spirit for all fathers: A.B.
MY EFFORTS TO RESEARCH this legend will fill another whole book even longer than this novel, if I am ever destined to write it.
I heard bits of the legend from the mouths of matriarchs of the desert region of Tinghart during the early years of my childhood. I heard other segments from tribal patriarchs of Azjirr when I was an adolescent. What I heard from these leaders of the people heightened my curiosity for two reasons. First, the age of the legend reached back to primeval times and antedated other folk legends that appear, for example, in “Tannas and Wannas,” which has entranced every poet capable of discerning the legendary aspects of daily life and the everyday experiences incorporated into legends. Second, this legend evolved over time as oral renditions transformed it and as the spirit of each age shaped it, so that the true nature of the original was shaken, the sequence of incidents disrupted, and the thread of the plot tangled. This is always the case with the oral transmission of stories claimed by several rival peoples alternately joined by alliances and then separated by conflicts.
I remember that when we settled in the oases and I began to discover the talismans of a form of writing (Arabic) that differed from the legendary symbols used in the Tifinagh alphabet, which I had learned from my mother like any other Tuareg child, a longing to ascertain the truth about Anubis quickly pervaded my heart. So I set off to search throughout my immense desert, like the treasure-hunting adventurers with whom the Sahara swarmed in those days, but with one small difference. Those adventurers relied on maps expertly drawn on skins when they tried to find their treasures, whereas the treasure I sought was an invisible wisdom rooted in my heart, while its stem flowed from the mouths of nomadic groups traversing the labyrinthine desert. I had to pursue them, to spare no effort to track them down, and then to wander wherever they went, if I wanted to gain my authentic treasure. This is what I did. I made forays in every direction by camel and crossed the desert accompanied by a few of my relatives, visiting the most far-flung tribes in Azjirr, Aïr, Adagh, and Ahaggar, so that I could question their leaders, elders, and sages.
In Timbuktu, some shaykhs showed me, hidden away in old wooden boxes, pieces of worn, crumbling leather on which faded Tifinagh symbols were inscribed. They told me this text was considered the most ancient recorded version of the legend and that it had reportedly been copied down from inscriptions — found in the caves of Tassili, in the caverns of Akukas, and on the boulders of Masak Satfat — that had been marred by rains, flooding, wind-driven sand, and the hands of vandals and mischief-makers.
In Aghades, rhapsodes and wily shepherds cautioned me about the difficulty of extracting an account of the life of our ancestor Anubi from the legends of the desert peoples, since his story has frequently been mixed with legends of epic battles and with stories about ancient heroes. Although I understood the importance of this admonition, I did not give up. I recorded everything I heard from the tongues of the rhapsodes. I accompanied sages to the caverns to decipher the symbols that had escaped destruction, comparing the versions found there with the oral tradition. I also recorded the stories in the documents that the scholars in Timbuktu translated for me from the oldest known form of the language and what I heard from the matriarchs of the tribes of Ahaggar in Tamanghasset.
I devoted an even longer period of time to piecing together the narratives, ironing out the time sequences, and shaping the individual incidents into a coherent story, rendering this once more in my mother tongue. Then I set all this aside for even longer. I did not come to grips with it again until a few years ago, when my migrations between major cities of the world (instead of between desert oases) had exhausted me. It was then that I discovered in the story of our forefather Anubi aspects of my own story (and of the story of any person who thirsts for truth). So I translated it from my mother tongue into Arabic, since I felt certain that Anubi’s journey is nothing other than man’s journey through this desert that people call “the world,” that Anubi’s tribulations in searching for the answer to his riddle are mankind’s tribulations in search of our riddle’s answer, and that the tribe of Anubi is, actually, the human tribe, which has yet to discover its secret truth, although we have searched for this since primeval times.
The Swiss Alps
2002
Part One Cradle Talk
The Lord God fashioned Adam from the dust of the earth and blew the spirit of life into his nostrils so that Adam became a living being.
1 Sunrise
I AWOKE FROM MY SLUMBERS at sunrise and had to struggle to open my eyes. Then I watched a hesitant, golden radiance stretch across the band of the horizon to flood the naked, eternal desert strewn with ash-gray pebbles. The melancholy barrenness shocked me, but I was overjoyed to see streams of golden light pour across the exposed land and inundate an awe-inspiring world, which was mysterious despite its nudity, perhaps because it spread and stretched out endlessly, with no tree or boulder to obstruct its forlorn progress till it reached the blue sky, which was also bare and just as severe. Wishing to remain in harmony with the lower world, it seemed, the upper world had mimicked its nakedness, inscrutability, and clarity.
Had I not observed on that day the breathtaking light that hovered as importunately as a busybody between the heavenly and the earthly realms, I would have judged each a puppet of the cunning type used to create shows to beguile the young. But in their heated embrace I discerned a secret that exercised my mind for a long time before I discovered that it was an especially cryptic talisman. I found myself ever further from the secret’s truth the closer I thought I was to grasping it, until I realized at last that it was at this moment when I met the mysterious puppet at sunrise, rather than at any other, that the sky and its consort the desert showed me their secret.
Perhaps that secret prompted the laugh that burst from me then. In the tent, it caused a clamor that shook me so profoundly that I expressed my alarm in a prolonged bout of weeping, even though the priestess, whom I saw standing above my head, did everything she could to restore my peace of mind. She appeared inscrutable as well, but I observed in her look a magic appropriate for a priestess. Actually it was nobler than magic, poetry, or maternal wisdom of the breast, from which I sucked my appetizing nourishment, for she was not merely a priestess. As I was to discover, she was my lady who appeased my hunger and protected me from fear. In my lady’s expression I perceived a lofty look. The disk of the sun had to roll across the desert sky many times before I realized that this look is named “compassion.”
Let us postpone our discussion of compassion’s story temporarily, since I have not yet finished recounting the string of wonders I witnessed the day I opened my eyes to the sunrise.
When the clearly demarcated horizon split with the first effusion of the flood of light, the nakedness uniting the realms of the upper and lower world was sundered and the last remnants of the darkness cloaking the desert world dissipated. Then I passed into the spirit world to witness the miracle: to see the secret smile, the genuine smile I was destined never again to see as I saw it that day. I was destined, likewise, never to forget it. Whenever I recalled it, I always experienced that nameless tremor again. Eventually I understood that the birth of light on the desert’s horizon that day was not just the birth of an awe-inspiring disk, to which the people apply the name “Ragh,” but the birth of light in my heart and of a riddle in my soul. I did not perceive, until after torrential floods had overflowed the ravines, that the desert with its horizon kissed by the morning light was not another body separate from my own and that the ray of light escaping from its eternal jug was not a reality separate from mine. The sword that smote the darkness of falsehood and limited the intimate congruence between desert sky and desert land did not burst forth from some spot in the eternal unknown but from inside me. The deep delight that overwhelmed me at that moment — a delight I was not destined to savor again — was no more nor less than a profound response to my experience of this riddle, which showed me that the birth of light on the horizon was actually my own birth, that the emergence of this disk Ragh from the band suggesting the horizon was my prophecy, that the bathing of the desert’s body by torrents of light was my miracle, and that the astonishing game termed “sunrise” by men’s tongues was my own awakening.