in search of a figment of the imagination and a lie, substituting for life a shadow of life? Now I had landed myself in life-threatening isolation, where I was searching for a drop of moisture in a rocky desert. I did not even dare to think about the copious supply of water I had left behind, since all I dreamt of was some shade to shelter me from the blazing sky and to preserve in my body all of the lost treasure I could salvage.