After these sages finished the house of the spirit, it was the turn of the house of worldly affairs, which they called the “Sublime House.” After examining the heavens again they returned from those vast expanses with a new prophetic mission. They accosted me inside my house this time, shackled me, and jerked me back and forth. When they stopped that, I assumed my bout of punishment was concluded, but they grasped whips and flogged me. They whipped me until I started bleeding. Then they left me in a corner while they chanted charms that meant nothing to me. Once they had finished, their attention turned back to me. They crowned my head with a blue, leather turban imprinted with the goddess Tanit’s triangle and handed me the hilt of a wooden staff, which was topped by another emblem of the goddess: two intersecting, straight lines. Next they belted into my ear a musical incantation, as if they were singing: “We caused you pain, even though you weren’t guilty, to give you a taste of how tyranny feels to an innocent person. We have crowned you with this blue headgear so that you will know that the scion of the heavens came from the heavens and will return to the heavens. Thus his status here below is temporary. We have placed the staff in your right hand for you to use in greeting, not in killing. You should realize that we have not appointed you to rule over the living but over dead people who think they’re alive. You should set forth, because from today on, you are a shadow charged with care of the shadows that burden the earth.” Then I heard them sing in unison about longing, using the tune “Saho,” which speaks of the exile of the clan in ancient days. I detected the melodious voice of Tin Hinan.
After this melodic initiation rite the master builders decided to make architectural history in the oasis. They circulated another enigmatic saying, referring to a building as a song in space and to a tune as a structure in time. Next they debated at length the dawn of being, first discussing its relationship with the spirit world. Then they turned their attention to visible bodies, beginning with the sky and culminating with the arc of the horizon, which encircles the desert. They discussed in their recondite language the puzzle of perfection, saying that a talisman will inevitably be circular, because worship of the divine, like the circle, has no beginning or end. They decided to shelter themselves inside buildings inspired by worship and began erecting rounded corners while chanting sorrowful songs that portrayed a building’s essence as a melody in space and a melody as a structure situated in time. These presumptuous fellows did not stop until they had arranged rows of circular houses into a necklace around the oasis, thus creating a perimeter wall that bristled with platoons of the goddess’ triangular emblem. They left the buildings earth-colored for a time, but soon the sages argued among themselves and raised their voices in debate before reaching a consensus about the essence of color. It is reported that they said that white is the color associated with nobles, since it is the only color that borrows its sanctity from Ragh’s expression, which everyone sees in the color of daylight. So they gave a free hand to the vassals and engineers, who spread the walls of the houses with the whitest types of lime, excavated from neighboring valley bottoms.
Natural protective boundaries of sand and rock notwithstanding, people contrived to reach the oasis. Clans from the four corners of the desert mixed in suspect settlements where people tracing their lineage back to the people of the spirit world rubbed shoulders with other communities that traced their roots back to distant nations of unknown identity. They lived harmoniously in that valley and intermarried. Then the sages decided to advance another step toward the realization of their dream. They began to build with stone and to erect ever larger buildings, relying on a team of magicians allegedly from the east. They were said to excel in parleying with the spirit world, in mastering stone, and in solving the talismanic riddles of the earth. These fellows assisted the sages in erecting walls. Their engineering was inspired by the circularity of the temple, which was slipped into the heart of the palace. I heard these wretches sing, while they labored industriously, tunes that I admit awakened in my heart a forgotten sorrow, possibly because they referred to the riddle of creation:
We who love stone
Are the people of prophetic counsel,
The sages,
The shapers of existence.
We have created the world.
I appropriated this song from these people and repeated it to myself in my hideaway, even though its lyrics’ arrogance and braggadocio made me nervous. So I was not astonished when a team of these scoundrels from the east used furnaces to smelt metals and to produce a lethal material they named “iron.” It was judged by the better people to be inimical to the sovereignty of the spirit world. All the same, that faction’s insatiable appetite for research was far from satisfied. The vassals told me that they had met with the sages before emerging from their conference with another prophetic directive to process the metal and to mint from it a disk they named “coin.” These coins they dropped into people’s hands to serve as markers for commercial exchanges between caravan leaders. Base metal coins predominated for a time, but soon they replaced these with gold dust, which they smelted, poured into molds, and then minted into coins as well.
I had not grasped the truth of the prophetic counsel of the wanderer who had once given me gold dust in lieu of merchandise and who had told me about gold’s exceptional characteristics, until I saw what the team from the east did with it. They decreed, after consulting the sages as usual, that one should covet it and attempt to procure it by any means whatsoever. They were the first to broadcast this propaganda, which spread like a plague through the nations. It stated that gold dust is a sacred gift, not a terrestrial metal. That this metal’s traits mimic those of the lord of lords was cited as evidence for their claim. It was said that gold dust was related to Ragh both in appearance and in substance; in appearance because of its color and in substance because of its immortality. On account of this despicable claim, many people became even more passionately enamored of it than of the lord of lords, and competed with each other to acquire it. Although this hoarding of gold succeeded in saving the oasis from famines many times, that despicable powder introduced to the oasis major crimes unknown before.
Worship of the metal became widespread, and many people erred for the first time. They erred, because they conspired, plotted, plundered, and thus abandoned the spirit world. Not surprisingly, the matter ended with one native son raising his hand to slay his brother and then seizing the other’s share of this ignoble metal. The first crime the oasis experienced was committed with a weapon forged from iron and concerned a gold bar. Then I remembered the counsel of the wanderer and felt certain that his words had not been simply an admonition but a prophecy and that the wanderer had not been simply a passerby but a prophet in the rags of a vagabond.