The morning sun comes late to the Oasis, for it must rise above the hills. But dawn dwells already on the desert. It is a subtle radiance of decaying night. Infinitesimal browns and blacks fleck the dim waste: these are the camps of nomads who use the Oasis as a trading center. Their tents are of undyed camel wool, strung low so that they look like camels crouching. The great slow beasts are at anchor by the tent. Dry grass is piled for them; they turn their delicate heads on the arched neck that fronts the body like the prow of a ship. Camel grass burns within. The Arab, swathed in his white burnouse, squats at the mouth of the tent and strikes his brow to the dust, saying his dawn-prayer. Unveiled behind him is his wife over the flame of twisted grass, and cooks and watches her children. On the horizon stand two caravans of twenty camels, bulging with dates. Now the thread of their approach writes upon the desert. It is market day in the Saharan center. There will be many caravans. And the wide scatter of nomads will close in like fragments of iron magnetized; making an irradiant design from the town to the horizons.
The market place is a low square, on the edge of the town away from the Oasis. One side of it is a mosque, a Koran school, a string of Moorish cafés where already merchants huddle with their coffee. The corner breaks into a labyrinth of streets strident with tiny shops. Upon a third side, the desert road cuts into the breast of sand-dunes; far away is the white solitary shell of a Marabout’s tomb.
The crowd is the town and the desert: an Arab world, drawn by hunger from far gold slopes, to make this thick and hardy organism. Most of the men wear burnouses of unbleached wool; their heads are covered by the ample hood and the skirt falls low over the inner jacket, over the naked legs, to the feet which are either bare or shod with sandal soles of grass thonged to the ankle. Time has dyed the virgin wool and use has torn it; the shreds and rents are fantasies in dirt. Within the hoods, sun-baked faces stare. The hands are talonous; the legs are like the tendoned legs of some great bird. And yet the dirtiest garment falls to the dust with grace; and the most squalid head is high.
The merchants sit on straw mats: they bake round acorn cakes on brasiers; they sell dates gold-dry, bronze-rich; they measure thimblefuls of palm oil dripped from reeking goatskins; they cobble sandals; they sell liver of camel and couss-couss, a staple dish of wheat, flaked with vegetables or with meat. (Donkeys stand mournful, charged with juniper from the distant Atlas.) They sell dust and fragments of silver, potsherds, amulets against devils, halters, tea; they sell the dry leaf of the favorite henna. The crowd sways, bartering, laughing. The Arabic is vowelless and the burnouse is proud. The Arab is shrewd; his eyes glint, his fingers snap, his voice pelts. He is the survivor of countless children who have died.
Children not yet dead weave through the intricate clamor. The boys wear a burnouse over a naked body; the girls are bound in a thick wool garment that will announce to the men when the breasts bud. They beg, they snatch a date, they nibble. Half of them are blind in an eye. For Islam makes no answer to the Ophthalmia of Egypt: is not Allah good to the blind son, giving him fortune as a beggar, as a ballad singer, as a muedzin to call the prayer from the mosque tower? Blind eyes, ravaged flesh, hard voices—most of the children will die. And their survivors are these hooded men at barter.
Therefore, the men are strong: it is the law that they eat first and what remains may go to the women and the brood. Women are here, too. Ancients with foul rags to bind their bulging udders and their bony legs; ancients almost bald with hands and faces splotched in the henna. They sell wool or weave mats from the coarse camel grass that bunches in the sand dunes like the hair on a mole. Younger women hold the veil so that a single eye peers at the ominous world. They buy wood, slices of liver, oranges from the East. In the weave of laughter, guttural and fleshless, of bray of donkey, of rumble of camels like the ebbed roar of a furnace, twines the call of children ... the call of begging, the life-call. A hand plashes a drum, a strain of song rises and binds this chaos.
He sits between a cobbler and a nomad ebon-black with the drooped tender lip of the Semite. He is the blind singer. He wears a clean tunic of white and his head is swathed in the turbash. His bare legs gleam like metal. His hands are delicate as prayer within the market clamor. He clasps the shallow drum; and his fingers fall like rain.
He sings the deeds of the warriors of Allah. From Mecca they came, and Al-Medinah; they spread from Araby to Egypt and down to Sudan and east to India. They brought the sword of the Prophet to the hand of the world. Like the sun, they went west; like Gabriel they rose into the Spanish north, bridging the sea with minaret and prayer....
Metal he sings: his song is sparse like shreds of grass on a sand hump. Five notes, naked, timbreless, make this intricate weave. They start like arrows, like catapulted stones, like horse-hoofs on the desert. This music is stripped like war; and like war single-willed.
The blind bard’s face is gray beneath the sumptuous swathes of his turbash. His lips twist like cord; his face like an engine discharges the song of Islam—single of key, terrible in singleness.