Seven Veils of Seth (12 page)

“We violate the commandments of our lost Law when we ask for a loan. We violate the Law twice when we grant a loan to people.”

“Is this a riddle?”

“Not so fast! Take it easy! Your first mistake was in making a loan to your friend, because a loan serves to nurture enmity in strangers, whom we provide with an incentive to become our enemies.”

“But why?”

“Human nature!”

“Do you think the debtor doctored the camel with some secret potion?”

“Didn't I tell you that even worse than the jinn are people who disguise themselves as people?”

“But what should we do for individuals who fall on hard times and are in pressing need of a loan?”

“We give them what we can as a present, not a loan.”

“Amazing!”

“That's preferable to loaning them something and then receiving a booby trap in return.”

“I don't understand how a person can turn a beast into a booby trap.”

“That's incredibly easy. One simply abuses the animal and then dispatches it to a competitor or enemy so that its bile will be vented on him instead of on the owner who mistreated it.”

Then he prepared to depart, and his host descended the hillside with him to see him off.

He decided to rely on cunning. So he descended to the valley to dispatch the camel as a warning.

He traveled along the twists of the valley to the south until he reached the caves where he normally hid necessities for his journeys: water skins, leather buckets, saddles, ropes, lances, swords, and arrows.

In the ancient cave, which was carved with the designs of the ancestors, he found that the saddle had disappeared, although the water skin still hung from the cave's ceiling where he had left it a year or more before. It had shriveled and shrunk, and its leather had dried out, making it difficult to recognize as a container for storing water. The water skin and the saddle, however, had been hung there simply as part of a strategy appropriated from the customs of sorcerers, who toss down a bit of gold where people can reach it in order to put them off the trail of the true treasure.

He stood at the heart of the cave with worshipful humility. He turned toward the mouth of the cave and took one step forward; then a second step. He halted. He turned to the right and once again took two steps with eyes closed and head raised. He halted. Then he swung round to face the cave's interior. He took a step, a second, and then a third. He halted. He turned right once more. He faced the north wall, which was decorated with colored and incised depictions of chimerical creatures that were composites blending human beings with animals and jinn. He stood in the presence of his ancestors' altars with the prayerful attitude befitting a place that exuded antiquity's scent, conveying a message thousands of years old. He murmured a charm in the forgotten language borrowed from the tongue of the forgotten tribe that had left him these cryptic maxims carved into the cave's wall. Once he had recited this incantation of unknown meaning, he turned left. Then he took two steps before he knelt and began to dig beside the wall. Thus he liberated from the people of the netherworlds a treasure he had entrusted to them for safekeeping many years before. They had appropriated it, and he would certainly not have been able to retrieve it from them without the secret password, the worshipful rituals, and a recitation of the charms of the first peoples. He dug for a long time, scooping out dirt and then rocks before finally extracting the treasure, which consisted of a brass sword and a spear the shaft of which ended in a vicious iron triangle. The sword was metal and the tip of the spear was metal, and – like gold – metals are treasures that denizens of the spirit world love to seize, just as they seize gold dust and the newborns of human mothers who have not protected them with wormwood leaves, knife blades, or the charms of the ancients tucked into pieces of leather. He brandished the spear in the air and then removed the sword from its scabbard. He felled an invisible enemy with a single blow and then descended the hill.

He caught up with his camel in the northern ravines and found that with its hideous chest his crazy beast was covering a she-camel. He lit a fire nearby and then thrust the metal point of the spear into the ashes. He fetched a new, palm-fiber rope from his kit and profited from the beast's preoccupation with mounting the female to fasten a fetter around its jaws and then to draw the rope back to tie firmly around the stallion's hind legs. When he took the spear point out of the fire, it looked blazing, like a live coal. He advanced on the frantic camel and plunged this fiery triangle into the creature's butt. The singed flesh made the hissing sound of a burning coal dropping in water. His nostrils were assailed by the scent of burning flesh. The scoundrel vented its pain with a voice that was not an animal's or a human being's. It was more like the sound of one of the unseen creatures: the voice of a ghoul, a she-demon, or a jinni. This sound blended with the voice of the miserable she-camel so that the braying became an earthquake that rocked the desert's stillness. He was not finished, however. He removed the spear and returned to the fire, heating the sword furnace-hot. He placed the blade against the beast's right jaw, burning the skin and sending smoke into the air. The earth shook with the ghoul's howl. It tried to stand up to evade the pain of the fire but its attempts to free itself were frustrated by its copulative union with the female's body. So it collapsed on the she-camel's body as he struck the fiery blade against its other jaw. Smoke from the burning flesh filled the air once more.

When he had finished acting out his maxim, he approached his victim. After mumbling an invocation, he said: “Scion of misfortune, this is my message to your master.”

He unfettered the camel and took it to a herdsman for return to its master as a present.

Within a matter of days, herdsmen told him that the ignoble beast had caught its master off guard as he stretched out to sleep, pounced upon him, and crushed him under its chest.

He swore that from that day forward he would never take the offspring of camels as his companion, for he considered any animal making a trip with him a companion in a desert of never-ending journeys.

He went to the higher gorges and searched the herds of wild donkeys for his jenny that had saved him from the teeth of destruction one day. He handfed her barley and – from passing caravans – purchased for her dried clover imported from the oases. He placed a halter on her head and from then on thought of her as his companion, substituting her for those offspring of baseness, malice, and perfidy referred to in the tribes' languages as “camels.” He was not content with this compact that provoked the horror of those who love the
mahari
and of devotees of other fine camels. He also launched a hostile attack against this species, accusing them of descending from inhabitants of the spirit world. In one of the satirical odes he composed, with some assistance from the talents of a wily herdsman, he said that demonic jinn like to cling to the backs of camels to make them their steeds and that, indeed, camels rank second as mounts for the denizens of the spirit world, topped only by the wind. For this reason, arrogance and haughtiness are a curse that befalls all those who choose to ride a
mahari
. By contrast, desert tribes have never observed a single presumptuous person feel haughty while mounted on a donkey. Times would come that would turn this innovation head over heels, just as the desert previously had been turned topsy-turvy by an innovation called commerce, which had transformed the most estimable people into the basest and converted the noblest heroes into riffraff, while turning members of the lower class into nobles.

The tribes attributed to him provocative verses that denigrated the status of camels and extolled donkeys by contrast. Despite the anger aroused by these verses, which some people interpreted as a challenge to the law of chivalry and a heresy attributable to the common people, many elders discovered that they were not devoid of wisdom, especially since the donkey was the first beast of burden domesticated by their original ancestors. In their lives back then, they had relied on the donkey for assistance even before cattle, which eventually were wiped out by droughts, leaving no evidence behind them in the desert. These men confirmed that it would be slanderous for them to snub their grandfathers' companion, which had sprung to their forefathers' rescue, or to celebrate the heroic deeds of the camel, which was proverbial for being as hateful as a slave or a flood. When panegyric poetry ruled supreme and the story was disseminated through the tribes, spiteful individuals jested and thus bestowed on him the epithet Wantahet, inspired by the hero of the story transmitted down through the generations with the comment that the master of the jenny at the end of time would approach villages to entice tribes to a banquet only to pull the banquet carpet out from under them, allowing them to fall into a bottomless abyss. When this message reached him, he responded to these people with a message in the form of a long ode, in which he eventually admitted he was the jenny master but denied that he was the jenny master who would lead the tribes to a banquet in the abyss. He was, rather, the jenny master who would lead the tribes to the banquet of deliverance.

The oasis lay in a depression encircled to the south and east by a network of sword-type dunes. It was bounded on the north by a barren plain strewn with rocks that were baked in the inferno of ancient volcanoes and then divided by shallow valleys leading eventually to a distant mountain chain, which was swathed in murky blue. To the west extended a wasteland with even, sandy dirt coated with pebbles. At the heart of the oasis stood a single hill, although it was not originally one and had become a mountain thanks to the flow of a power called time, which leveled the buildings of one generation, reducing them to mounds on which the next generation raised its own. The subsequent act in this everlasting epic was the collapse of this generation's buildings; thus the structures of later generations rose on that debris. Eventually, with the passing days, the top of all this construction stretched high enough to stand as a real mountain, crowned by caverns and decorated at every step by skulls of bygone generations and the bones of ancestors, whom time had felled and cast down to feed the earth. During its long history, this oasis apparently experienced a flowering that brought it many honors among the oases but also created enemies for it, so that it was subjected to armed raids from neighboring clans. Testifying to this were broken remnants of the oldest wall – incorporated into a later one. These were located by the tomb mountain on the north. The desert world understands from experience that oases only imprison themselves behind walls to defend themselves against violent enemies. It has also learned from experience that enemies only launch attacks on prosperous oases.

Generations have related that the spring, located at the southern limits of the oasis, near the sands, was once part of a great lake, before the wind's sandy attacks advanced against it in prehistoric times. Out of self-defense, it retreated north, seeking refuge with the rocky desert, for which the northern mountain chains serve as a landmark. Once water nymphs had enticed desert men to abandon their endless migrations, settle down, populate the empty space, and sow the earth, they were able, thanks to this astonishing feat, to lay the cornerstone for the structure of the civilization known to later generations as “the oasis.”

The day he arrived at the market mounted on his jenny, he stopped her at a nearby wall and tossed her a handful of clover for her delectation. Then he went to the square, where the chief merchant hurried to greet him, jubilantly resorting to panegyric hyperbole: “It is reported that Wantahet willingly carries his jenny on his back when wading through mires in the sandy desert or transports her by camel-back, like a precious cargo, thus going out of his way to demean camels.” “Ha, ha. . . . Why shouldn't the jenny master carry his jenny on his back, since she protected him one day? Why shouldn't the jenny master decry the offspring of camels, since his fear of them is not unfounded?”

“The jenny master's tongue never lacks a response. Only a person granted felicitous use of this organ by the spirit world will ever know happiness.”

“The tongue assures happiness in our world, but eternal happiness depends on the intellect.”

“You're right. Anyone granted mastery over the tongue will never need to conclude a pact with our master luck.”

“And anyone allied with luck will equally have little need for the tongue. You merchants are the scions of luck.”

“That's what everyone thinks. Only a few people realize that nothing depends so much on the intellect, which you just mentioned, as does commerce. Because they are ignorant of the truth about this riddle called commerce, people disdain it. The problem is not that common people are naturally opposed to what they don't understand; they simply have never known the delight of commerce. They don't understand that landing a deal ranks even above landing a beautiful virgin.”

“I know that no sedentary person practices a profession unless he finds pleasure in its pursuit.”

“Commerce, Mr. Foreigner, isn't just trade. Commerce does not consist merely of profit or loss. Commerce – like woman – is a plaything. Commerce is a song! Commerce, for the accomplished practitioner, is a stanza in a long epic. The epic is the physical world and commerce is its verses. Commerce's brilliance is evidenced by its ability to call forth civilization from a void. Were it not for commerce, this oasis wouldn't have a leg to stand on. If it were not for commerce, we would not have had the pleasure of meeting here in the market today.”

From behind his veil, he watched the merchant with interest but interrupted at this juncture: “Your aria about commerce has moved me, inspiring me to dream up a deal. Ha, ha . . . would you imagine that the jenny master would dare engage in commerce by offering a deal to the master merchant?”