Oh! If only the Spirit World had granted him poetry’s muse, he would have recited the most exquisite verses about how captivating it is to love someone a thousand times.
4
En route to his thousandfold love, however, he inevitably encountered a ghoul.
It was not an ordinary desert ghoul but a unique type of ghoul previously unknown in the desert’s history. The ghoul was one of a kind, because thousandfold love is unique, as his ancestors had told him in tales. Unlike all the other ghouls, the one that stands guard over thousandfold love cannot be slain by a hero’s sword. It is the sole ghoul that can only be vanquished with treasure, because it safeguards treasure.
The ancestors had warned him about this in their tales too.
5
He set out to gain control of the treasure that would free his thousandfold love from the ghoul’s imprisonment.
The jinn whispered in his breast, and the voices of all creation repeated the jinn’s refrain. The wind hissed the talisman’s secret in his ear. They told him that he would never succeed in gaining the treasure unless he possessed the amulet known as strategic planning. They also told him that this treasure was itself the fruit of strategic planning and that for this reason it would be necessary to rely on strategy to reclaim its offspring.
When he investigated, he realized that caravans traversed the continent, crossing the desert from each of the four directions, bringing from the north loads that were put down en route in oases to exchange for local produce. Then they proceeded further south and marketed their goods within the forestlands’ borders. There they exchanged merchandise from northern and central kingdoms for that coquettish dust. Then they returned by the same route with their find. In the markets of the oases they would display part of their stash, and wizardlike artisans and men with furnaces and hammers would seize the opportunity to transform this dust into gold and to shape the gold into jewelry and coins. Thus the metal increased in brilliance, beauty, and sordidness. The merchants carried their new commodity, their lethal wares, goods that are the only motivation for any conspiracy, the sole reason for which a woman would deceive her mate, a brother would raise a hand to slay his brother, or a prophecy would die on a diviner’s lips. They proceeded with their terrifying wares that had been transformed by wily smiths into a genuine treasure they could proffer as they stormed the central oases and northern kingdoms. He witnessed how it slipped into the oasis and studied the way it drove people insane, disturbing residents’ minds and stripping wisdom from the heads of the wisest sages. He saw its impact on people and believed in its power. Its magic convulsed him, and he began to tremble anxiously whenever he witnessed its gleam. He heard disquieting voices repeat the refrain that the secret’s wares were the market’s destiny. Then someone appeared who claimed these goods were the destiny of oases. Finally, propagandists went even further and avowed that the secret’s wares were life itself. Then he nearly choked in distress, and slipped away from the strongholds of the oasis as though fleeing from a ghoul.
The ghoul standing guard over her treasure, however, eventually forced him to plunge into her strongholds. The ghoul standing guard over her treasure demanded a treasure in exchange for releasing her treasure to him, because a treasure is required to buy treasure, and the only way to escape from the ghoul is to seek refuge with the ghoul.
6
Two days before he burst into the ghoul’s cave, he stole into his beloved’s house. There he found the guardian hovering around her ward’s chamber like a she-demon from the wilds. She gestured to the woman that they wanted to be alone; the crone cast her a threatening look before retreating behind the wall. That night she told him the schemer had decided to grant him only forty days to bring her what she demanded. If luck did not favor him, she would consider herself absolved of her promise and would sell the girl to the owner of a shop for hides and linen in the blacksmiths’ market.
This was a despicable proviso from a despicable creature, but it would not have unnerved him so much had he not seen in his wretched true love’s eyes a lethal pain he at first thought he had never seen before in a living creature. Then this pain reminded him of the eloquent expression in the eyes of a gazelle kid he had surprised in a Barbary-sheep gulch. He had grabbed hold of it with both hands, and it had resisted him for a very long time, trying to escape. When it finally gave up and started shivering silently, he had seen the same expression and the same pain he now witnessed in his beloved’s eyes. It was a look of impotence born of a loss of strength and power and of desperate surrender that discounted any deliverance short of a miracle. It was a pain that surpassed other pains, a despair greater than other types of despair, and a surrender beyond other forms of surrender. What was the significance of this look? What should a person call this type of pain? Was it a calamity or something even greater than that? Yes, yes … in the gazelle’s eyes and in his beloved’s was something even greater than a calamity, because it contained some of the Spirit World’s majesty, the certainty of recluses, the purity of those who expect no boon or beneficence from the world or from worldly people. In it, regardless of everything, there was a mysterious rapture washed with prophecy’s nectar. He bolted from the house as if a snake had bitten him and then slipped into the ghoul’s cave.
7
He saw nothing, felt nothing, and thought nothing till they seized him.
Within him stirred a beast he had never encountered before. It flew him to the treasure’s abode the way the jinn fly desert prophets to the desert’s end. This was a bold soul mate. In its impetuosity, zeal, and nonchalance, he detected the daring of a person who has taken charge of some matter, any matter, oblivious to any shame that might accrue should the matter go awry. He asked himself at once about the provenance of such a soul mate in a desert where the Law disapproves of daring. A man there must inevitably mull over every issue a thousand times and question the diviner time and again before taking a single step forward followed by a step back, in order to overcome at last the whispered insinuations. When he decides to throw his full weight into the struggle, he discovers — too late — that the combat has ended, that the dust has settled, and that only the battle’s debris is left on the field. The reason for this behavior is not a fear of loss. It is, rather, an ancient, age-old dread of the ghoul named dishonor. For this reason he was amazed by the impetuosity of this mysterious soul mate and felt certain, beyond a doubt, that it was a creature from another lineage not affiliated in the slightest fashion with those of the wasteland.
This brute, who excited his admiration and whose feats and heroic deeds astonished him, left him, however, and disappeared the moment he was arrested.
8
They cast him before the leader, who sentenced him to banishment.
He set forth with the first caravan, and they dropped him off in a harsh, dead, lethal patch before the next oasis, because the law governing banishments decrees that the condemned person should not serve his exile in another oasis after he has been convicted of a crime in the previous one. They left him in a deadly wasteland with water, dates, and some barley and continued on their way. He walked along with the caravan for a distance and then stood watching till it reached the horizon, where a mirage swooped toward it, tearing it limb from limb.