I crawled for a distance, but the scorching earth burned my hands. I licked them and fell on my stomach and elbows. I began to wriggle forward on my belly like a snake but was not able to wriggle far. I lay on my back. My face was burned by the punishing sun and my back by the punishing earth. I burned until I no longer felt the inferno. I sensed I was about to pass out. I do not know how long I was unconscious, but the sip of water that saved my life certainly preceded the prophecy I heard from the mouth of the emissary who stood above my head: “It is not wise to neglect what we have in order to search for what we lack.”
He placed the mouth of his water-skin in my mouth, and the water poured down my throat. I could feel it flow through my body and spread into my blood, restoring my faculties to me. I regained the ability to use my hands and grasped the water-skin with thirst’s insanity, attempting to empty it into my belly in one gulp, but the emissary seized it, pulling it away from my mouth. “This is the answer,” he said. “This is the secret. It is all about greed.”
I was thirsty. I had returned in an instant from a trip to the unknown. My dream was to provision myself with more of the antidote that had rescued me from the ghoul’s grip. I made a sign with my eyes. I begged with my eyes, because — like others who have fallen into the ghoul’s grip and then miraculously returned to the desert of the living — I had lost the ability to speak. Even so, the apparition kept the water-skin out of my reach while he proclaimed sagely: “You had a comfortable living bestowed on you, but you betrayed your covenant.”
My tongue, however, stammered with the wisdom of the thirsty: “Water!”
“You received water and betrayed it by setting out on a journey. Where are you heading? Where?”
“Give me a sip, and I’ll tell you a secret.”
“No one who has disavowed his secret has a secret.”
“Did I disavow my secret by setting forth in search of food?”
“We provided you with the fruit of the palm for nourishment. So don’t lie.”
“Dates are a lifeless form of nourishment.”
“Lifeless?”
“Any nourishment devoid of that riddle named beauty is lifeless food.”
“Beauty is a treasure that gives life, not a deadly ordeal.”
“How can one seize beauty, master?”
“Beauty always evades us if we set out to search for it.”
“Master, I have never dreamt of obtaining anything so much as I’ve dreamt of obtaining beauty. When, however, I departed one day to search for my father, I lost my way and was not destined to return, for I found myself stuffed into the jug of metamorphoses.”
“Do you see? This was your punishment. You should not search for anything you do not find in your heart. You are beauty. You are your father. You are prophecy. You are the treasure!”
He chanted his words as if reciting verse. He swayed right and left, as if in a trance. He uttered groans of pain reminiscent of those of people overcome by longing. My faculties were restored and life began to pulse through my body. I said, “I gave up searching for my father one day and decided to look for Targa, but the spirit world cast me into an oasis whose name I don’t even know.”
“What the spirit world wishes for us is always nobler than what we wish for ourselves.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The oasis whose name you don’t know is real, but Targa is a false illusion.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Targa too is a lost oasis.”
“I’ve heard members of my tribe speak of caravans that left for Targa.”
“Caravans that leave for Targa don’t return. It is the lost caravans that head for Targa.”
“Targa is lost, the law is a lost set of prophetic admonitions, and the people of the desert are a lost tribe. Are we, then, bastard children of heaven like Anubi?”
“Each one of us is Anubi; each a fleeting shadow.”
“But…who are you?”
“I am a fleeting shadow.”
Because of my fatigue, dizziness, and ordeal-induced daze, I was not able to make out his features clearly, but sparks in my heart tried to tell me something. “Has the spirit world not brought us together before?” I asked.
He stuck to his enigmatic response: “I’m naught but a fleeting shadow.”
The sparks in my heart illuminated a corner veiled by darkness, and I pulled myself together and struggled onto my elbows. I clung to his blue veil, which gleamed indigo in the twilight. Unaware of what I was doing, I shouted, “Not so fast! You are my father! Are you my father?”
He stared at my face for a time. His eyes narrowed to slits, but when he opened them again I detected an attractive smile in them, the smile of a child who has received what he wants. I struggled against vertigo once more but heard his prophetic admonition clearly: “What need for a father has one whose father is the heavens?”
“I heard a maxim saying that a father is the antidote for misery and that a creature who has never discovered his father will never be happy. So, who are you?”
He continued to gaze silently at me. The childish smile in his eyes twinkled brighter and became more affectionate and tender. I smiled too, for I sensed intuitively that he was preparing to give me some good news. I wished he would be quick to quench my thirst for the truth before my heart grew confused and I passed out again. He, however, took his time, deliberately I supposed. Just when I felt the whispered onset of unconsciousness I heard him say: “I’m you!”
6 After Midnight
“THE PROPHET OF EXPLORATION guided us,” said the first strangers when they reached my oasis. I hurried out to greet them before I could mask my astonishment. Once they had descended through the pass between the sandy mountains of the west and the rocky ones of the south, I asked: “Who are you?”
The elder leading them replied: “Wanderers parched by thirst.”
“How did you cross the rocky wastes to reach here?”
“The prophet of exploration guided us.”
“Amazing!”
“Please postpone your amazement till later and give us water from your spring.”
I led them to the nearest of my four groves, and they knelt to sip from the spring. They thrust their mouths into the deluge till their noses and faces disappeared. Their animals also darted to the bubbling waters. I stood beside them, waiting until they had slaked their thirst. I watched the delight they took in the water, till thirst stirred in my heart too. This was the thirst concealed, since birth, in the psyche of every desert dweller, for it can never be quenched, even if he consumes all the water in the world. Awakened in my heart was the thirst that had become an enigmatic murmur ever since I was overcome by thirst while searching for the Barbary sheep. Unlike the spirit world’s emissary, who wrested the water-skin from my mouth that day, I did not drive these people from the water but, rather, found myself also dropping to my knees to sip from the bubbling water. I sipped and only came to my senses when the caravan’s leader repeated less than grammatically, “Four! Four! Not just one well, but they is four. What have you done for spirit world that grant you four treasures?”
I replied with the stupidity of one who has been isolated from other people for a long time and who has forgotten the niceties of expression: “I didn’t do anything. I was searching for my father.”