However mad that ride, I shared the madness and abandoned myself to the hour and the whirr and the rush and the roar with a wild happiness in my heart -and the wind that rushed past my face sang out: 'never again wilt thou be a stranger ... never again, among thy people!'
And as I lie in the sand under my flapping abaya, the roar of the sandstorm seems to echo: 'never again wilt thou be a stranger ...'
I am no longer a stranger: Arabia has become my home. My Western past is like a distant dream -not unreal enough to be forgotten, and not real enough to be part of my present. Not that I have become a lotus-eater. On the contrary, whenever I happen to stay for some months in a town -as, for instance, in Medina, where I have an Arab wife and an infant son and a library full of books on early Islamic history -I grow uneasy and begin to yearn for action and movement, for the dry, brisk air of the desert, for the smell of dromedaries and the feel of the camel saddle. Oddly enough, the urge to wander that has made me so restless for the greater part of my life (I am a little over thirty two now) and lures me again and again into all manner of hazards and encounters, does not stem so much from a thirst for adventure as from a longing to find my own restful place in the world -to arrive at a point where I could correlate all that might happen to me with all that I might think and feel and desire. And if I understand it rightly, it is this longing for inner discovery that has driven me, over the years, into a world entirely different, both in its perceptions and its outer forms, from all to which my European birth and upbringing had seemed to destine me...
WHEN THE STORM finally subsides, I shake myself free of the sand that has been heaped around me. My dromedary is half buried in it, but none the worse for an experience that must have befallen it many times. The storm itself, it would seem at first glance, has not done us any damage apart from filling my mouth, ears and nostrils with sand and blowing away the sheepskin from my saddle. But soon I discover my error.
All the dunes around me have changed their outlines. My own tracks and those of the missing camel have been blown away. I am standing on virgin ground.
Now nothing remains but to go back to the camp -or at least to try to go back -with the help of the sun and the general sense of direction which is almost an instinct with someone accustomed to travelling in deserts. But here these two aids are not entirely reliable, for sand dunes do not allow you to go in a straight line and so to keep the direction you have chosen.
The storm has made me thirsty, but, not expecting to be away from camp for more than a few hours, I have long ago drunk the last sip from my small waterskin. However, it cannot be far to the camp; and although my dromedary has had no water since our last stop at a well some two days ago, it is an old campaigner and can be relied upon to carry me back. I set its nose toward where I think the camp must lie, and we start at a brisk pace.
An hour passes, a second, and a third, but there is no trace of Zayd or of our camping ground. None of the orange-coloured hills presents a familiar appearance; it would be difficult indeed to discover anything familiar in them even if there had been no storm.
Late in the afternoon I come upon an outcrop of granite rocks, so rare in the midst of these sand wastes, and recognize them immediately: we passed them, Zayd and I, yesterday afternoon, not long before we made camp for the night. I am greatly relieved; for though it is obvious that I am way beyond the place where I hoped to find Zayd -having probably missed him by a couple of miles or so -it seems to me that it should not now be difficult to find him by simply going in a southwesterly direction, as we did yesterday.
There were, I remember, about three hours between the rocks and our night camp: but when I now ride for three more hours, there is no sign of the camp or of Zayd. Have I missed him again? I push forward, always toward southwest, taking the movement of the sun carefully into account; two more hours pass, but still there is no camp and no Zayd. When night falls, I decide it is senseless to continue further; better rest and wait for the morning light. I dismount, hobble the dromedary, try to eat some dates but am too thirsty: and so I give them to the camel and lie down with my head against its body.
Itis a fitful doze into which I fall: not quite sleep and not quite waking, but a succession of dream states brought about by fatigue, broken by a thirst that has gradually become distressing; and, somewhere in those depths which one does not want to uncover to oneself, there is that grey, squirming mollusk of fear: what will happen to me if I do not find my way back to Zayd and to our water skins? -for, as far as I know, there is no water and no settlement for many days' journey in all directions.
At dawn I start again. During the night I calculated that I must have gone too far to the south and that, therefore, Zayd's camp ought to be somewhere north-northeast of the place where I spent the night. And so toward north-northeast we go, thirsty and tired and hungry, always threading our way in wavy lines from valley to valley, circumventing sand hills now to the right, now to the left. At noon we rest. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and feels like old, cracked leather; the throat is sore and the eyes inflamed. Pressed to the camel's belly, with my abaya drawn over my head, I try to sleep for a while, but cannot. The afternoon sees us again on the march, this time in a more easterly direction -for by now I know that we have gone too far west -but still there is no Zayd and no camp.
Another night comes. Thirst has grown to be torment, and the desire for water the one, the overpowering thought in a mind that can no longer hold orderly thoughts. But as soon as dawn lightens the sky, I ride on: through the morning, through noonday, into the afternoon of another day. Sand dunes and heat. Dunes behind dunes, and no end. Or is this perhaps the end the end of all my roads, of all my seeking and finding? Of my coming to the people among whom I would never again be a stranger...? 'O God,' I pray, 'let me not perish thus…'
In the afternoon I climb a tall dune in the hope of getting a better view of the landscape. When I suddenly discern a dark point far to the east, I could cry with joy, only I am too weak for that: for this must be Zayd's encampment, and the water skins, the two big water skins full of water! My knees shake as I remount my dromedary. Slowly, cautiously, we move in the direction of that black point which can surely be nothing but Zayd's camp. This time I take every precaution not to miss it: I ride in a straight line, up sand hills, down sand valleys, thus doubling, trebling our toil, but spurred by the hope that within a short; while, within two hours at the most, I shall reach my goal. And finally, after we have crossed the last dune crest, the goal comes clearly within my sight, and I rein in the camel, and look down upon the dark something less than half a mile away, and my heart seems to stop beating: for what I see before me is the dark outcrop of granite rocks which I passed three days ago with Zayd and revisited two days ago alone... For two days I have going in a circle.
4
WHEN I SLIDE DOWN from the saddle, I am entirely exhausted. I do not even bother to hobble the camel's legs, and indeed the beast is too tired to think of running away. I weep; but no tears come from my dry, swollen eyes. How long it is since I have wept ... But, then, is not everything long past? Everything is past, and there is no present.
There is only thirst. And heat. And torment. I have been without water for nearly three days now, and it is five days since my dromedary has had its last drink. It could probably carryon like this for one day more, perhaps two; but I cannot, I know it, last that long. Perhaps I shall go mad before 1 die, for the pain in my body is ensnarled with the dread in my mind, and the one makes the other grow, searing and whispering and tearing. . .
I want to rest, but at the same time I know that if I rest now I shall never be able to get up again. I drag myself into the saddle and force the dromedary with beating and kicking to get up; and almost fall from the saddle when the animal lurches forward while rising on its hind legs and, again, when it lurches backward, straightening its forelegs. We begin to move, slowly, painfully, due west. Due west: what a mockery! What does 'due west' amount to in this deceptive, undulating sea of sand hills?
But I want to live. And so we go on.
We plod with the rest of our strength through the night. It must be morning when I fall from the saddle. I do not fall hard; the sand is soft and embracing. The camel, stands still for a while, then slides down with a sigh on its knees, then on its hind legs, and lies crouched by my side with its neck stretched on the sand. I lie on the sand in the narrow shadow of the dromedary's body, wrapped in my abaya against the heat outside me and the pain and thirst and dread within me. I cannot think any more. I cannot close my eyes. Every movement of the lids is like hot metal on the eye-balls. Thirst and heat; thirst and crushing silence: a dry silence that swathes you in its shroud of loneliness and despair and makes the singing of blood in your ears and the camel's occasional sigh stand out, threateningly, as though these were the last sounds on earth and you two, the man and the beast, the last living beings, doomed beings, on earth.
High above us, in the swimming heat, a vulture circles slowly, without ever stopping, a pinpoint against the hard paleness of the sky, free and above all horizons ... " My throat is swollen, constricted, and every breath moves a thousand torturing needles at the' base of my tongue -that big, tongue which should not move but cannot stop moving in pain backward forward, like a rasp against the dry cavity of my mouth. All my inside are hot and intertwined in one unceasing grip of agony. For seconds the steely sky becomes black to my wide-open eyes.
My hand moves, as if of its own, and strikes against the hard butt of the carbine slung on the saddle-peg. And the hand stands still, and with sudden clarity the mind sees the five good shells in the magazine and the quick end that a pressure on the trigger could bring ... Something in me whispers: Move quickly, get the carbine before you are unable to move again!
And then I feel my lips move and shape toneless words that come from some dark recesses of my mind: 'We shall try you ... most certainly try you...' and the blurred words slowly assume shape and fall into pattern-a verse from the Koran: We shall most certainly try you with fear and hunger and with the lack of possessions and labor's fruits. But give the good tiding to those who remain steadfast and, when calamity befalls them, say: 'Behold, to God we belong and unto Him do we return.'
Everything is hot and dark; but out of the hot darkness I sense a cooling breath of wind and hear it rustle softly -wind rustling, as if in trees -over water -and the water is the sluggish little stream between grassy banks, near the home of my childhood. I am lying on the bank, a little boy of nine or ten years, chewing a grass stalk and gazing at the white cows which graze nearby with great, dreamy eyes and the innocence of contentment. In the distance peasant women work in the field. One of them wears a red· head-kerchief and a blue skirt with broad red stripes. Willow trees stand on the bank of the stream, and over its surface glides a white duck, making the water glitter in its wake. And the soft wind rustles over my face like an animal's snort: oh, yes, it is indeed an animal's snort: the big white cow with the brown spots has come quite close to me and now nudges me, snorting, with its muzzle, and I feel the movement of its legs by my side...
I open my eyes, and hear the snort of my dromedary, and feel the movement of its legs by my side. It has half raised itself on its hind legs with uplifted neck and head, its nostrils widened as if scenting a sudden, welcome smell in the noon air. It snorts again, and I sense the excitement rippling down its long neck toward the shoulder and the big, half-raised body. I have seen camels snuffle and snort like this when they scent water after long days of desert travel; but there is no water here... Or -is there? I lift my head and follow with my eyes the direction toward which the camel has turned its head. It is the dune nearest us, a low summit against the steely bleakness of the sky, empty of movement or sound. But there is a sound! There is a faint sound like the vibration of an old harp, very delicate and brittle, high pitched: the high-pitched, brittle sound of a beduin voice chanting on the march in rhythm with the camel's tread -just beyond the summit of the sand hill, quite near as distances go, but -I know it in a fraction of an instant-far beyond my reach or the sound of my voice. There are people there, but I cannot reach them. I am too weak even to get up. I try to shout, but only a hoarse grunt comes from my throat. And then my hand strikes, as if of its own, against the hard butt of the carbine on the saddle... and with the eye of my mind I see the five good shells in the magazine...
With a supreme effort I manage to unsling the weapon from the saddle-peg. Drawing the bolt is like lifting a mountain, but finally it is done. I stand the carbine on its butt and fire as hot vertically into the air. The bullet whines into the emptiness with a pitifully thin sound. I draw the bolt again and fire again, and then listen. The harp like singing has stopped. For a moment there is nothing but silence. Suddenly a man's head, and then .his shoulders, appear over the crest of the dune; and another man by his side. They look down for a while, then turn around and shout something to some invisible companions, and the man in front clambers over the crest and half runs, half slides down the slope toward me.
There is commotion around me: two, three men -what a crowd after all that loneliness! -are trying to lift me up, their movements a most confusing pattern of arms and legs. . . I feel something burning-cold, like ice and fire, on my lips, and see a bearded beduin face bent over me, his hand pressing a dirty, moist rag against my mouth. The man's other hand is holding an open wate rskin. I make an instinctive move toward it, but the, beduin gently pushes my hand back, dunks the rag into the water and again presses a few drops onto my lips. I have to bite' my teeth together to prevent the water from burning my throat; but the beduin pries my teeth, apart and again drops some water into my mouth. It is not water: it is molten lead. Why are they doing this to me? I want to run away from the torture, but they hold me back, the devils... My skin is burning. My whole body is in flames. Do they want to kill me? Oh, if only I had the strength to get hold of my rifle to defend myself! But they do not even let me rise: they hold me down to the ground and pry my mouth open again and drip water into it, and I have to swallow it -and, strangely enough, it does not burn as fiercely as a moment ago -and the wet rag on my head feels good, and when they pour water over my body, the touch of the wet clothes brings a shudder of delight...
And then all goes black, I am falling, falling down a deep well, the speed of my falling makes the air rush past my ears, the rushing grows into a roar, a roaring blackness, black, black...
BLACK, BLACK, a soft blackness without sound, a good and friendly darkness that embraces you like a warm blanket and makes you wish that you could always remain like this, so wonderfully tired and sleepy and lazy; and there is really no need. for you to open your eyes or to move your arm; but you do move your arm and do open your eyes: only to see darkness above you, the woolen darkness of a beduin tent made of black goat hair, with a narrow opening in front that shows you a piece of starry night sky and the soft curve of a dune shimmering under the starlight. .. And then the tent-opening darkens and a man's figure stands in it, the outline of his flowing cloak sharply etched against the sky, and 1 hear Zayd's voice exclaim: 'He is awake, he is awake!' -and his austere face comes quite close to my own and his hand grips my shoulder. Another man enters the tent; I cannot clearly see him, but as soon as he speaks with a slow, solemn voice I know he is a Shammar beduin.
Again I feel a hot, consuming thirst and grip hard the bowl of milk which Zayd holds out toward me; but there is no longer any pain when I gulp it down while Zayd relates how this small group of beduins happened to camp near him at the time when the sandstorm broke loose, and how, when the strayed camel calmly returned by itself during the night, they became worried and went out, all of them together, to search for me; and how, after nearly three days, when they had almost given up hope, they heard my rifle shots from behind a dune...
And now they have erected a tent over me and I am ordered to lie in it tonight and tomorrow. Our beduin friends are in no hurry; their water skins are full; they have even been able to give three bucketful to my dromedary: for they know that one day's journey toward the south will bring them, and us, to an oasis where there is a well. And in the meantime the camels have fodder enough in the hamdh bushes that grow all around. After a while, Zayd helps me out of the tent, spreads a blanket on the sand, and I lie down under the stars.
A FEW HOURS LATER I awaken to the clanking of Zayd's coffeepots; the smell of fresh coffee is like a woman's embrace.
'Zayd l' I call out, and am pleasantly surprised that my voice, though still tired, has lost its croak. 'Wilt thou give me some coffee?'
'By God I will, O my uncle!' answers Zayd, following the old Arab custom of thus addressing a man to whom one wants to show respect, be he older or younger than the speaker (as it happens, I am a few years younger than Zayd). 'Thou shalt have as much coffee as thy heart desires!' I drink my coffee and grin at Zayd's happy countenance.
'Why, brother, do we expose ourselves to such things instead of staying in our homes like sensible people?"
"Because,' Zayd grins back at me, 'it is not for the like of thee and me to wait in our homes until the limbs become stiff and old age overtakes us. And besides, do not people die in their houses as well. Does not man always carry his destiny around his neck, wherever he may be?"
The word Zayd uses for 'destiny' is qisma -'that which is apportioned' -better known to the West in its Turkish form, kismet. And while I sip another cup of coffee, it passes through my mind that this Arabic expression has another, deeper meaning as well: 'that in which one has a share.'
That in which one has a share...
These words strike a faint, elusive chord in my memory ... there was a grin that accompanied them ... whose grin? A grin behind a cloud of smoke, pungent smoke, like the smoke of hashish: yes -it was the smoke of hashish, and the grin belonged to one of the strangest men I have ever met -and I met him after one of the strangest experiences of my life: while trying to escape from a danger that seemed -only seemed -to be imminent in its threat, I had been racing, without knowing it, into a danger far more real, far more imminent, than the one I was trying to elude: and both the unreal danger and the real one led to another escape...
It all happened nearly eight years ago, when I was travelling on horseback, accompanied by my Tatar servant Ibrahim, from Shiraz to Kirman in southern Iran -a desolate, thinly populated, roadless stretch near Niris Lake. Now, in winter, it was a squelchy, muddy steppe with no villages in the vicinity, hedged in to the south by Kuh-i-Gushnegan, 'the Mountains of the Hungry' toward the north it dissolved into the swamps that bordered the lake. In the afternoon, as we circumvented an isolated hill, the lake came suddenly into view: a motionless green surface without breath or sound or life, for the water was so salty that no fish could live in it. Apart from a few crippled trees and desert shrubs, the salty soil near its shores did not allow any vegetation to grow. The ground was lightly covered with muddy snow and over it, at a distance of about two hundred yards from the shore, ran a thinly outlined path.
The evening fell and the caravanserai of Khan-i-Khet -our goal for the night-was nowhere in sight. But we had to reach it at any price; far and wide there was no other settlement, and the nearness of the swamps made progress in darkness extremely hazardous. In fact, we had been warned in the morning not to venture there alone, for one false step might easily mean sudden death. Apart from that, our horses were very tired after a long day's march over oozy ground and had to be rested and fed.
With the coming of the night heavy rain set in. We rode, wet and morose and silent, relying on the instinct of the horses rather than on our useless eyes. Hours passed: and no caravanserai appeared. Perhaps we had passed it by in the darkness and would now have to spend the night in the open under a downpour that was steadily mounting in strength... The hooves of our horses splashed through water; our sodden clothes clung heavily to our bodies. Black and opaque hung the night around us under its veils of streaming water; we were chilled to the bone; but the knowledge that the swamps were so close was even more chilling. Should the horses at any time miss the solid ground -'then may God have mercy upon you,' we had been warned in the morning.
I rode ahead, with Ibrahim following perhaps ten paces behind. A gait and again the terrifying thought: Had we left Khan-i-Khet behind us in the darkness? What an evil prospect, to have to spend the night under the cold rain; but if we proceeded farther -what about the swamps?
All of a sudden a soft, squishy sound from under my horse's hooves; I felt the animal slide in the muck, sink in a little, draw up one leg frantically, slide again -and the thought pierced my mind: the swamp! I jerked the reins hard and dug my heels into the horse's flanks. It tossed its head high and started working its legs furiously. My skin broke out in cold perspiration. The night was so black that I could not even discern my own hands, but in the convulsive heaving of the horse's body I sensed its desperate struggle against the embrace of the swamp. Almost without thinking, I grabbed the riding crop which ordinarily hung unused at my wrist and struck the horse's hindquarters with all my might, hoping thus to incite it to utmost effort -for if it stood still now, it would be sucked, and I with it, deeper and deeper into the mud... Unaccustomed to such ferocious beating, the poor beast -a Kashgai stallion of exceptional speed and power -reared on its hind legs, struck the ground with all fours again, strained gaspingly against the mud, jumped, slipped, heaved itself forward again, and slipped again -and all the time its hooves beat desperately against the soft, oozy mire...
Some mysterious object swept with a swish over my head I raised my hand and received a hard, incomprehensible blow. What from? Time and thought tumbled over one another and became confused... Through the splashing of the rain and the panting of the horse I could hear, for seconds that were like hours, the relentless sucking sound of the swamp... The end must be near. I loosened my feet from the stirrups, ready to jump from the saddle and try my luck alone -perhaps I could save myself if I lay fiat on the ground -when suddenly -unbelievably-the horse's hooves struck against hard ground, once, twice... and, with a sob of relief, I pulled there in sand brought the quivering animal to a standstill. We were saved...
Only now did I remember my companion and called out, fun of terror, 'Ibrahim!' No answer. My heart went cold.
'Ibrahim...!' -but there was only the black night around me and the falling rain. Had he been unable to save himself? With a hoarse voice I called out once again, 'Ibrahim!'
And then, almost beyond belief, a shout sounded faintly from a great distance: 'Here ... I am here!' Now it was my reason's turn to stand still: how had we become so widely separated?
'Ibrahim!'
'Here ... here!' -and following the sound, leading my horse by the reins and testing every inch of ground with my feet, I walked very slowly, very carefully toward the distant voice: and there was Ibrahim, sitting calmly in his saddle.
'What has happened to you, Ibrahim? Didn't you also blunder into the swamp?' 'Swamp ...? No -I simply stood still when you suddenly, I don't know why, galloped away.'
Galloped away . . . The riddle was solved. The struggle against the swamp had been only a fruit of my imagination. My horse must have simply stepped into a muddy rut and I, thinking that we were being drawn into the morass, had whipped it into a frenzied gallop; cheated by the darkness, I had mistaken the animal's forward movement for a desperate struggle against the swamp, and had been racing blindly through the night, unaware of the many gnarled trees that dotted the plain.... These trees, and not the swamp, had been the immediate, real danger: the small twig that had struck my hand could as well have been a larger branch, which might have broken my skull and thus brought my journey to a decisive end in an unmarked grave in southern Iran...
I was furious with myself, doubly furious because now we had lost all orientation and could no longer find a trace of the path, now we would never find the caravanserai...
But once again I was mistaken.
Ibrahim dismounted to feel the terrain with his hands and so perhaps to rediscover the path; and while he was crawling thus on all fours, his head suddenly struck a wall -the dark wall of the caravanserai of Khan-i-Khet!
But for my imaginary blundering into the swamp we would have gone on, missed the caravanserai and truly lost ourselves in the swamps which, as we subsequently learned, began less than two hundred yards ahead ...
The caravanserai was one of the many decayed remnants of the epoch of Shah Abbas the Great -mighty blocks of masonry with vaulted passageways, gaping doorways and crumbling fireplaces. Here and there you could discern traces of old carving over the lintels and cracked majolica tiles; the few inhabitable rooms were littered with old straw and horse dung. When Ibrahim and I entered the main hall, we found the overseer of the caravanserai seated by an open fire on the bare ground. At his side was a bare-footed man of diminutive size draped in a tattered cloak. Both rose to their feet at our appearance, and the little stranger bowed solemnly with an exquisite, almost theatrical gesture, the right hand placed over the heart. His cloak was covered with innumerable multicolored patches; he was dirty, entirely unkempt; but his eyes were shining and his face serene.
The overseer left the room to attend to our horses. I threw off my soaked tunic, while Ibrahim immediately set himself to making tea over the open fire. With the condescension of a great lord who forfeits none of his dignity by being courteous to his inferiors, the odd little man graciously accepted the cup of tea which Ibrahim held out toward him.
Without any show of undue curiosity, as if opening a drawing room conversation, he turned to me:'You are English, janab-i-ali?'
'No, I am a Namsawi' (Austrian).
'Would it be improper to ask if it is business that brings you to these parts?'
'I am a writer for newspapers,' I replied. 'I am travelling through your country to describe it to the people of my own. They love to know how others live and what they think.'
He nodded with an approving smile and lapsed into silence. After a while he drew a small clay water pipe and a bamboo rod from the folds of his cloak; he attached the rod to the clay vessel; then he rubbed something that looked like tobacco between his palms and placed it carefully, as ifit were more precious than gold, in the bowl of the pipe, covering it with live coals. With a visible effort, he drew in the smoke through the bamboo rod, violently coughing and clearing his throat in the process. The water in the clay pipe bubbled and a biting odor began to fill the room. And then I recognized it: it was Indian hemp, hashish -and now I understood also the man's strange mannerisms: he was a hashshashi, an addict. His eyes were not veiled like those of opium smokers; they shone with a kind of detached, impersonal intensity, staring into a distance that was immeasurably removed from the real world around them.
I looked on in silence. When he finished his pipe at last, he asked me:
'Will you not try it?'
I refused with thanks; I had tried opium once or twice (without any particular enjoyment), but this hashish business seemed too strenuous and unappetizing even to try. The hashshashi laughed soundlessly; his squinting eyes glided over me with a friendly irony:
'I know what you are thinking. O my respected friend: you are thinking that hashish is the work of the devil and are afraid of' it, Nonsense. Hashish is a gift from God. Very good -especially for the mind. Look here, hazrat, let me explain it to you. Opium is bad -there can be no doubt about it -for it awakens in man a craving for unattainable things; it makes his dreams greedy, like those of an animal. But hashish silences all greed and makes one indifferent to all things of the world. That's it: it makes one contented. You could place a mound of gold before a hashshashi not just while he is smoking, but at any time -and he would not even stretch out his little finger for it. Opium makes people weak and cowardly, but hashish kills all fear and makes a man brave as a lion. If you were to ask a hashshashi to dive into an icy stream in the middle of winter, he would simply dive into it and laugh... For he has learned that to be without greed is to be without fear -and that if man goes beyond fear he goes beyond danger as well, knowing that whatever happens to him is but his share in all that is happening... '
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