Seven Veils of Seth (5 page)

Many, however, were suspicious and – typically – denied the birth of prophecy. A rascal, who mocked the boy, accosted him, tossing a date to his hand and a malicious question to his face: “Do you think I'll find my lost milking camel when I go out to search tomorrow?”

The boy immediately cast him a mysterious look before inquiring, “Did you say the camel is in milk and lost?” Without waiting for a reply, he continued, “Yes, indeed; you will find your lost she-camel.”

The wretch roared with maniacal laughter and then shouted to everyone: “Hear that? He said I'm going to find my lost milking camel, even though you all know perfectly well I don't have either a milking camel or a lost one.” The assembly bellowed with laughter too.

The spirit world, however, decided to brand the rascal a liar and to vindicate the prophet, for a few days later – accompanied by a few companions – that man went out to search for truffles in the western plains, where he was bitten by a viper. His comrades scouted around for a passing caravan but found only a female camel, which bore him back to the encampments. Their astonishment was profound when they learned that the camel had not only been lost by one of the tribe's nobles but was called “Milch Camel,” for her copious yield of milk. From then on, the scoffers left him alone and even the clever acknowledged his gift.

Even so, as he matured to manhood, he had more difficulty tapping into the prophetic visions that had burst into his heart when he was a child. Then the elite urged him to try solitude, and he began to head out to distant deserts – taking refuge in the mountains and secluding himself from the world there for days or weeks – so that he might bring reliable information home to the tribe. As time rushed past, he realized that solitude was not the only price paid for prophecy but only another link in a chain that terminated with what he came to call “the nightmare.” This is a lethal corridor, and he learned from experience that the only thing harder than leaving it is gaining access to it. He would disappear in waterless deserts and explore many different homelands, roam through redoubts, and lose his own identity in his quest, until the firebrand glowed and the passageway flashed with sparks transforming it from an entryway that was flooded with darkness into a corridor that glowed with a vision.

This effort drained him. His body did not merely burn with fever; he also felt empty, and this emptiness made him feel sad. He had tried repeatedly to renounce the whole business and put an end to this quest for inspiration, asking, “Why do I need prophetic vision? What's the use of prophesying for a tribe that will eventually learn what is to come anyway? What's the use of our discovery of secrets of the Unknown, if we cannot circumvent what the Unknown's secrets bring us, whether for good or ill?”

He decided to give it all up, but people would not let him choose for himself or abandon this calling. An aged woman, almost one hundred years old, seized his hand to teach him a lesson the day he refused to consult the Unknown or to provide her with information concerning her three sons, who had left on a business trip to the forest lands years before and had not returned. When he told her that he had resigned, she shook her head in astonishment. Then, grasping his wrist, she asked him to step closer. She laughed scornfully at him and asked, “Do I hear right? Do you want to resign? Does a mother ever resign from nursing her infant? Does a bird resign from feeding its fledglings in the nest? Does the shepherd resign from caring for his flock? Do warriors resign from defending the tribes' homelands? Does the sky resign from releasing rain for the earth?” She was silent for a moment – although she never released his wrist from the grip of her twig-like fingers – and then added as she gazed across the empty desert, “Don't you understand that your resignation will turn the desert upside down? Don't you know that prophetic vision is the diviner's destiny and that prophesying is a duty and a debt for him? Don't you know, son, that you did not choose your prophetic vision; it chose you? Don't you know I will die tonight unless you promise to bring me news of my sons tomorrow? Don't you know I live solely on the hope of seeing them again before I depart? Have you understood now that prophesying is not entertainment but hope?”

Then she released his hand. In her sad, weak eyes, he saw moisture building: tears. So he slipped away from her tent and hastened to the wastelands, to solitude, to his destiny. He rushed to fulfill his destiny so he could bring the aged lady her treasure – her family – because had he never done that again, mothers would not have nursed their infants, shepherds would not have cared for their herds, men would not have drawn their swords to protect their homelands, and the sky would no longer have given rain to the earth. The Law would have been shaken, and the world would have been convulsed and turned upside down.

He returned to the vast expanses of his destiny to learn that whenever a sacred passageway is unyielding, the explanation is that fever does not purify unless it burns the patient, that it does not give birth to a substance until it annihilates an existence, and that it does not revive a spirit until it slays a body.

He bore his destiny in his heart and wrestled with the spirit world until eventually times grew harsh. The desert suffered a lengthy drought, and the tribe was forced to split up, heading for different oases. Along with a few others, he had settled in this one, bearing sorrow in his mind and the burden of prophecy in his heart.

A cryptic smile flashed through the man's eyes before he answered, “Is this the way to greet a guest?”

Hoisting himself up on his elbows, he gazed at the flood of light washing the brows of the distant sword-type dunes. He commented, “Each of us is the wasteland's guest.”

“But custom decrees that the first to arrive acts as host. You are currently the wasteland's master. I am merely an apparition who has come as a guest of the lord of the wasteland.”

“Perhaps you realize that we're not the only masters of the wasteland. It has some natives we call ‘People of the Spirit World' in our tongue. My question was meant to gauge the identity of my guest – jinni or human – since I'm sure the denizens of the spirit world understand the truth of my statement, because we've never heard of anyone who has heard them lie.”

The guest continued to watch him inquisitively all the while, and the mysterious smile never left his eyes. “Fine! I'll accept your statement at face value, too, even though I've never discerned any link between myself and the spirit-world tribe of which you speak. My name is Edahi, Edahi the Fool, if you desire a longer handle. The nobles of the oasis have sent me to convey their invitation to a meeting.”

“Never in my life have I attended a banquet or accepted anyone's invitation. Beware, fool!”

The fool was silent for a moment. He plucked a slender twig and snapped it in two. Then with the forbearance of the wise, he observed, “We were created in this desert for the sole purpose of meeting. People become neighbors expressly so they may meet. What harm is there in accepting an invitation?”

The stranger, however, remained steadfast. He replied severely, “Meeting is harmful. Indeed, we've never experienced any harm in our world that did not originate with a meeting. Do you deny that people only assemble to quarrel and fight?”

The fool was silent. The smile left his eyes and sorrow replaced it. Almost entreatingly he said, “But quarreling too is life. We only discover our true nature when we argue and quarrel. Moreover, we quarrel only to become neighbors again afterwards and to throw ourselves into each other's arms. This is how it used to be. This is how it is. This is how it will be. So why exaggerate?”

“It's hardly a good idea for me to disobey my own laws. I've learned from experience that whenever I disobey one of my law's dictates, retribution that I would otherwise have escaped is meted out to me. Forgive me for respecting my law.”

“You speak of the law as if you owned it.”

“Oh, yes! The law is mine alone.”

“Which law? Are you talking about the lost Law of the desert?”

“I speak of my law. I'm not sure whether it is derived from the lost Law of the past generations or from my heart, which conceals so many secrets that I have not yet understood their true nature.”

Stillness pervaded the solitary spot. This was the desert's stillness, which people molded by the Law term the “Call of Eternity.” The fool said, almost to himself:

“Now I understand why not even a drop of rain has fallen since you arrived in our settlement as a guest.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“We've grown accustomed to having exemplary people bring us copious rain. The footprints of the best people are always washed away by rain. This has also been passed down to us from the lost Law.”

He laughed sarcastically before retorting, “How do you expect me to bring rain with my footsteps to people who stick hideous talismans on every corner to ward off the rain for fear the walls of their clay prisons will be damaged by it?”

“That's true; some wretches actually do that, but I speak as one spawned by the desert, not by the oases.”

“You're originally from the desert?”

“Yes, indeed. The only father or mother I know is the desert.”

“Next time I'll bring you your own private rain cloud . . . ha, ha, ha.”

He released a reverberating, repulsive laugh that convulsed the stillness and stifled in the desert's breast the immortal call of eternity. The fool sprang to his feet and shot off toward the fields. The seated figure also jumped to his feet and chased after the fool, whom he did not catch. So he berated him, “Did you come to teach me magic, wretch? I know this law: ‘Clever men camouflage themselves with foolishness, and fools with cleverness.' If you're a fool, I'm the biggest fool of all. Ha, ha, ha. . . .”

He quit the fields to take refuge in the cemetery. As he loaded his gear on his jenny, he said, “The most suitable place for a man to reside isn't next to the living but beside the dead.” His throat rattled with suppressed laughter as he made his way stealthily to the center of the oasis and the foot of the mountain where the cemetery slumbered. Since appearing at the oasis he had explored this area repeatedly and had thus discovered that the mountain was not the hill the idiotic people of the oasis thought it was, but tombs of the successive generations who had lived in the oasis since the desert dried up and left an oasis in its embrace. Tombs had collected atop other tombs, and their stones had crumbled, covering other stones. Buildings had collapsed, burying the tops of those preceding them. The bones of the latter-day dead were heaped on the skulls of earlier decedents, rising to lofty heights in a structure that deserved to be called a sanctuary rather than a mountain. It towered into the sky, where it stood as a beacon to people of their own futility, bearing witness to them every day of the destiny that awaited them and their descendents. People are blind, however, and do not see. They are deaf and do not hear, ignorant and unable to decipher symbols. Had they looked, they would have discovered in the decaying bones, which poked out here and there from the ancient edifice, the destiny awaiting them. Had they listened, they would have heard the cry of reality in the eternal stillness of the desert. Had they been able to read, they would have deciphered the message incorporated into the sanctuary's center with skull bones. These wretched folk, however, were locked in a never-ending tussle with reality as evidenced by the way they fled from their mud-brick homes over the course of generations as the tombs encircled them. Although they moved out of the way, destiny pursued them. Inevitably, the tombs encompassed them and they were forced to move again. Now, here they were, rejecting the reality that awaited them, fleeing to nearby open spaces, and calling the burial mound a mountain and its sacred slope a cemetery. They did not have the courage to decamp far away, to seek genuine liberation, to flee from internment, and to surrender their fate to the eternal desert, which would never remind them of their reality, since it is itself a reality that does not need to construct lofty mounds from the skulls of predecessors to remind people of their insignificance. Anyone who seeks its protection sneers at death. There is no death in the womb that nurtures us, but the desert does not forgive anyone who betrays her. He does not merely die an alien's death but also lives miserably, because anyone who does not seek death's protection, anyone who does not appeal to the desert for its assistance, finds his whole life a living death. His entire life becomes a desert.

In the entryway to one of these vaults clinging to the surface of the mountain, the intellect's patron visited him one evening. He was an elderly man of uncertain age, tall, pale-complexioned, lean – apparently a wayfarer from the desert's labyrinths. He seemed not to have imbibed the oases' loathsome water, which upsets the body and the mind. He was veiled with a faded, striped cloth and brandished – rather than leaned on – a gloomy staff. With audible zeal, he was debating with creatures no one else could see. He publicly cursed the fertile land's humidity, which had inflamed his arthritis.

He stood outside the mausoleum at sunset, and the stranger heard him say – as if he were rebutting a ghost from the spirit world, “We should never say: ‘Let's do what our fathers did.' ”

He went out to his visitor, whom he discovered beside a tomb that had crumbled to bits of stone, except for its marker. Gazing at the horizon, which was cloaked in sunset red, and clasping his stick with both hands, he asked, “Does my master propose a different maxim?”