The scattered remnants of the tribe returned from their sojourn in the heights. They moved through their retreats, set out foundations, raised the tent poles, searched for lost possessions and missing items that they typically forfeited whenever a blessing arrived and when the Unknown granted them rains.
They were so preoccupied by searching for necessities, possessions, and chattels that they forgot about themselves and ignored the birth of birds in the skies, which were still obscured by fogs. The children would go out to play in the mud puddles in the neighboring plains. So they were the first to discover the appearance of sprouts growing from cracks in the rocks and raced home with the good news.
XIII
THE SACRIFICE
Just as children gather round their mother, things in this world thirst for ritual sacrifice.
Rig Veda
1
“Water in the sky, and water on the earth: if you lack water in the sky, search for water in the earth.” The tomb’s Diviner uttered this prophecy aloud, inscribed it on a piece of leather with a metal skewer, which she had heated in the fire, and then sent it to the Council of Sages. These nobles, however, were so used to cryptic expressions in news from the Spirit World that they could not believe they had been granted a prophecy that did not require extensive exegesis. So they searched for the hidden meaning beneath the apparent one for nights. They were skeptical of the apparent meaning, saying that the Law had cautioned them against accepting statements at face value, because anyone who trusted what he saw, believed what he heard, and accepted what he was given met a fate like the traveler who violated the law of the road by leaning over a rope left in the middle of the trail. After he took it and placed it around his waist, the rope changed into a snake that killed him during the night when he lay down to sleep.
The elders’ debate lasted for days. Finally they sent a messenger to the Temple Priestess with a question that would put an end to their doubts. They received in return a square of leather with the prophecy two days later: “Water in the sky, and water on the earth: if you lack water in the sky, search for water in the earth.”
They abandoned their debate and consulted with each other. They scouted all four directions and reached a consensus in favor of the depression that lay south of the plain. Then they sacrificed a young billy goat and began to dig.
2
The poets sing in praise of the Red Hammada’s beauty, calling it the sky’s true love. It rises far above the elevation of the other deserts, reaches into space, and pursues distant stars on its way to unite with its beloved. It utilizes shanks of solid rock and strives to reach the heights on pillars of mountain peaks. But it stops halfway for a reason the ancestors did not explain, not even in the traditions of the first fathers. The later generations did inherit from their grandfathers sad songs that compare this patch of ground suspended in the celestial void to a nomad who chose solitude, not because he wanted to flee from people but because he pitied people. Then he lost his way, and the labyrinth became his sole homeland. The Hammada that swims in space’s expanses is another vagabond homeland. Thus it has not obtained its share of water from the sky, thirst has parched its lands, and it is incapable of chasing after the waters that flee to lowlands of the Southern desert (where the lake of Great Waw once swelled and where a mighty sea of sand cowers today) or slip to the North to pour their gift into the distant sea. So it is said that the Red Hammada is the only desert area that feeds neighboring regions with its blood, gives other deserts the secret of life, and chooses drought as its destiny—pursuant to the Law’s dictates, which say that a parched land is nobler than wet ones.
Despite the terrifying elevation, despite the deluge’s flow to the North and South, the suspended desert found a way to conceal its waters in severe, solid stone. Thus since the most ancient times the nomad’s hand has reached down to dig in solid boulders shafts so deep that the eye cannot discern the bottom. Later desert dwellers called these passages “wells.”
From the West appeared unidentified ancestors, who settled there. They enjoyed living in the expanses of the suspended body. They were, however, soon caught off guard by the heat and tasted the bitterness of thirst. So they split open the earth’s belly and crumbled the solid stone with their hands. They were not destined to reach water for several generations. For years tribes have passed down to the next generation the well of the Western Hammada, giving it many names, which changed from one generation to the next. The last of these was Efartas.
People came from the South and met the same fate as the ancient people from the West. They dug into the dirt with a zeal that surpassed the ardor of rats. Far down they reached water and gave the Southern well many names. The last of these was “Thirsty Man’s Well.”
Peoples arrived from the North and proceeded to search for their share of water in the depressions of the awe-inspiring mountain ranges that characterize the North. Local historians relate that the luck of these peoples was worse than that of the other tribes. They dug very many wells before they drew water from two called Awal and Emgharghar. Herdsmen still discover the vestiges of all these wells and find their mouths sealed with circular slabs of cut stone. They are delighted, exult, and call back and forth to each other, thinking that they have discovered a new mouth for the earth. But their joy turns to sorrow when they discover that the well is nothing but an empty pit. Despite their disappointment, the sages did not despair. Frequently they found random wells that were more like cisterns, because their water was not merely fetid, bitter, or weird smelling but the quantity was limited and was exhausted as soon as herds of camels visited it once or twice.
The strangest, deepest, and oldest well, however, is Harakat, which is situated at the heart of this suspended planet. In their songs poets refer to it as “the gift from the people of passion” or “the lovers’ miracle,” because narrators say that a lover who was a member of the first tribes dug it as a symbol of fidelity to his beloved, who was coming from the East to marry him when thirst killed her en route. The lover wept a long time for her. Then he realized that his glory would come not from weeping for his beloved in verse but in conquering the ghoul that had taken her from him.
The lover searched the Hammada from the extreme East right through the central areas inch by inch and scoured it with an army of hired assistants, servants, and vassals. Then he did not discover even moisture left behind by floodwaters in the lowest strata of the earth. All the same, he hired more workers, purchased armies of slaves, made use of people coming from every direction, and proceeded to fight the rock and to chisel away the solid stone without succeeding in discovering the treasure. The tops of many wells caved in during this struggle as the earth claimed its sacrificial offerings repeatedly through cave-ins. Many slaves fled and even more hired hands quit, but the lover bought more slaves to replace those who had fled and paid the new workers even more liberally, replacing the army of explorers who had quit. So the excavations continued with even greater zeal each time he welcomed a new army into his ranks as recruits. Other tracts of land were harrowed as time passed. The commander of this army was the only person who wasn’t conscious of the passage of time, who did not notice the changing seasons, and who did not hear the screams of the many babies who were born. Likewise information about people who grew tired and lay down beside their fathers beneath piles of rocks in the tombs of the slopes escaped him. He kept stooping over the earth, inspecting its markings as if reading in them a prophecy that confirmed that life did not consist of trekking like nomads across vast expanses in search of a rendezvous beyond the horizon. Instead, life meant kneeling on the ground and searching for treasure in the deepest pits. For this reason, wrinkles formed on the lover’s skin, and networks of veins showed on his face and arms. His heart, however, did not grow old, and the sparks in his breast did not die out. In this way he lost all his peers and contemporaries, all the members of his generation. He became his generation’s sole heir.
He was his generation’s he
ir because he did not follow his generation’s path. His peers disappeared because they spread over the earth, seeking something that did not exist. He differed from his peers because he did not move across the earth and did not waste time on what the earth lacked. His contemporaries had long ago passed away, bequeathing life to a person who had renounced life and did not wish to inherit what other people considered life. The lover had forgotten the goal of the desperate digging and had forgotten the reason for this lethal struggle, because he had forgotten himself for an even longer period. So he did not even lift his eyes from the earth when his workers came to him and brought him the good news that the solid rock had finally been vanquished and that water was spurting from the hard stone.
3
Songs celebrate the water that gushed from the granite with all the abundance of a spring and continued to flow into the wasteland during all the bygone years after the lover’s age. In subsequent generations, however, the treasure began to retreat, and the earth started to swallow its water, which disappeared from sight. Reaching the water required a sturdy set of palm-fiber ropes. Soon tribes were talking about travelers who headed to the well but perished while circling the mouth and looking down the pit at the sight of the water, because they hadn’t provided themselves with sufficient quantities of rope. In other times, clever planners attempted to remedy the problem by leaving piles of palm-fiber ropes at the well’s mouth as a benefaction for wayfarers. But sun and dirt got to the ropes before travelers did and destroyed them in short order. Then the sages introduced a new law that in time became a noble tradition. It required everyone who came to the well—whether herdsmen, caravan owners, or nomadic tribes—to bring a quantity of rope to leave behind at the mouth of the well in exchange for water. So piles of rope accumulated by the mouth of the well, and bulky clusters of rope littered the area in networks that stretched here and there. Coils of palm-fiber ropes transformed the adjacent bare land into a veritable rope jungle. The savage sun devoured some ropes as the fiber turned white; dust and grit mangled the rest. Not only did the color fade, but the rope became frayed and disintegrated. Other piles more recently created looked brand new from a distance. A person seeing them imagined that he would inhale their fresh scent when he approached—the scent of fresh, moist palm fiber, the smell of the oases, and the aroma of dates and of seasons of ripe dates at the beginning of fall.
Nearby, in increasing numbers, other ropes woven from goat or camel hair piled up. These ropes were braided with greater expertise. Poets report that they were woven by the fingers of beautiful women who trembled for fear of getting a bad reputation or of being disgraced. So they took extraordinary care and wove the ropes with the same apprehension they felt when weaving nose ropes for mehri camels or the saddle ropes for gallant riders, because they were certain that the strangers who frequented the well’s mouth would inquire, ask each other, and figure out some stratagem to determine who had made the rope. If she had done a good job, they would write poems praising her; otherwise they would attack her with satirical songs.
Pride of place in the epics of the ancient generations, however, was allotted to the amazing ring around the mouth of the well. This polished disc, which was no more than a single cubit across, was sternly rounded. Many agreed that its charm was attributable precisely to this severity. Its solid stone had a unique coloration. At noon when the sun’s rays ruled, the circle’s stone looked pure white. When the setting sun sowed the horizon with dusk’s rays, the ring’s color changed and borrowed its hue from the flecks of gold on the Western horizon. When evening attacked and darkness settled over the desert, the collar also became gloomy, but the stone covering the mouth continued to glow mysteriously as if calling out to its devotees among the passersby or exchanging secret messages with the distant stars. During moonlit evenings, the ring would cheer up once more and regain its merry color.
But the patterning of the stone of the circular collar was even more beautiful.
The entire rim was marked with signs that ropes had cut into it over successive generations till these cuts in the smooth, translucent rock resembled the mark on the thighs of a camel or the deep scar of ancient wounds that time had healed. In this pattern, connoisseurs of the Unknown were wont to decipher signs of the time to come. It was said that diviners in the past had sought out the well—not to provision themselves with water—but to interrogate the stone and to research news of the time that had passed and of the time that was to come.
Over the course of the generations, many poems were recited in honor of the rim, and lovesick female poets still sing of it, comparing a lover known for faithful love to the rim of the well of Harakat. They have also used it as an epithet for patient people and added its name to every matter they wanted to characterize as immortal.
4
The tribe’s strongest men dug in the northern passes; they dug in the lowlands of the southern plains; and they dug as well in sinkholes adjoining the valley bottoms to the west. Then they despaired. They dug down to great depths and reached great heights without even finding moist soil. So they despaired.
They gathered in the evening shadows and lowered their gaze as they normally did when despair gripped them. With their forefingers they imprinted riddles in the dirt. But they did not consult each other orally. They did not raise their voices in debate, because gloomy silence is always the language of despair. Proceeding a long way down the path of despair is an acknowledgement of the beauty of divestiture. Divestiture is the law that comes from the Unknown with inspiration, and inspiration was what reminded them of the excavator on one of those evenings.
They remembered the stranger who had lived with the tribe for many years with his only son; they had all joked—grown men, children, and women—about the satisfactions he found in the earth. He would say that the life above ground was a mistake for a man and that a wayfarer should not trust a place that provided no opportunity for him to crawl inside the belly of the earth. So he would lift his child down from behind his camel’s hump whenever the tribe stopped traveling and decided to set up camp somewhere. Standing by the camel, he would unload from her the hoes, picks, and other stone implements that he had inherited from ancestors, who had used them as digging tools before the desert knew metals like copper and iron. Then he would stride around the area a little before choosing the suitable patch of ground to begin digging into. He would dig all day if the tribe reached the place early or dig all night long if the tribe arrived at a new site in the evening. He would dig without stopping until he had created in the belly of the earth a cave large enough to shelter him and his son. A portly man in his fourth or fifth decade, he was on the short side and wore a veil crowned with a protruding leather amulet. He encircled his belly with a thick leather girdle that extended from his ribcage to a little below his navel. Inquiring minds attributed the width of this belt to generous padding that the excavator had devised for a reason that the tribesmen only grasped the day a hostile tribe treacherously raided their encampment. Then they saw the excavator leap from his tomb beneath the earth and fight the enemies with pickaxes. When bowmen hit him with arrows, the belt deflected the blows. So he had real body armor. Then the people of the encampment knew for certain that the excavator had not adopted the broad belt, which was stuffed with straw and chaff, to help him dig, as he claimed. He had another secret reason. It was said that his strange habits dated back to an earlier period, when he married a young woman who was related to him. Then he dug an underground bed chamber for their wedding night, concealing the entrance under a blanket inside the bridal tent. He did not uncover it until the wedding officials left. At that time the naughty boys, who were accustomed to slip into the corners of tents to spy on couples on their wedding night, were flabbergasted when they saw the bride flee angrily from the tent. She reportedly said she wasn’t a snake, a rat, or some ugly reptile to consent to live in a home underground. The excavator sent her a letter advising her that he had chosen to enter the dirt not only because he co
uld find no place more secure than the earth but for its other qualities the tribe didn’t know about. Then the bride unleashed the women poets on him. They recited deadly satires about his conduct; these were repeated by the beautiful women of neighboring tribes. But neither the satirical poems nor fear of disgrace could force the man to quit his subterranean chambers. Instead he became increasingly infatuated with this approach and dug even more. At times when the tribe settled on the earth for a long time, he made himself more than one dwelling. For her part, his bride never returned—perhaps because he made no effort to bring her back, perhaps because he never forgave her for her anger on their wedding night, and perhaps because he did not understand, or did not care to understand, what his fellows in the desert had grasped, namely that a woman is a tribulation acquired not only by renouncing pride but many other things as well.
His bride bore him a son before she disappeared from the desert in a lethal epidemic that harvested many members of the tribe. Then he took the child from the girl’s family and introduced him to his excavations. He obtained from his clan two women slaves he had inherited from his ancestors—just as he had inherited his stone tools—to supervise rearing his child. Soon, however, he rid himself of them. He remarked that anyone who chose the earth’s way and delivered his interests to the dirt would never need maids or slaves, and that caring for children even when they are quite young is less taxing than the headache of putting up with a hateful and ignoble community like that of servants. At first the tribeswomen pitied him. Later their pity turned into admiration. They would accost him and offer to help in disciplining the child, but the excavator would always thank them for their kindness and refuse their assistance with a politeness that women encountered only from hermits who had been secluded in desolate regions for long periods of time. It was said that he carried the child on his back in a rope halter when he went out to search for his camels, to gather firewood, or to collect truffles. It was said that he knew how to hide him from sight in high mountain crevices or in a hole the mouth of which only he could find. It was also said that he had taken a captivating bride who was one of the women of the Spirit World and that she took charge of the child for him. Many swore by the mightiest gods of the desert that they had repeatedly seen him in the company of this beauty on his wanderings but that she would disappear and vanish when they drew near. Others spoke of hearing him with their own ears converse with this female jinni; they had not, however, discerned her body or seen any figure.
New Waw, Saharan Oasis (Modern Middle East Literature in Translation) Page 14
