by Ben Okri
Historians maintain that in ancient Egyptian tombs there are false doors through which the Ka of the dead can return to the world and eat the offering left for them by the living. This discarded door of Newgate Prison was the door of the criminal dead.
At night the spirits of infamous highway robbers, cut-throats, rapists, and arsonists found their way through this neglected door, and spread waves of criminal thoughts throughout the unsuspecting city. The police were mystified at the sudden rise of old-fashioned crimes. It was as though criminal gangs had an unprecedented wave of inspiration from long-forgotten generations of their fraternity. It seemed to the police that old gangs, lurking in the underworld, had now resurfaced.
There were murders and shadow murders all across the city. Reports of the number of ghost sightings of highwaymen rose dramatically. A boy’s testimony was luridly illustrated in all the papers. He claimed to have seen a dead man with a noose round his neck emerging from an abandoned door. Psychics, spiritualists, and exorcists converged on the door and it didn’t take them long to unanimously pronounce it monstrous.
‘This is the most evil door in the land,’ a priest said.
‘This is the most pain-soaked door in the land,’ a famous medium declared.
Those who lived near the door claimed that at night they could hear cries coming from it, the cries of those who seemed shut up in hell. The clanging and bolting shut of metal haunted the dark hours. The broken howl of decapitation pierced the East End nights.
3
Artists were drawn to the door. Its solid abstract shape, the pattern of its grille, its nocturnal green, and its pullulating metal studs inspired canvasses with unexpected images. Artists composed some of their most infernal paintings under the aegis of its power. They claimed that something seemed to take over their hands while working. One or two artists who painted the door never painted again.
Poets found in the door a romantic image of the criminal spirit. They wrote long Byronic poems about the grimness of the fetter and the unbounded dream of freedom and about unknown doors to the underworld. One or two poets who wrote poems about the door succumbed to fatal addictions and disappeared from their respectable lives in society. One of them took to the highway and was shot dead at night by an exasperated police force. Another poet, whose case was much celebrated in the press, worked on an epic poem about the door for over seventy-two hours without a break and was found dead in his bathrobe with a bottle of absinthe at the foot of his table. The poem was destroyed by his widow. Some of the poets who wrote about the door never wrote poems again, but worked diligently in the advertising industry.
All those who came into contact with the door acknowledged there to be something weird about it. In its vicinity all things were touched by a dark enchanted power. Innocent objects within its radius took on sinister aspects. Around it crawled a torrid spectral life.
4
Then one day something happened which changed the fate of the door.
Children were playing nearby. They were playing games of war, games of fugitive and policemen, of hide and seek. One of the boys hid beneath the door and was never found again. He was a particularly bright boy. He was good at mathematics and had a gift for healing wounded animals. After his disappearance the hauntings by criminals ceased and the tide of old-fashioned crimes waned and fell away altogether.
The Offering
For a long time I wanted to see them. I had heard about them in my childhood in the tales my father told in the evenings with his face turned towards the mountains. My mother had told me stories about them too with woodsmoke in the air. Often when I fell asleep I thought I saw them. But I didn’t see them. For many years I heard no more tales about them. My mother took her tales with her to the grave and I went away to school where they told no tales about such things.
The years were long. I travelled far and went to other lands that were colder than this. Their tales were frozen tales about girls in ice palaces. All through my travels I longed for woodsmoke tales.
I had long finished my studies. I practised now as an anthropologist. But I cared for none of this. I was still that girl who longed to see them.
This summer I decided to take a journey up into the mountains. Maybe something was calling me. I went to that region where they say you can see them. It is an enchanted region high up in the Andes. The people there are poor and their lives are simple. As I ascended the ranges into their villages I knew I had entered a different kind of space.
There were many legends here about them. They said you could see them by the lakes or under the waterfalls. I went walking by the lakes barefoot. All along the shores I saw guitars. They were laid out with a bunch of red or yellow flowers beside them. There were places where I saw guitars on a stone, in the sun, by the river. They seemed like offerings.
Sometimes I heard a ghostly strumming across the lakes and I longed to cross over to see what it was that produced such unearthly music. The villagers told me it was wise not to make such a crossing, that those who crossed over never came back.
They spoke of musicians who came to the lakes hoping to see them. They came with their musical instruments and made offerings and tuned their guitars under the waterfall hoping for the gift of that otherworldly inspiration. Many musicians had died here seeking the gifts of the elusive ones.
I did not eat much in the time I was there. Something about the mood of the place made eating unnecessary. I was not a musician but I wanted the elusive ones to tune my instrument, whatever that might be. I woke early and walked barefoot and carried a yellow flower in my hand in case I saw one of them.
Before dawn, the music from across the lakes was almost too sweet to bear. I alone heard it. The sun then was like a smear of butter on the horizon. Soon the hills would quiver and melt with that celestial furnace. Only the lakes would be cool.
Like a deserted habitation of musicians, the guitars left on the shores and on the rocks glistened with dew. I made no footprints on the virgin shores. The lake at that hour seemed especially enchanted. It was a mountain lake and the first time you rose from the climb and saw it you felt as if you were beholding a miracle. A cry escaped from my lips that made something near me that I couldn’t see flutter and leap back into the water. I saw nothing but the closing of the water’s face. There was something unnerving about the way the water closed its face.
From that moment on my nerves were on edge. It felt like a slow madness was creeping into me. I had the sense of a giant cockatoo just beyond the edge of my vision. I had the sense of someone walking beside me, listening to my thoughts.
It was good to suddenly hear music when I felt like that. It was as if someone had diverted a thread of the waterfalls through my being. I felt on the edge of seeing things not of this world. I was on the edge a long time, for days and weeks, and never quite going over.
Maybe it was my training that held me back. I wanted to lose all I had learnt on those shores. The morning was fresh with the fragrance of legends. The blue mountain lakes were like mint to the eyes. There was so much beauty to see that I could not see. There were drugs I would happily have taken to release me from my bondage.
After the third week, I began to wonder what I was doing there. I was beginning to think of going back down when an old man told me the legend of a secret lake higher up in the mountains.
‘I know what you seek,’ he said. ‘Many have sought it too and have left with nothing. Only those musicians devoted beyond death itself, willing to lose their minds to the harsh goddess of this place, ever find the new sound that their souls crave. Mostly they leave with a new subject or at best some inflection of a mountain riff. I am a musician myself. I am one of those who came to offer my guitar to those who cannot be seen to tune my instrument to a new inspiration that through me may be renewed the soul and temper of the Americas. Some days I thought I had found it, and a strange sound floated across the waters when I played. But after many years I realised that it was merely the altitude, a
nd that I was hearing my old familiar self in these rarefied airs. Then one day I saw what I sought. She touched my guitar and it went mute forever. I could not return to the world with a mute song. So I stayed here and slowly I am becoming part of the stone and part of the shore. Look at my arms, plants are growing on me. This is what it means to seek for unknown revelations. Do you still want to know of this secret lake?’
‘Yes,’ I said, taken aback by the waterfall of his speech.
‘Not many people in these regions know of it. To see it alone is a sign of some sort of spiritual favour. But you won’t know the source of this favour till maybe it is too late. There you will find what you seek.’
‘How do you know what I seek?’
‘I know the hunger and the derangement in those eyes. Mine were like yours once.’
It gave me a shiver to hear him say that.
‘Not many women seek what you seek.’
‘Really?’
‘The ones that do have run away from the furnace of the world.’
‘Do they find what they seek?’
‘Not one that I have heard of.’
‘Has anyone?’
‘No.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘They become part of the legends.’
I had no more questions and stood silently staring into the sky. It was then that he described the special path I must take, and the special rituals I must make, to find the secret lake.
The next morning early, I set off. White birds with yellow beaks were on the wind. Wisps of an anguished guitar melody sounded from a half open door. My footsteps echoed on the face of the lake. I walked for a long time towards the rising heat. There were moments when my head swayed and I felt as if I had drunk a barrel of raw beer. Sometimes I forgot myself and it was as if the road were walking me. By the early afternoon I arrived and my feet were blistered and the altitude made my nerves jumpy. I had arrived but I still could not see this secret lake that the old man had spoken about.
I went on walking till I saw a boy playing by the path. I asked him about the secret lake and he smiled as if he were expecting me. Before I had finished he jumped up on his feet and with an excited half walk half run led me round many turns, through narrow spaces in the mountains where the rocks grazed my face, through a field of sorrel. I saw flowers I have never seen before.
‘Can you not see it?’ I suddenly heard the boy say.
I looked up but saw nothing. The boy was ahead of me. I followed him at a run.
I certainly did not want to lose him now, after all the heat blisters on my face. I saw him turn the corner of a misshapen rock. When I went round the rock I could have fallen into it.
There it was, in the palm of the mountains, a pristine blue silvery lake that only time had breathed on. Slowly, across its face, birds inscribed their arcane alphabets. Here was not the legend, but the source of legends itself.
The boy was not looking at the lake, nor at me. It was a moment before I realised he was looking beyond me. I turned and saw nothing. Then I heard a delayed splash in the lake right near where I was standing.
‘Did you see her?’
‘Who?’
‘Her.’
‘Who?’
‘The woman of the water. Didn’t you see her?’
‘No.’
‘You were looking at her.’
‘Was I?’
‘And she was looking at you.’
‘I didn’t see her.’
‘I thought you knew her.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The way you were looking at her. She knew you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The way she was smiling at you.’
‘She was smiling at me?’
‘Yes. I think she likes you.’
‘Now you are talking nonsense.’
‘Didn’t you see the sign she made you?’
‘What sign?’
He made the sign. It was an invitation, a call, a summons.
‘Was that the sign?’
‘Yes. She made it once.’
‘Once.’
‘Yes. I have never heard of her doing that before.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think she likes you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s nothing.’
He stayed a moment. I gave him a coin. He took it and ran off back to the village. I sat by the shore, at the exact spot where the boy had seen her. I stared a long time at the lake. Then I took my clothes off and dived into the blue waters.
But when I dived in the water was gone. A woman stood there in the empty space where the lake had been and said:
‘I hear that you came here seeking something. What did you seek?’
‘I wanted to see them.’
‘Who are them?’
‘The elusive ones of the lake.’
‘What do you want from them?’
‘I too want to tune my instrument to a new inspiration.’
‘Where is your instrument? The others leave their guitars on the shore or under the waterfall. Where is yours?’
‘I am my instrum…’
*
When I show people pictures of the lake all they see are its pale blue and muted silver and the low ring of mountains.
They never see what I saw afterwards.
Don Ki-Otah* and the Ambiguity of Reading
When he came into the printer’s shop, we thought he was drunk. He had come to see for himself the machine that multiplies realities. He came in with his machete drawn. He had been passing by on one of his adventures to the North. He had heard that there was a war going on between giants and men. He wanted to fight against the giants. He claimed to have fought them before.
When he came into the shop he had the idea that the printing machine was in some way antagonistic to him. We had been working the shafts and the steel plates, applying oils and clearing the machine of impediments. He approached the machine as though it were a dangerous foe.
It took a while to realise he wasn’t drunk at all. He was just rough in speech. He had a restless spirit and a boundless imagination.
Conversation with him was difficult. He was liable to misunderstand the simplest thing you said. His companion, Sancho, seemed the only person who could calm him down. We asked Sancho to get him to drop his machete. But Sancho too had diabolical notions about the printing machine. We had two mad people in that tight space.
There have been many accounts of what happened when Don Ki-Otah stumbled into the first printer’s shop he had ever encountered. Most of the accounts are lies. When an event passes into legend, people always claim they were there at the time. I was there when it happened. I was there.
‘Let me see how it works!’ Don Ki-Otah commanded, waving the machete close to my chin.
He stood over the machine, his eyes flashing. I noticed his beard for the first time. It was long and white and pointed. His eyes had great vigour. His proximity made the space around him charged. What it was charged with I cannot say.
‘What would you like to see?’ I asked.
‘Print something.’
‘Anything?’
He gave me a sharp look.
‘Yes.’
I continued printing what was on the blocks. I worked laboriously, sweating under the ferocity of his gaze. It was hard to work while he breathed down my neck. Eventually I pulled out some freshly printed pages.
‘You have to wait for them to dry,’ I said.
‘I will wait.’
He still had the machete. His eyes made you think he was mad.
For him, waiting involved a special passion. I had never seen anyone wait with such intensity. It was as if by the force of his spirit he was regulating the motions of the moon or the subtle energies that flow through all things.
When a person is touched by greatness might it not be because they are resonating with this subtle energy that runs through spider’s webs and the intr
icate motion of the stars?
While he was waiting I noticed that he was concentrating on a crest of cobwebs in a high corner of the workshop. I was ashamed of the state of the place and became defensive.
‘We clean the place once every we—’
He cut through my explanation with the sword of his wit.
‘If only,’ he said, with a glint in his eyes, ‘if only we knew the webs that connect us, it would be easier to send a message to the highest authorities with a tug of thought than by protesting at their gates.’
He must have noticed the blankness of my look.
‘I believe that the true warrior acts on the secret foundations of things, don’t you?’
I gave him a look of incomprehension. The level at which he spoke was too elevated for me. Then I noticed something else about Don Ki-Otah. He was a walking encyclopaedia of nonsense and wonders. While waiting he began a dissertation on the analogies between the spider’s web and people’s inability to alter the world. He philosophised while we waited. I couldn’t make out much of what he said. I heard fall from his lips words like Amadís of Gaul, Plato, the Knights of the Arduous Road. He mentioned the tragedies of Sophocles, the last ironic paragraph of Things Fall Apart, and a fragment of Okigbo which he quoted again and again. Then he let fall a string of Luo proverbs, incanted a Swahili song, and strung out an Urhobo fable from which he drew threads of a luminous wisdom that held us spell-bound.
When something extraordinary is happening in your life, time has a way of becoming an underwater phenomenon. It may be the distance of forty years, but there was a curious charm about those hours. It was a charm tinged with the old African magic one rarely encounters anymore. Sometimes one comes upon a seer emerging briefly from a long solitude in the forest. Don Ki-Otah was like one of those seers. Like a story made real for a moment, he came into our lives, and then he was gone.
