I listened to him dumbfounded, because from this terrifying jinni’s discourse I learned that this was not just a plot against me but a conspiracy against the entire desert and that my wife was not the mastermind plotting this insurrection but merely a piece of the snare the cunning strategist had disclosed to me in his fatal exposition.
After this, nothing surprised me. I was not surprised when the nobles deserted me, one at a time. I was not surprised when they clustered around my former consort in the temple’s heart to finish weaving the strands of this conspiracy. I was not surprised when they kept me from seeing my son, preventing me from sharing stages of his development as he grew, matured, and explored the desert, where he learned to hunt, grew tough, and discovered how to be a man. I found myself alone, isolated, and abandoned, just as I had always been. I grew ever more certain that the fate of men in this desert is always Anubi’s. I was born in the desert like Anubi, live in the desert like Anubi, and will leave the desert one day the way Anubi did, for anyone whose father has ever left him will have Anubi’s destiny as his eternal fate. My slave Hur attempted to lighten my burden. “What’s all this, my master, but a trial from which we can learn?” he asked me one day.
“Learn what, Hur?”
“Learn the reality of truth and falsehood.”
“Don’t talk to me about the reality discussed by the prophet of lying.”
“The prophet of lying?”
“Is the leader of the people of Ragh anything other than the lie’s prophet?”
“Master, we’ll never recognize truthful prophets, if we aren’t plagued by the lying ones.”
“But I lost reality the day I decided to play. I have come to believe that the lady of the temple was right to scold and menace me with the punishment appropriate to this offense.”
“We can’t learn, master, unless we suffer.”
“I lost reality, thanks to my taste for amusement; so forgive me.”
“Despair master, is also therapeutic.”
“I have lost my offspring, my nation, and my reality and have brought you all down with me. Worse than all this is the fact that I’ve lost my son. By losing the prophetic counsel of the law, I lost my son.”
“We don’t find ourselves, if we don’t lose ourselves, master.”
“The one thing I ask from you is to refrain from changing my offspring’s name. Inform the people that as of today my name is no longer Ara. From today forward it will be Amahagh; so don’t forget.”
“We are all Imuhagh, master. We are all children of a desert labyrinth. None of us, master, knows what to do with himself. It is this ignorance that motivates us to commit offenses like playing, because we must inevitably ask ourselves one day: ‘What will we do with ourselves, if we don’t play?’ Thus entertainment slays us, just as others are slain by longing. One group dies from the offense of playing, master, and another group dies from the disease of longing.”
“I entrust my offspring Imuhagh to your care and count on you to divulge to all the people the true nature of this name.”
“Master, I pledge my life to be true to this trust.”
A few days later I was informed of the community’s verdict, which sentenced me to exile, once more.
6 The Slip
I FOUND MYSELF in my desert, cleansing myself with the last drops of my mirage and roaming through the endless expanse of my open countryside. I returned to my solitude and believed in my solitude, since only solitude is real. The evidence for this claim is that within its confines I had no need for entertainment in order to live. I discovered life-threatening entertainment to be an innovation created by the lassitude of oases. The antidote to this malady is closer to us than the jugular vein, since it rushes to greet us as soon as we venture into the desert, embracing us to provide a replacement for whatever we have left behind. I roamed and began, in the labyrinth, to purify myself. I contemplated what appeared and what was concealed, what was manifest and what latent, what was visible and what invisible, and cleansed myself from all the rot of lethargy. I stood a foot or less from a sanctuary to the spirit world, feeling certain that if I called out, I would receive a response and that if I pressed my intrusion an inch farther it would appear before me. Yet, fearful, I suppressed my cry each time, so that I would not receive an answer, and confined my intrusive behavior to my head, so it would not show. I quit my confrontations with the covert and diverted myself by reading the talismans of the ancients on the rock statues or on the walls of the caves or by re-enacting my first gallop behind the herds of gazelles or pursuit of the heads of Barbary sheep, when the fates cast me at the outskirts of the oasis. Then I had eaten my relatives’ flesh grilled by a heavenly lightening bolt, and my body has been aflame with greed ever since. I roamed through the companionable countryside. I rambled around to enjoy my isolation, reveling in the time I had alone with my beloved, whom I realized I had betrayed when I substituted for her another creature, who soon betrayed me. I courted my former true love with the most heart-rending poetry. I sang her plaintive ballads she had never heard before, not even from the jinn’s female vocalists, whom I had seen in the caves and encountered while they roamed the great outdoors by the full moon. I forgot my curse. I forgot my destiny. I forgot Anubi’s fate, which had always encumbered me. I forgot my lost father. I forgot the lost law. I forgot my lost spouse. I forgot my lost oasis. I forgot my lost reality, for the desert became father, law, spouse, homeland, and reality for me. I threw myself into its embrace. Then it eased my mind, dandled me, calmed me, and made me forget my exhaustion. I wandered through its vast expanses. I scaled peaks to discover springs that my desert had never shown any creature before. I descended ravines and valleys to find, in their lowest reaches, wells that my consort had hidden from strangers’ eyes for ages. When I wandered across the plains, she fed me secret fruit more delicious than any I had ever tasted. My desert showed me her affection like a tender mother with an errant child, a son who returns after a misguided voyage. So how could I help but recite poems about her beauty or sing ballads glorifying her?
My former true love was not content to celebrate my return with all this munificence; she sent my way some jinn disguised as people to console me and to dispel from my heart the isolation that mankind terms loneliness. Then she sent my way people masquerading as jinn to show me how remorseless people are. The most precious treat she granted me was the hint of purity that drew me close to my secret reality, however, for it was this exalted purity that brought me to a stop only a fraction of an inch from the sanctuary where I felt that, were I to call, I would be granted a response invisible to human eyes, inaudible to human ears, and unimaginable by the human mind. The past’s pains, with which the desert had once weighed me down to test me and to make a man of me, became the memory of a comforting grace. The delights of lethargy, which the oasis had generously showered upon me, became the memory of a hideous inferno. I saw how hell frequently is transformed into a blessing when it becomes a memory, and a blessing frequently evolves into an inferno in memory; the talisman, apparently, is a pawn to the riddle named time, which deliberately puts us off, delays us, and fails to inform us of the true nature of what transpires on a certain day until it is too late.
I was entranced by this healing and felt myself light as a straw, as pure as a tear; like a person recovering from a lengthy, near fatal illness. I smiled, because I understood that the group of conspirators, who had thought they were harming me, had actually done me a favor. Nonetheless, the nightmare of the oasis soon swept over my solitude to disrupt my blessing and to ruin my situation. Are the wise men of the tribes correct when they say that the spirit world’s envy does not allow anyone’s happiness to last long?