OLDUVAI


                               HIPPOCAMPUS   OLDUVAI

 

 

                      He was crossing the Sahara on the back of a flat-bed truck, seated with a dozen or so passengers on sacks of grain.  The lucky ones dangled their legs over the holding gates to catch the breeze, nothing more than a hot lick chipped off by their motion over the stony ground.  The night before they had floated soporifically across dunes.  He had been half submerged in dreams, gazing under the images projected on his drooping lids at the plow of headlights skimming the sand. This ballasted rocking and deep shadowed celestial travel was cut from the same cloth as childhood slumber.  Sometimes the two realms would eddy together and the truck would sink into the reverie and unable to float over water or clouds or butt its way through feathers, the driver and lorry boy would have to clamber down from the cab and lay metal tracks under the tires. Engine revving, the truck pulled itself up by its own bootstraps.   Their progress now relying on the tensile strength of metaphor was translated from dreams.  

       Today they had moved relatively fast over the hard ground. It was a bumpy, nauseating ride under a sky painfully bright as welding metal.   Maybe the driver felt a gamy wobble in a wheel, or heard a knot in the engine’s throat; the truck stopped and the passengers who had reason to expect that nothing quickly solved would have justified a halt, climbed down to stretch their legs or find a smidgen of shade beneath the chassis.  Past a certain point of discomfort relief becomes an irritant.  It requires too much ingenuity to enjoy.  He would have preferred to sit passively and stew, but he did not have the energy to resist the surge of the crowd.  Once on the ground he filled the anomie of sudden elbowroom by deciding to take a piss; the jiggling had stimulated his kidneys although he could not gather enough spit to keep his tongue from sticking to the roof of his mouth.  Modesty, solemnly and gracefully kept in a Moslem country, pushed him away from the truck about thirty steps.  Not just the transubstantiation of his tongue into frozen clangor would suggest an ice shelf in this part of the desert.    Not a blade or tussock grew anywhere.  The ground was scoured of any rock larger than an egg, as if a glacier blanketed it, and the bleaching glare had the needling saltiness of fierce cold.   Pissing is generally a solipsistic act, cozy and smug, a bit megalomaniac.  Here there was no shrub to curtain the indulgence.  The sun immediately peeled the stain. A yellow lens held together by surface tension would lie briefly on the hard pan, but rapidly the sun shaved it down to a sheer shadow. 

     He had adopted the practice of kneeling to pee while in public as he had seen other men doing, to honor Mohammad they had explained to him.  When he was alone he reverted to habit. In this case the custom saved him.  No sooner had he begun folding down to his knees then he blacked out, which would have given him a nasty bump had he fallen from the globe straddling colonial stance.  As it was, he fell from his knees and awoke when his hands hit the ground, a split second, but his amnesia was complete.

     He awoke knowing absolutely nothing and facing complete emptiness.  Had he fainted at the threshold of Eden, the garden would have poured unimpeded through his transparent, witless eyes.  Instead, existence was a present tense yet to be put to use; a void painfully charged with vibrating light.

      A second may have passed before he remembered who he was, and even that count may have been lengthened by the absurdity of Jed Canto, American, being transported in the blink of an eye to the middle of the Sahara.  The blink of an eye, no more, and pursed in that thimble of black-accommodated more impossibly than a genie-and pouring out the spout of his re-opened lids, came loci of attributes able to catalyze out of nowhere pebble and kneecap and along with them a geometry of association having his identity as its axioms: an expanding four dimensional topology containing the route to this place not starting merely in a deduced Agadez, but with flickering entrances from childhood books starring the big cats.  This cascade of ever fuller distillations from a dizzying vanishing point explains why he could think for an instant yet sheer alloyed from emptiness that he had landed on an asteroid, and why this absurd reflex of reason would leave the film of an idea over the more completed Sahara: other equally possible portals had only been passed over only by chance when he exited the natal void.

      He returned to the truck on wobbly feet, hung-over from the blackout. Apparently, the driver had meant this to be a briefer stop than it was turning out to be, and since everyone else was already aboard, Jed was the truant. He was being hustled along by the lorry boy with those part majordomo and part hysterical gestures he has found typical of Arabs, put on display as an example of European opulence. 

     That night they slept on the hard pan near the lorry.  A rumor of scorpions percolating through the language barrier-something about a circle of rope around the sleeping bag-was disregarded because of fatigue, but a sense of pre-creation lingered, of a clock or compass whose points were the zodiac superimposed on what he saw. Laying on the bare rock he watched a crescent moon rise-a silver ark-and on the shore of the cold reaches of space where his travels had brought him, he looked through an open eye into the pitiless beauty of a heaven etching destiny.  

     A little before noon.  Two hours later they would be in Tamanarasset.   The truck halts.  The driver points to what looks like a goat trail meandering off into a narrow cut in a bare rock cliff.  He wonders if he is being exiled because of yesterday, but goes anyway, made docile by fatigue and still apologetic for straying and ready to make amends.  Less drastically, maybe he is being made the butt of desert sarcasm: Here is a place equal to his grand deference when pissing. 

     The path leads to a trickling spring painting the palest green around it.  There is a small rectangle of stones nearby, the remains of a rude dwelling that would have had space only to cache a hermit.  From which direction had the hermit arrived?  By foot, from Tamanarasset, the passage here would have only taken a few days, but the compulsion was towards incalculable space, and the genius stretches back for years and leagues.  Long ago, the Atlas Mountains would have sunk into the dunes behind him.  If he came from the south he left behind rivers to cross this hardpan with its acne of stones.

     What eye looks through mirages and sees water in the desert?  A tally of this eye would include the integral sight of a dream and the dilated vision when falling into injury or love at first sight.  Such an eye dredged in clarity may see the ocean which was once here. The hermit sets out on its endless fathoms with nothing more than sandals.

     After walking the ocean he may need to settle where he can hear its combers without interference from camel’s braying or bargaining in the market.  Possibly, with their advantage of foreknowledge, a flock of migrating birds may alight here to dip their bills in the ribbon of glisten coming from the rocks, and he might recognize someone among them, maybe even himself, given such an eye, and feel that here by the spring the shell between this world left high and dry and the gleaming ocean on the other side is already fractured. 

     Jed drank from the spring. It was so thin he was forced to sip it as gingerly as hot tea.   On the way back he realized he was following the steps of the old ascetic.  This goat trail marked where he had avoided this very stone and where he would have gone around the shoulder of the cliff, all preserved exactly on this ocean bottom, a text written as he waded through his double vision.  So, the driver and lorry boy had seen him.  The same voyagers who gave space in every sentence to the editing hand of Fate that may blink at seventy years and without crowding fit eternity in a tear drop, these voyagers had seen the fissure into which Jed had fallen and the fissure in his eye when he returned. 

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