It is said that this faction was the first to caution the tribes against the allure of the Spirit World’s bird when they recounted the effect of his songs on people’s souls and the domination of his tunes over the intellects of even the wisest intellectuals. People would all jump up and hurry to the valleys to hear his hymns of amazing sorrow. Noblemen, vassals, slaves, herdsmen, women, young men, and even the children would rush to the valleys. The bird would seize control of them with his voice, and they would stay in the wadis for days, frequently forgetting themselves there. They would stay as long as the bird did — not eating, drinking, speaking, or sleeping. Then they would become emaciated and quiver with feverish ecstatic trances. The jinn tribes that resided in their breasts — which they thought they had forever destroyed with the talismans of the ancients — would awake. The feuding tribes in their breasts would wake up and become ecstatic, foam at the mouth, and reel.
But the devastation affecting their chattels at such times surpassed the devastation affecting their bodies. Jackals were able to slay people’s flocks in the pastures at will. Camels wandered off to other lands, where they fell into the hands of brigands and rustlers. Autumn winds blew and unruly storms plundered their tents, carrying away the furnishings. When people finally regained control of themselves, they discovered that the Spirit World had not returned them to the desert but had tossed them into the labyrinths of the wasteland for the first time. Then they were obliged to search for their way, starting afresh.
At this point the soothsayers intervened, thinking they should take charge of the matter themselves.
5
The soothsayers made the rounds of the tribes and dictated their call to the herald. They said the seductive bird wasn’t one of the messengers from the Spirit World but a new device of the immortal enemy Wantahet. So people should be wary and extremely cautious. They said via the herald that the ancient, ignoble one had been unable to destroy them with bribes and it hurt him too much to take them with the weapon of seduction. Therefore he had devised the strategy of singing to annihilate their bodies, destroy their physiques, and devastate their homelands, because he had discovered their weakness for music. He had realized that nothing could annihilate creatures’ bodies as effectively as singing. They also said that the immortal sorcerer was hiding in the bird’s body this time just as he had previously hidden in the bodies of serpents. He had borrowed the bird’s voice and slipped into the neighboring valleys to rob them of their bodies and souls through the domination of this voice, because the ignoble one knew their secret and perceived the weakness they had inherited from their ancestors regarding the voice and the delight of the voice. So he had decided to take them by means of the sovereignty of the voice. They needed to be on guard from that day forward against every voice!
Panic swept the tribes, and an argument erupted among the sages. Many attacked the edicts of the soothsayers. One faction tried to mount some opposition. Skeptics said that the diviners did not merely wish to shun the minds of the intellectuals, and never tired of repeating the lies they had fabricated long ago to lead the nations of the desert toward life (even though the tribes realized that they were merely terrifying claims), but today again they had come to drag the tribes far from the truth, claiming that they did this from a desire to prevent the community from going extinct, whereas they knew better than anyone else that they were preventing the community from enjoying the eternal longing for immortality, because they also knew that a being that doesn’t become immortal unless he loses his body does not mind dispensing with the shadow body if through this sacrificial offering he can assume the body of light, the body of the Spirit World, the original body that doesn’t know bodies.
In their opposition to the soothsayers, the skeptics went to the extreme of accusing their foes of depriving the wretched tribesmen of the sole pleasure the Spirit World had granted them and said that the diviners, by forbidding listening to and enjoying music, were not just imitating the severity of Wantahet but were appropriating his role and speaking with his tongue. In fact they were digging for the people of the wasteland that foul pit to which Wantahet had sworn to lead them one day. The soothsayers weren’t soothsayers; they were Wantahet.
6
North winds frequently carried clouds to the desert, the valleys flowed with plentiful water, from the floors of the tents rang the painful screams of newborns frightened by the terror of childbirth, and the successive days destroyed many bodies, which then slumbered in the slopes of the mountains beneath piles of gray stones, but the bird of the Spirit World never stopped singing.
The bird never stopped singing, and his passionate fans never stopped descending to the valley in order to emigrate via song from this valley and all valleys — from the whole desert. Then they would see what they could only see through song and hear what they could only hear through song, and live another life that they could only live through song.
Their bodies grew emaciated, withered, and wasted away till they vanished. But they did not retreat. They did not want to return to the land of shadows, because anyone who travels far and explores other homelands beyond the wasteland will not return to the realm of the wasteland. He will not return to lands that can only be seen with the eye of blindness!
VIII THE WESTERN HAMMADA
We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
1
During the second year, the drought became extreme, and desiccation, blazing heat, and blasts of the Qibli wind scorched the pathetic grasses left from the blessing of the wet years. Then the leader approached him.
The leader came to him and invited him to explore the effects of the downpours from transient clouds on the plains of the Western Hammada.
They set off on foot in the sunset dusk, leading their camels behind them and dislodging rocks along the way with their sandals. In earlier days, they typically had done this when the tribe was affected by some momentous matter that required private debate. Back then they would set off for the great outdoors, roaming on foot through the dark expanses of the wasteland like two shadows from the jinn tribes, striking their sandals against stones with childish stubbornness, exchanging a gesture at one time, allowing themselves to be guided by the circumlocutions of the ancients at others, adopting the language of the people of passion at times, and remaining silent for long, long periods. They stayed silent so long that the jinn who were spying on them concluded that they would never say anything. The Spirit World’s spies decided that they would never reach an accord or assumed that these two men had secretly agreed to use a vile, unspoken language, a language that the clever strategists of the wretched human community appealed to in order to conceal their evil intentions against the scions of the people of the Spirit World. Dawn surprised them in the badlands, but they would not turn back till they discovered a talisman to protect the tribe against the evil of the affliction. So the most eminent jinn butted their heads against the walls of their caves in despair at ever detecting the secret and out of admiration for man’s cunning.