“But old age cripples the body, addles the mind, and tethers the poor creature to the earth with iron chains. So how can it explore the sky and join the celestial caravan? Search your Law for another path for it; don’t ask the poor creature to oppose the will of our mother, the desert.”
The diviner took another step closer to the site and struck his hands together. He said, “O God of the desert! Does my master think that the bird is this senile? Doesn’t my master see that the bird has refused to fly not because he can’t fly but because he is carrying a prophecy to the encampment?”
Their eyes met. The two men faced off at the mysterious site. They circled round the source that is the only destination for the community of diviners when they embark on their quests. It is a shadowy spring, a melancholy source they refer to in their arcane jargon as a sign.
The diviner saw that the leader had discovered the site and shouted, “Old age is truly a noble homeland, Master, but it’s an ailment that does not yet threaten my master’s body.”
The leader turned his eyes far away. He smiled and returned to the wasteland, to the playful mirage in the wasteland. He smiled for a long time. He smiled because he had discovered the diviner’s secret, his secret reason for visiting. He had known the diviner would arrive shortly. He had known the diviner would come as a messenger from the Council of Wisdom. He had known that they would not let the matter drop easily. He had known that they would come to him individually and in groups, evenings and nights. He had known that they would not oppose him on any matter, but also that they would not yield easily, especially when the matter related to a dictate of the Law, especially when the matter related to a practice that had helped mold them since they were born and had become a religion for them, especially when the matter related to migration. He had excused them, understanding that they were right to struggle desperately to obey a command they had inherited from their grandfathers and had read in their laws, a dictate that had coursed through their blood till it became their life. But he knew as well that they did not know in which land he stood, in which desert he had found himself during recent years, and what it means for a man to discover overnight that everything he has done in life is lost, that everything he should not have done is what he has done in life, and that what he has not done, he will never be able to do, because his time is disappearing faster than he expected, what he thought was life, what he had depended on, had ended before it began, had ended at the time he had planned to begin, indeed, even before he planned to begin. He was discovering that life had passed in the hour he was preparing to begin life — what trivial people call life. Now they wanted him to move about like in the old days. They wanted him to stock up on poems of longing, to set his sights on the stern, shadowy, indifferent horizon and rush off, to dart away toward the horizon in search of what lay beyond the horizon, to hurry off toward the horizon in search of the lost oasis that he knew he would never find. He was duty-bound to hope it existed if he wanted to continue playing, because this was the basis of the game. Whenever the horizon disclosed a void — an expanse, another horizon even less forgiving, even more murky, even more cunningly indifferent — he fought back the lump in his throat, cursed Wantahet both privately and publicly,6 and diverted himself with songs of grief, because the nomad contents himself with the Waw he finds in poetry once he discovers that this perfect oasis does not exist on earth. But old age mocks every deception and sees what all nomads fail to see. It sees what the diviner does not see. It sees what the Law itself does not see. This is the secret of old age. This is the secret of the sorrow that the diviner saw in the old man’s eye and called beautiful.
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4. In Tamasheq in the original Arabic.
5. Tamasheq for shaykh, old man, leader, or grandfather.
6. The Jenny Master, a trickster figure in Tuareg lore and a passionate advocate for nomadism and for the she-ass — not the camel.
III THE DEPARTURE
Nature likes continual creation and continual destruction, because nature is not fit to create anything that can be depended on.
1
But they did not know his secret; they did not understand why he contended with the rugged terrain every day to descend to Retem Valley. They did not know why he isolated himself there from morning to noon. They did not know because they had not heard the song; they had not been delighted by the Unknown’s anthem that hid in the groves of retem trees. If they had known, if they had heard, they would have realized that the leader would not reject being uprooted, would not refuse to order the people to move on and separate from their mother, the earth, merely because old age was drawing him to this place the way that the bird from the flock was drawn to the earth of the encampment. If they had heard, they would have realized that the leader would never have contravened the Law of past generations even if feebleness bound him with the strongest chains of iron. If they had heard, they would have realized that the matter involved a secret greater than decrepitude, stronger than a feeling of feebleness, and more profound than the disappointment with which anyone who reaches an advanced age and discovers that the path that previously swallowed his ancestors is the same abyss, the same gloom, and the same forgetfulness that awaits him.
He heard it for the first time a few days after they arrived in this land. He descended into the virgin valley, where the bottomlands were covered with a band of smooth sand marked by attractive folds reminiscent of the earliest days of creation when the original grandfather left his kingdom and ventured into the wasteland for the first time. Into this sandy expanse retem trees had raced each other, but rocky borders had crowded them out of the adjoining tract, depositing in the areas at the foot of the mountains swords cloaked with polished stones that time’s torrents had burnished till they gleamed in the sun’s rays. Trees had found no place to expand there. So they had turned back on themselves, massed together, and created in the valley bottom thick groves reminiscent of date palms in oases when they encircle springs of water, interlace, cohere, and cluster together as if to hide the spring from inquiring eyes, as if hiding the spring from people for fear they will envy this treasure. To the crest of upper branches of these groves come birds, doves, to build splendid nests. They lay eggs in the nests, sit on those eggs, and sing their monotonous melodies during the siesta hour.
In the retem grove he heard the bird’s song as well.
Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t at all monotonous. Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t monotone or monochrome. Unlike the doves’ songs, it wasn’t boring.
In this song, the bird’s voice modulated, there were multiple rhythms, parts rose and fell, the lament grew ever more intense, and the tune became purer and mixed with the wail of the wind in the crests of the retem trees, altering the ballad. Then the breeze died down and the lamento calmed, but the sorrowful sweetness, the sweet sorrow, never left the song. Indeed, the tune became more sorrowful and increasingly sweet and delightful. Then all the jinn in his breast awoke. They listened, reveled, and entered ecstatic trances, carrying him off through time to return to him what time had taken. They didn’t restore to him the harsh, lethal memory that lights a fire in the heart but never brings back what has passed away. Instead they spirited him off to a space where space does not exist. Then he found himself in a time where time does not exist; a space that has not yet become space and a time that has not yet developed into time. So he saw … saw what he had always tried to see. He saw what the desert had hidden from him. He saw what time had snatched from him. So he wept. He wept like a child. He wept because only a child sees nothing disgraceful about weeping. He wept because he had retrieved his lost childhood, which he had thought time and old age would never return to him. The bird fell silent, but the man did not return to the valley, to the desert, to space, to time. He remained in the world of the jinn for a period. He stayed suspended in a void devoid of all the characteristics of the void, hovering in space lacking the special qualities of space, soaring in a time that gave birth to no one and that swallowed no one, because it was a time that had not yet been born.