“Perhaps you realize that we’re not the only masters of the wasteland. It has some natives we call ‘People of the Spirit World’ in our tongue. My question was meant to gauge the identity of my guest — jinni or human — since I’m sure the denizens of the spirit world understand the truth of my statement, because we’ve never heard of anyone who has heard them lie.”
The guest continued to watch him inquisitively all the while, and the mysterious smile never left his eyes. “Fine! I’ll accept your statement at face value, too, even though I’ve never discerned any link between myself and the spirit-world tribe of which you speak. My name is Edahi, Edahi the Fool, if you desire a longer handle. The nobles of the oasis have sent me to convey their invitation to a meeting.”
“Never in my life have I attended a banquet or accepted anyone’s invitation. Beware, fool!”
The fool was silent for a moment. He plucked a slender twig and snapped it in two. Then with the forbearance of the wise, he observed, “We were created in this desert for the sole purpose of meeting. People become neighbors expressly so they may meet. What harm is there in accepting an invitation?”
The stranger, however, remained steadfast. He replied severely, “Meeting is harmful. Indeed, we’ve never experienced any harm in our world that did not originate with a meeting. Do you deny that people only assemble to quarrel and fight?”
The fool was silent. The smile left his eyes and sorrow replaced it. Almost entreatingly he said, “But quarreling too is life. We only discover our true nature when we argue and quarrel. Moreover, we quarrel only to become neighbors again afterwards and to throw ourselves into each other’s arms. This is how it used to be. This is how it is. This is how it will be. So why exaggerate?”
“It’s hardly a good idea for me to disobey my own laws. I’ve learned from experience that whenever I disobey one of my law’s dictates, retribution that I would otherwise have escaped is meted out to me. Forgive me for respecting my law.”
“You speak of the law as if you owned it.”
“Oh, yes! The law is mine alone.”
“Which law? Are you talking about the lost Law of the desert?”
“I speak of my law. I’m not sure whether it is derived from the lost Law of the past generations or from my heart, which conceals so many secrets that I have not yet understood their true nature.”
Stillness pervaded the solitary spot. This was the desert’s stillness, which people molded by the Law term the “Call of Eternity.” The fool said, almost to himself:
“Now I understand why not even a drop of rain has fallen since you arrived in our settlement as a guest.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We’ve grown accustomed to having exemplary people bring us copious rain. The footprints of the best people are always washed away by rain. This has also been passed down to us from the lost Law.”
He laughed sarcastically before retorting, “How do you expect me to bring rain with my footsteps to people who stick hideous talismans on every corner to ward off the rain for fear the walls of their clay prisons will be damaged by it?”
“That’s true; some wretches actually do that, but I speak as one spawned by the desert, not by the oases.”
“You’re originally from the desert?”
“Yes, indeed. The only father or mother I know is the desert.”
“Next time I’ll bring you your own private rain cloud. . ha, ha, ha.”
He released a reverberating, repulsive laugh that convulsed the stillness and stifled in the desert’s breast the immortal call of eternity. The fool sprang to his feet and shot off toward the fields. The seated figure also jumped to his feet and chased after the fool, whom he did not catch. So he berated him, “Did you come to teach me magic, wretch? I know this law: ‘Clever men camouflage themselves with foolishness, and fools with cleverness.’ If you’re a fool, I’m the biggest fool of all. Ha, ha, ha. . ”
2 Elelli
He quit the fields to take refuge in the cemetery. As he loaded his gear on his jenny, he said, “The most suitable place for a man to reside isn’t next to the living but beside the dead.” His throat rattled with suppressed laughter as he made his way stealthily to the center of the oasis and the foot of the mountain where the cemetery slumbered. Since appearing at the oasis he had explored this area repeatedly and had thus discovered that the mountain was not the hill the idiotic people of the oasis thought it was, but tombs of the successive generations who had lived in the oasis since the desert dried up and left an oasis in its embrace. Tombs had collected atop other tombs, and their stones had crumbled, covering other stones. Buildings had collapsed, burying the tops of those preceding them. The bones of the latter-day dead were heaped on the skulls of earlier decedents, rising to lofty heights in a structure that deserved to be called a sanctuary rather than a mountain. It towered into the sky, where it stood as a beacon to people of their own futility, bearing witness to them every day of the destiny that awaited them and their descendents. People are blind, however, and do not see. They are deaf and do not hear, ignorant and unable to decipher symbols. Had they looked, they would have discovered in the decaying bones, which poked out here and there from the ancient edifice, the destiny awaiting them. Had they listened, they would have heard the cry of reality in the eternal stillness of the desert. Had they been able to read, they would have deciphered the message incorporated into the sanctuary’s center with skull bones. These wretched folk, however, were locked in a never-ending tussle with reality as evidenced by the way they fled from their mud-brick homes over the course of generations as the tombs encircled them. Although they moved out of the way, destiny pursued them. Inevitably, the tombs encompassed them and they were forced to move again. Now, here they were, rejecting the reality that awaited them, fleeing to nearby open spaces, and calling the burial mound a mountain and its sacred slope a cemetery. They did not have the courage to decamp far away, to seek genuine liberation, to flee from internment, and to surrender their fate to the eternal desert, which would never remind them of their reality, since it is itself a reality that does not need to construct lofty mounds from the skulls of predecessors to remind people of their insignificance. Anyone who seeks its protection sneers at death. There is no death in the womb that nurtures us, but the desert does not forgive anyone who betrays her. He does not merely die an alien’s death but also lives miserably, because anyone who does not seek death’s protection, anyone who does not appeal to the desert for its assistance, finds his whole life a living death. His entire life becomes a desert.
In the entryway to one of these vaults clinging to the surface of the mountain, the intellect’s patron visited him one evening. He was an elderly man of uncertain age, tall, pale-complexioned, lean — apparently a wayfarer from the desert’s labyrinths. He seemed not to have imbibed the oases’ loathsome water, which upsets the body and the mind. He was veiled with a faded, striped cloth and brandished — rather than leaned on — a gloomy staff. With audible zeal, he was debating with creatures no one else could see. He publicly cursed the fertile land’s humidity, which had inflamed his arthritis.
He stood outside the mausoleum at sunset, and the stranger heard him say — as if he were rebutting a ghost from the spirit world, “We should never say: ‘Let’s do what our fathers did.’ ”
He went out to his visitor, whom he discovered beside a tomb that had crumbled to bits of stone, except for its marker. Gazing at the horizon, which was cloaked in sunset red, and clasping his stick with both hands, he asked, “Does my master propose a different maxim?”