Читать книгу Seeds of Corruption - Sabri Moussa - Страница 8

THIRD

DAWN ROSE FROM THE DEEP VALLEYS BEHIND the Sukra and Hamata and Abu Ghusun mountains, from behind the Samyuki, Zarkat al-Na'am, Abraq, and Misrar mountains. It spread over the hills and plains, dissipating the night's darkness into clouds that curled over the flattened mountain tops.

The light of the sun awoke Nicola as he lay naked in his only blanket, spread out on the rocks of the Darhib. He rubbed his eyes, then he stood erect and his blanket fell to the ground at his feet. He stretched, moving to limber his muscles, then walked to the levelled courtyard facing the three wooden houses and crossed it to his house, careful not to upset the chessboard resting on its small wooden stand.

Nicola went to a corner of the house and picked up a pitcher from the water barrel, filled his hands and slapped the water on his face and neck. From another pitcher he swallowed thirstily. Then he filled his tea kettle and bent towards a pile of wood and coal in a hole between two rocks. He blew away the old ash, rearranged the wood in the hole, then lit the fire and put the kettle on.

Such was Nicola's morning. Bitter tea was his breakfast. Afterward he climbed the Darhib and waited for the sun to rise completely. His eyes roamed the mountain tops and the valleys as his naked body welcomed the morning breeze. For a moment Nicola was filled with happiness. In those extremely brief times—between dawn and day, between the golden and the silvery, before Nicola began his daily ritual of suffering—he truly felt elated. He relived the old feeling that he had known when he entered the desert for the first time.

It was during a similar sunrise, forty or fifty years ago. Nicola had shivered, and there had welled within him a trembling yearning, a thirsting for the impossible; he had believed that he could summon his forces and hurry towards the horizon and grasp the very sun before it rose to its summit. The landscape around him was like that of some heroic myth as he rocked atop his camel, side by side with his friend Mario, the engineer from Italy, also on camelback.

Behind them there were three other camels carrying provisions and equipment and workers. These workers had been recruited by Mario's partner, an Egyptian Pasha named Khalil. He had said that the Bedouins of that desert knew only how to herd sheep and drive camels, and that besides, they were too proud to work in the mines. The Pasha, therefore, brought diggers and carpenters and rock carriers from Upper Egypt. He loaded them on camels together with provisions of oil and rice, flour, butter, tea, sugar, cigarettes, wood, ammunition, and drilling equipment. He told Mario that he would finance the work if Mario would oversee the production. And so they became partners. The Pasha stayed over for dinner in the wooden house owned by Sheikh 'Ali, the desert guide, in Marsa 'Alam. Sheikh 'Ali broiled a huge fish one of his boys had caught in the waters of the Red Sea. The Pasha had brought two bottles of Scotch to celebrate the occasion. After midnight, the Sheikh rose and woke up the workers and the camels. The caravan, including the Sheikh and Nicola and Mario, hurried to leave, and the Pasha stood to bid them farewell, wishing them success. Perhaps at that moment he was dreaming of the gold nuggets the small caravan would send, once the diggers extracted them from the mountain, al-Sukra, toward which they were heading. Unlike Nicola, to whom mining and exploration were ends in themselves, Mario and the Pasha thought only of gold.

Along the road they traveled between the mountains that long- ago morning, the caravan passed two or three clumps of trees. Along in the arid land, the trees made small spots of shade. The Bedouins would lead their sheep into the shade and set up their jute tents there—only to pull them down and move on when the sheep could find no more leaves to graze on. From time to time, as the caravan moved past one of these shady places, a creature would intercept them, a man, his arm covering his eyes as he spoke in an unintelligible language and waved a long, rusted sword. The caravan would stop, Sheikh 'Ali would pour a little water in a cup for the man and offer him a cigarette. When the man prostrated himself, Sheikh 'Ali would remark, “He is one of the Bashariyya.” The men were all barefoot, their hair long and their shoulders greased with a concoction of goat fat and sandalwood in the ancient custom of the Pharaohs of Thebes.

As they proceeded deeper into the desert, Mario told Nicola, “Those are your relatives and in-laws, Nicola. Isn't your wife Ilya an immigrant Caucasian? Al-Bashariyya too are immigrants from the Caucasian mountains. In ancient times, they came across the Lebanon and the Sinai Peninsula. They walked along the shores of the eastern coast of the Red Sea until they came to its southern end where they crossed into Eritrea in Ethiopia. Most of them settled in the deserts of the Sudan and in Egypt east of the Nile.”

Nicola looked at his dark “in-laws” doubtfully, thinking of his own white European skin. But Mario explained that five thousand years of residence under the hot African sun is bound to burn the skin and dye it a dark coffee color, whereas the Caucasian nose would never disappear.

“Look close, you'll see it is the same on all their faces. Don't their noses look like your wife's nose?”

Mario had an ability to be serious and frivolous at the same time.

Once in a while they would see a pile of white bones or a dry branch with a piece of cloth fluttering from it. These were the signs of death in the desert, and Nicola regarded them with awe.

Sometimes the bones would be the bones of a camel. If the bones were scattered, Nicola would realize that death must have overtaken the camel while he was running. At other times Nicola would note that the neck and head were stretched out, and he'd realize that the camel must have died sitting. The hyenas of the desert had devoured the flesh a d left the bones as white signs to travelers such as he.

And when a man dies in the desert, he is buried where he dies. They may find him dead on top of a rock or at the edge of a plain, desiccated by the heat, eyes extinguished in death. They may find him on the worn path, dead from the exhaustion of walking for days in search of a man, a voice, even an animal to lead him to a spot of water.

Nicola himself was to confront death in the desert. A man can wander futilely for days, looking among the rocks for a path or a sign of water. On the third or fourth day he will find himself alone among the endless dunes, mouth and throat parched, lips and toes cracked. Fear takes hold of him, but his instinct for survival drives him onward. He crawls and crawls; gradually he loses the sensation of thirst, but it becomes difficult to breathe through his dry mouth. He wavers between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then he sinks to the ground and relinquishes the right to rise again.

At that moment Nicola, facing death, said to himself: “I have done what I can. All I can do now is die in silence.” and he closed his eyes to obtain peace. Then he opened them to find the young Bedouin Issa standing at his head, a turban wrapped around his face and his sword in one hand, pouring water into Nicola's mouth from a goatskin flask.

After the caravan reached camp at al-Sukra work began: the workers were to re-open an old deserted mine there. Carefully they descended into the tunnels, sounding the interior rocks in search of the crevices where the gold lay hidden.

In these tunnels, Nicola learned the secrets of mining, and he realized he would neither be the first nor the last. Those old abandoned dungeons told him the story of the ancient Pharaohs who were the first to extract gold from the rocks. After them came Romans, then Arabs, to this very same mine. He remembered how Muhammad 'Ali, the ruler of Egypt, used to send his Albanians here to bring him eight pounds of gold every two months.

That knowledge filled Nicola with enthusiasm as he watched the quartz being ground and sifted. And when he saw the gold pebbles shining in the brass tray during the process of purification with mercury, a feeling of triumph glowed within him. He could see the pebbles multiplying and eventually being formed under pressure into an ingot, which he would then forward to the Pasha at his office back in Cairo.

But that ingot, although it was made, never found its way to the Pasha's office in Cairo. It was big and heavy, so they left it in the mine for the night, and when morning came it was gone.

Issa—the Bedouin boy—was not preoccupied with the idea of truth and justice on a conceptual level. It was more like an instinctive anger flowing in his ancient Baja blood which made him stand trembling one night in the mine's courtyard, as if a fateful force required him to perform a task, the consequences of which he did not know. The presence of foreigners in the ancestral mountains of his people angered him, and he led three armed men into the mine of al-Sukra, and, while all were asleep, found the gold bar and carried it out of the mine. Issa hid the bar in his goatskin and disappeared with his companions into the desert night.

Earlier that day Nicola had celebrated the completion of the gold bar, which represented the harvest of two years' exhausting effort. Issa had watched Mario the foreigner, the Egyptian Pasha's partner, standing beside Nicola applauding, while the workers stood staring vacantly yet with a certain serenity at the gold bar, as if they did not really believe that the gold had been born of these rocks. Mario had ordered Issa to kill two goats to celebrate. So this was the nature of things, Issa had reflected: the gold went to the foreigners while the people got a bellyful or two of food for their pains. He looked at Mario, whom he had introduced to the desert from Marsa 'Alam one morning two years ago. These foreigners had been full of modesty and simplicity then. Now they acted as if they owned the mountain.

Perhaps it was this thought alone that drove Issa to think of taking the gold bar. He may have wished to reinstate his power over his private mountains at the price of breaking the authority of those strangers and shattering their arrogance. For he had no intention whatsoever of keeping the gold bar. He decided to take it, and at the same moment he decided to return it.

He urged his camel on in the desert night, the gold bar in his goatskin wallet glued to his breast as if it were a shield protecting him from unknown evils. Surrounded by his three companions, he headed south in the desert. They crossed Ra's Samadi and passed by al-Sharm; they could see the Ziyyara mountain to the west, on their right. Before dawn they arrived at Ra's Bushdadi; they crossed the Valley of Camels at the first light. They headed for the wells of Ringa, Hamata, and Ra's Nikrat, and reached the sea by afternoon, then veered westward once more toward the desert. They left behind them the ruins of the city of Baranis, built by Ptolemy-the-Flute-Player over a thousand years before in honor of his daughter. After they passed the Gulf of Banas, they rested for an hour at the foot of Batuga Mountain, then continued walking to the Shalatin well across from Zarkat al-Na'am on the route to the holy white Mount of 'Ulba, which they reached after two more days.

There they all collapsed, exhausted, at the foot of the mountain, as if prostrated in prayer like messengers returning from a holy mission.

The mountain loomed proud above them. A few random wild goats grazed on the upper slopes as if they were competing to reach the clouds. They moved cautiously so as not to slip on the green slopes. From between the dry rocks of the mountain, water flowed southward and westward into the Valley of 'Aidhab, to irrigate a thick forest there. The Baja tribes believed that it enclosed the spirit of their great ancestor, Koka Lanka, who spent his life in a deep cave inside the white mountain of 'Ulba, praying and worshipping, until, as time went by, his body changed into a rock itself. Meanwhile, according to the myth, his soul proceeded to tunnel out through the mountain in the form of springs so as to create a forest where it could dwell.

Thus that early morning at the foot of this mountain, which contained the rock which was in the past Koka Lanka, Issa, his descendant, took out the gold bar from its hiding place and placed it on a rock. He and his companions stood around it as if making their great ancestor Koka a witness to their act, reassuring him that his descendants continued to wield power over the desert and its mountains. All the Bashariyya, 'Ababida, and other different branches of the Baja tribe did likewise when some problem befell them: They took their worries and acts to the mountain that rose high into the sky, its impregnable crest surrounded with a white halo of clouds. The mountain became their shrine, like the Ka'aba at Mecca, an object of many pilgrimages. Down through the ages it had received the different migrations from across the sea, from the east, and even after the tribes dispersed to the west they always returned to the mountain. Issa believed in the power of the mountain as well as in its myth. As a boy he had learned that when God created Adam, He showed him the whole Earth spot by spot. When Adam saw Egypt, he saw 'Ulba Mountain covered with light. He named it the Blessed Mountain, and he prayed for it to be blessed and made fertile. Could there be any doubt that Adam was in fact their great ancestor Koka Lanka?

Issa, therefore, called on his ancestor as he stood at the foot of the mountain. He cried out loud so that Koka Lanka could hear him in his elevated cave. He told him in detail what he had done, and he lifted the gold bar as if bringing it nearer to the eyes of his ancestor. The sunlight gleamed on the bar, and Issa vowed that he would return the bar to its place in the mountain; for stealing was not part of his code of morals, and he asked for the blessing of his ancestor to guide him.

From the foot of the mountain came some of Issa's relatives and friends. They took the gold bar in their hands, turned it in the face of the sun two or three times, threw it against the rock to test its solidity and authenticity; then they returned it to Issa, blessing him. Issa placed it back in the goatskin and prepared his camel and set forth with his companions back to the mine.

They spent the night traveling, guided by the moon, the stars, and the planets. In the morning they passed a wild shrub near which they found a hat which Issa recognized as Nicola's. He ordered his men to look for the foreigner. After two hours of searching and smelling the ground, they found him. He was slumped over a rock, the cracked skin of his fingers bloody as if from digging for water.

He looked as if he were already dead. Issa bent over him, listening to his chest. Then he wet Nicola's face, careful not to pour more than a couple of drops at a time on his lips until he was able to drink. When Nicola started opening his eyes, he drank water in small sips, trembling. Issa took off his cape and covered him with it. Then he put him on the back of his camel.

So Nicola did not die, although he had been ready to. He had set forth five days before to recover the gold bar, but had become lost and had wandered for days in an exile of thirst. His fingers had scratched the ground but had failed to extract water from the rocks, just as he had failed to find the stolen gold.

He was not aware, of course, that the gold bar was hidden in Issa's garments all the time that Issa was leading the camel. They walked on toward al-Sukra and the mine, from the edge of death back toward life, with Issa as silent as he had been when he guided Nicola's camel on the day when Nicola first came into the desert.

On their way across the desert they passed the ancient cities in the Valley of 'Alaqi, the piles of stone of the fortresses in the Valley of Shanshaf and Wadi Sakit and al-Kharrit. They saw the old roads that the armies of the ancient Egyptians and the Roman Emperors had made—conquering as they went or else stopping off to subdue or to guard their already subjugated captives—on their way to the quarries where they mined the marble and precious stones to decorate the palaces and temples of Pharaohs and Emperors.

Wherever Issa's small caravan went, their eyes fell on remains of those old mines with their ancient inscriptions. Nicola trembled in awe and respect. These surroundings took hold of his disturbed feelings and made him feel that at last he was about to find a home, a place he would want to belong to.

He was sure he had won Issa as a brother and friend. He was unable to speak or move, so he looked at Issa. And at other times he would look at the desert around him, where there were only pale yellow sands and the washed-out pale blue sky and the shriveled earth hardening under the sun. And as they left these scenes behind them, they seemed to become mirages. Nicola stared at the disappearing scenes. At the beginning he saw thick shadows on the horizon, only shadows. As he studied them he thought he could distinguish domes and minarets, walls and gates. He could have sworn he saw thick leafy trees heavily laden with shimmering fruits. He tried to uncover the riddle of those shadows which at times turned into domes and minarets, and at other times into gardens and water fountains. But even more serious was the fact that they made him believe what he saw.

He realized then that the riddle was within himself. He was aware enough of his situation to realize that hope and desire are traps that human beings set for themselves and that they run panting after them only to fall into them. When he had begun walking into the desert five days before, was it merely a mirage that he was pursuing? That mirage had led him until he lost all sense of direction but he still ran toward it persistently, seeking refuge under its domes, water from its fountains and trees. He stumbled and then rose again to resume running, driven by the extraordinary force of thirst, until he collapsed on the rocks with cracked mouth and gullet, never reaching the domes or leafy trees, for they were only an illusion that his needs had created.