I petted the she-camel, and the she-jinni stealthily trailed after me. I chanted to my gentle creature a song of longing, and my beloved grunted her pain and shared her suppressed sorrow with me. Despite preoccupation with this intimate conversation and despite being lost in the world of song, I was aware that the she-jinni was pursuing me. She disappeared behind a low hill separating the cliff face from the valley bottom. My beloved camel thrust her long neck against my chest, and I embraced her. I whispered to her that I loved her because she bore in her eyes the look of another beloved creature that had carried me in her body when I was on the point of perishing of thirst and had also returned to bear me once more the day I lost my father and my truth. The poor creature moaned in distress and swayed from right to left like an ecstatic religious celebrant overwhelmed by grief. The she-jinni, whom I had forgotten in my crazed dance, then ruined everything by suddenly popping up, as she-jinnis will. The beloved camel beside me took fright and bolted.
The she-camel fled, and I found myself standing face-to-face with a creature far more hideous than the she-jinni, one more like a she-demon. I forced myself to smile at her, but the evil look I saw in her eyes frightened me. So I retreated, but she did not approach me. She glared maliciously at me and then departed. She climbed the hill and vanished at a curve in the valley, where it stretched northward.
I tried to forget, but the whispered temptations would not cease. These frightened me more than the threat in her eyes, because I knew that such a threat is generally an empty one, whereas an idée fixe is nothing more or less than a prophecy. It seems that what I had learned was confirmed on this occasion as well, because I discovered beauty’s paragon dead the next morning. I did not for a moment doubt that the she-jinni had plotted this outrage. I found the she-camel in the animal yard, all swollen up, her eyeballs protruding, with suspicious-looking snot oozing from her nostrils. I was certain that the she-jinni had given the camel poison mixed with dry grass. I pursued her to rebuke her for her deed, but she bared her teeth at me like a jackal and then pelted me with a hail of abuse in the forest dwellers’ gibberish. So I left her and went off by myself to the open spaces to seek inspiration for some wily subterfuge. I told myself that a creature who plots the destruction of a fellow creature is a past-master of evil who will stop at nothing and that unless I succeeded in limiting this evil I would be its next victim, without the slightest doubt. I went to her and lured her into a conversation about the secrets of the caves. I did not tell her about the ancestors’ prophetic aphorisms, not merely because I felt sure her community would disdain prophetic wisdom and anything linked to the ancestors but also because of her instinctive hostility toward these riddles, which she considered trumped-up superstitions devoid of truth. All the same, I sang for her, under my breath: “Wherever you come from, there you’ll return, for man, like a caravan, would not be man, unless he returned to his point of departure.” Then, out loud, I told her about the secrets awaiting her in the caverns and the other things the ancestors had hidden, treasures that they had been unable to carry with them into eternity and had been forced to stash in tombs at the foot of the walls. In my narration, I substituted earthly treasures for the heavenly ones. I recited verses about the earthly legacy but kept silent about the eternal legacy. Curiosity flared in her breast, and she followed me like a shadow. I took her by the heights and scaled the boulders of the southern cliff faces, chanting to myself the law of arrival and departure while my tongue kept extolling the vaunted treasures. I followed twisting trails and cut back and forth between rugged boulders. I crossed passes, ridges, and peaks that I had reconnoitered during my explorations in the southern redoubts in the past. I caught sight of the escape route at last, for I noticed the secret cleft that had brought me to the labyrinth when I crossed through it one day, searching for my brethren from the herds’ clans.
I slipped through the forbidding cleft, and my shadow slunk through behind me. I crossed to the other side and traversed in this stage a distance long enough that our tracks would disappear. Then I turned to toss a question her way: “Are you a jinni or a person?”
She smiled at me blankly but did not reply. She may have thought the question senseless. She may have suspected that I was merely joking. In any case I said, “You arrived at my oasis borne on the steeds of the jinn, and a demon jinni placed you in my custody. Is it reasonable that you would be of any lineage other than the jinn?”
At that she spoke. She spoke while I listened to words like a prophecy issuing from the peak of the mountain rather than from the mouth of a creature named woman: “Master, has there ever been any difference between men and jinn? Didn’t you tell me some days ago that you donned the body of a gazelle to save yourself?”
“You’re right. The truth is that I shouldn’t search for any distinction between men and jinn, between a man and gazelles or Barbary sheep, even between animals and the plants animals consume, or between plants and the earth’s soil that nourishes the plants, for I am everything, and everything is really me.”
She smiled slyly but said nothing. I too kept my peace, but under my breath I chanted my insane refrain, “Wherever you come from, there you’ll return, for man, like a caravan, would not be man unless he returned to his point of departure.”
I chanted until I reached the strip of land that is the point of no return. There, at the gap of the unknown, I left her to her fate and fled. Leaping like a Barbary ram, I disappeared behind the boulders that demarcate the deadly opening from the west. I did not pause but continued leaping as though fleeing from my own shadow. I dodged the rocks that obstructed my progress without ever slowing my pace. I did not pause to catch my breath until I had traversed much of the distance on the long way back, while the horizons became covered with the sky’s gloom. Then I stretched out to rest. I lay down and dozed off out of sheer exhaustion. I did not awake until the horizons were imbued with daybreak’s dazzling firebrand. I jumped up in alarm, for I had witnessed a prophetic vision in my slumber. As I slept, I had seen the she-jinni slither across the earth like a serpent and search in the sun-baked earth for treasure, digging up hard, fiery lumps with both hands. She dug with the insane intensity with which thirsty people excavate parched depths, even though she knew full well she would find nothing there. Despite that certainty, she did not despair. The spirit world mocked her efforts and wrapped them in floods of fraudulent fluids, so that from a distance the poor body seemed a toy teased by the mirage’s tongues, which alternately drowned her in the sea and plucked her from its waves, letting her float on the surface of this imaginary flood. This struggle awakened in my heart something I had never experienced before. It awakened in my breast a new inspiration and an insistent whispering that struggled against forgetfulness for a long time before memory told me it was what nations call “compassion.” Compassion convulsed me, and I leapt from my sleep and shot off at a gallop over the route I had taken. I raced back with a crazed passion that exceeded that with which I had fled. On my way to the point of no return, I shouted repeatedly, “I never for a moment imagined a child of the jinn could perish of thirst. Forgive me!” I repeated this cry to help me last the distance.