Then Ukhayyad heard the man sob.
Ukhayyad could not believe his ears. He held his breath and concentrated all his senses on listening. He was not imagining things: the man was indeed crying. This kind of man was especially terrifying. When a man in the desert cries because he wants something so badly, it means he will surely attain it. This man wanted Ukhayyad’s head — and was crying because he had not got it. My God — had his wretched life suddenly become so important? No, he was not the object of their desire — the gold was. The itinerant herdsman had not been wrong — all his speculation about them had been right. They wanted nothing but the gold. And Ukhayyad was the serpent guarding the treasure. To take their plunder, they would have to kill the serpent standing in their way. He remembered Sheikh Musa’s prayer, “Lord, do not make me guardian over treasures of this world.” Now he understood what this priceless plea meant. The mind of the guardian is never at ease — and the sword lies forever upon his neck.
His heart now filled with distress — this den at the top of the mountain was not actually secure. All night long, the man’s weeping continued to ring in his ears. Where men suffer, there danger lies. Whenever you hear the man behind you weeping in pain, you can be sure of this: his hand will soon be upon you. Ukhayyad would not find safety in any one place. Safety would now be found only in moving — in fleeing across the wide open deserts.
He made the decision to abandon the mountain. At dawn tomorrow at the first opportunity, he would leave. During fits of sleep, he visited the house of shadows again. But at dawn, before he found a chance to escape, the piebald returned.
32
He heard the uproar on the slope as they surrounded and overwhelmed him. Loud shouts went up. Still, some time passed before Ukhayyad heard his howl of distress, “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”
What were they doing? The camel’s bellowing returned, even louder than before and now the echoes reverberated back and forth across the mountain peak. Only then did the stench of burning flesh hit his nostrils.
Now Ukhayyad understood — they were scorching the camel’s skin with hot irons. Burning the animal’s flesh, they seared Ukhayyad’s heart. Hawks cannot be caught unless you disturb their nests. And these men knew where Ukhayyad’s nest was — Dudu’s servants had led the men right to the camel. Maybe the toothless herder was among them, acting as their guide? Sheikh Musa had been right — he was right about everything: “Place your heart nowhere but in heaven. If you leave it in the care of someone on earth, it will be stolen and burnt into cinders.” Sheikh Musa had never pawned his heart, nor had he loaned it to anyone. He had never married, never had children, and never raised herds of sheep or camels. Perhaps that was how he remained free from worry. In fact, the sheikh was never angry, nor did he laugh. There was only ever a constant smile on his lips. Ukhayyad had defied the sheikh’s wisdom — he had made the mistake of putting his heart into the care of a friend. By placing his heart with the piebald, the hand of sin had managed to catch him — the hand of men.
Again, the cry of distress rent the desert silence. Again, it echoed across the mountains, “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a.”
His nostrils were singed by another waft of burning flesh. A scorching gust of wind carried it into his vault, setting fire to his heart in the process. The smell of burning skin became a blaze in his heart.
He removed the stones blocking the crevice, and the light blinded his eyes. He crawled on all fours, shielding his eyes. The scorching smell of burning flesh intensified as it mixed with the smoke of burning wood. He spotted the men gathered around the piebald on the slope. Some of them pulled on ropes, while others heated up knives and irons in the shimmering fire.
The smell of burning flesh was finally too much to bear.
Ukhayyad scrambled down the mountain face. Stones tore at his skin and clothes — a jagged rock ripped the turban from his head.
Wounded, bareheaded, and in tatters, he stood before them. They studied him in silence. He glared at them in silence. The old herder was not among them, and Ukhayyad felt a vague sense of relief. Without exchanging a word, the men tied him up. The piebald’s body was bloodied and burnt. They had even scarred his face with hot metal and ripped open his muzzle with a red-hot knife. Blood poured from the animal’s torn hide.
“Remember how Tanis took revenge on her wicked co-wife?” asked a burly man who reeked of burnt flesh.
He then turned toward Ukhayyad. “Do you remember how the co-wife got what she deserved?”
They bound his arms and legs with rope, then brought over two camels. They tied his right hand and foot to one, his left hand and foot to the other. The hefty man began to call, “Whip them, whip them!” The tongue of the lash licked at their bodies and the camels bolted — one to the right, the other to the left. Suddenly, Ukhayyad found himself stretched between the realms once more. Again, he was tumbing into the well, into the space between the edge above and the water below. Again, he was falling to that space where he had once glimpsed paradise. The houris began to trill and on Jebel Hasawna the jinn began to wail and wail.
“The sheikhs won’t believe us if we don’t bring them a piece of evidence,” a voice said.
With bloody arms and legs, Ukhayyad attempted to pull his torn body along the ground. The camel on the right, the stronger of the two, had ripped Ukhayyad’s thigh and arm from their sockets. His body was broken, yet Ukhayyad tried to lift his head.
The hefty man approached, sword glittering in hand. Ukhayyad asked one of them to help him — but was repulsed. He turned toward the mountain and, with a loud noise, his insides began to pour out. Another man walked over to Ukhayyad and gripped his bare head in his hands. The sword flew across the sky. As it moved, it seemed to perform its ablutions in the waters of the sky, in the cruel rays of the sun. Then it landed across his neck.
Across the twilight a sudden glow broke. The dream house of shadows was shaken by a massive earthquake. Its terrible wall began to collapse, struck by the blow of a sword of light. Only now did the invisible being of his dreams finally show itself as clear as day. It had finally become manifest in that moment when Ukhayyad could no longer tell anyone what he had seen.
Translator’s Afterword
Gold Dust takes place in a world of contrasts — desolate rock plateaus, lush oases, and far-flung pastures abounding in mythical flora and fauna, all surrounded by endless wastes traversed solely by camel herders, dervishes, and the occasional caravan. The focus of this novel is not the desert itself, but rather the lives of desert dwellers as they struggle against forces beyond their control. In an echo of Ibn Khaldun’s great treatise on human society, al-Muqaddima, time in Gold Dust moves in cycles rather than lines. Indeed, the desert is not timeless but seasonal — with wet seasons of abundance and flourish, followed by years of drought and hardship. Human time, too, moves in this way in the noveclass="underline" characters grow and wither, win and lose; caravans come and go, bringing with them holy men and refugees, riches, and misery. And always, in the background, there are the winds of empire that buffet the desert world, with barbaric French and Italian incursions from the north and reverberations from the rise and fall of African kingdoms to the south.
What may not be so obvious to English readers is that al-Koni’s world of nomads is not necessarily a familiar one to most Arab readers. The Arabic novel has always been dominated by stories of the city, although peasant communities of the settled agricultural lands of the Arab world have had their place in the canon as well. Aside from the work of novelists such as Abdelrahman Munif and Miral al-Tahawy, the nomadic segment of Arab society — once so economically and politically significant that it inspired Ibn Khaldun’s classic — has been largely absent from the Arab novelistic imagination.