instinctive gestures that she doesn’t understand, she digs into the sand with her hands, near the roots of the fig tree, and buries the placenta.
Then she lies down at last at the foot of the tree, her head very close to the trunk which is so strong; she opens the coat, takes the baby in her arms, and brings it to her swollen breasts. When the child begins to suck, its tiny little face with closed eyes pushing up against her breast, Lalla stops resisting the fatigue. She looks briefly at the lovely light of day that has just begun, and at the deep blue sea, with its slanting waves like animals running. Her eyes close. She’s not sleeping, but it’s as if she were floating on the surface of the waters, for a long time. She can feel the warm little head pushing up against her breast, wanting to live, sucking her milk greedily. “Hawa, daughter of Hawa,” Lalla thinks, only once, because it’s funny, and makes her feel good, like a smile, after so much suffering. Then she waits, patiently, for someone from the plank and tarpaper Project to come, a young boy crab catcher, an old woman hunting for dead wood, or a little girl who simply loves to walk in the dunes to watch the seabirds. Someone always ends up coming out here, and the shade of the fig tree so peaceful and cool.
SO THEY CAME for the last time, they appeared on the vast plain, near the sea, at the mouth of the river. They came from all directions, those from the north, the Ida ou Trouma, the Ida ou Tamane, the Ait Daoud, the Meskala, the Ait Hadi, the Ida ou Zemzen, the Sidi Amil, those from Bigoudine, from Amizmiz, from Ichemraren; those from the east, beyond Taroudant, those from Tazenakht, from Ouarzazate, the Ait Kalla, the Assarag, the Ait Kedif, the Amtazguine, the Ait Toumert, the Ait Youss, the Ait Zarhal, the Ait Oudinar, Ait Moudzit, those from the Sarhro Mountains, the Bani Mountains; those from the coast, from Essaouira to Agadir, the fortified city; those from Tiznit, from Ifni, from Aoreora, from Tan-Tan, from Goulimine, the Ait Meloul, the Lahoussine, the Ait Bella, Ait Boukha, the Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa, the Ida Gougmar, the Ait Baha; and above all, those from the far south, the free men of the desert, the Imraguen, the Arib, the Oulad Yahia, the Oulad Delim, the Aroussiyine, the Khalifiya, the Reguibat Sahel, the Sebaa, the peoples of the Chleuh language, the Ida ou Belal, Ida ou Meribat, the Ait ba Amrane.
They gathered together on the riverbed, so numerous they covered the whole valley. But they weren’t warriors for the most part. They were women and children, wounded men, the elderly, all the people who had been fleeing endlessly over the dust tracks, driven by the arrival of the foreign soldiers, and who no longer knew where to go. The sea had stopped them there, before the great city of Agadir.
Most of them didn’t know why they had come there, to the Souss riverbed. Perhaps it was simply hunger, weariness, despair that had led them there, to the mouth of the river, facing the sea. Where could they go? For months, years, they had been wandering in search of a land, a river, a well where they could set up their tents and make corrals for their sheep. Many had died, lost on the trails leading nowhere in the desert around the great city of Marrakech, or in the ravines of the Oued Tadla. Those who had succeeded in fleeing had gone back to the South, but the old wells had gone dry, and the foreign soldiers were everywhere. In the city of Smara, where Ma al-Ainine’s palace of red stones stood, the desert wind that wears everything away was now blowing. The soldiers of the Christians had slowly closed their wall around the free men of the desert; they occupied the wells of the holy valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra. What did these foreigners want? They wanted the entire earth; they wouldn’t stop until they had devoured everything, that was certain.
The people of the desert had been there for days, south of the fortified city, and they were waiting for something. Ma al-Ainine’s last warriors, the Berik Allah were mixed in with the mountain tribes; their faces were marked with distress, with forlorn hope, due to the death of Ma al-Ainine. There was a strange feverish, hungry sheen to their eyes. Each day, the men from the desert looked toward the citadel, where Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, was to appear along with his mounted warriors. But off in the distance, the red walls of the city remained silent; the gates were closed. And there was something threatening about that silence which had lasted for days. Big black birds circled in the blue sky, and at night, the yapping of jackals could be heard.
Nour was there too, alone in the crowd of defeated men. He had gotten used to that loneliness long ago. His father, his mother, and his sisters had gone back to the South, back to the endless trails. But he hadn’t been able to go back, not even after the death of the sheik.
Every evening, lying on the cold earth, he thought of the path upon which Ma al-Ainine had led his people northward, to new lands, the path the Lion would now follow, to become the true king. For two years now, his body had become hardened to hunger and exhaustion, and his whole being was filled with the desire to set out upon that path which would soon be opened.
Then, in the morning, the rumor spread through the camp: “Moulay Hiba, Moulay Sebaa, the Lion! Our king! Our king!” Shots cracked, and women and children cried out, making their voices quaver. The crowd turned toward the dusty plain, and Nour saw the sheik’s horsemen engulfed in a red cloud.
The cries and the shots drowned out the sound of the horses’ hooves. The red fog rose high into the morning sky, whirling over the river valley. The crowd of warriors ran out to meet the horsemen, firing their long-barreled rifles skyward. They were, for the most part, men from the mountains, Chleuhs wearing their homespun cloaks, wild men, disheveled, eyes blazing. Nour didn’t recognize the warriors of the desert, the blue men who had followed Ma al-Ainine until his death. Hunger and thirst had not left their mark on these men; they had not been burned by the desert for days and months; they had come from their fields, their villages, without knowing why or against whom they were going to fight.
All day long, the warriors ran across the valley, all the way up to the ramparts of Agadir, as the galloping horses of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, raised the great red cloud. What did they want? They were just running and shouting, that was all, and the voices of the women and children quavered over the riverbed. At times, Nour caught a glimpse of the horsemen going by in their red cloud, surrounded by flashes of light: the Lion’s horsemen were brandishing their spears.
“Moulay Hiba! Moulay Sebaa, the Lion!” the voices of the children were shouting all around him. Then the horsemen disappeared over on the other side of the plain, by the ramparts of Agadir.
That whole day the valley was filled with jubilation, and with the lip-scorching fire of the sun. The desert wind started blowing around evening time, covering the campsites in a golden fog, hiding the walls of the city. Nour sought shelter under a tree, wrapped in his cloak.
Gradually, the excitement fell, as night did. Cool darkness settled over the desiccate earth at prayer time, when the animals knelt down to protect themselves from the damp of night.
Nour thought again of the summer that would soon begin, of the drought, of the wells, of the slow herds his father would lead out to the salt flats on the other side of the desert, in Oualata, in Ouadane, in Chinchan. He thought of the loneliness of those boundless lands, so remote that all memory of the sea or the mountains is effaced. It had been so long since he had known rest. It was as if there were nothing anywhere but the expanses of dust and stones, ravines, dried rivers, rocks jutting up like knives, and most of all, fear, like a shadow hanging over everything one sees.
At mealtime, when he went to have some bread and millet porridge with the blue men, Nour watched the star-filled night covering the earth. Weariness burned his skin, fever too, throwing its long shivers down his body.
In their makeshift campsite, under the shelters of branches and leaves, the blue men no longer spoke, no longer told the legend of Ma al-Ainine, no longer sang. Wrapped in their ragged cloaks, they stared into the burning coals, blinking when the wind swept the smoke back. Maybe they weren’t waiting for anything anymore, eyes blurred, hearts beating very slowly.
One after the other, the fires went out, and darkness flooded through the wide valley. In the distance, jutting into the black sea, the city of Agadir blinked weakly. Then Nour lay down on the ground, his head turned toward the lights, and as he did every evening, he thought of the great sheik Ma al-Ainine, who had been buried in front of the ruined house in Tiznit. They had laid him in the grave, face turned toward the east; in his hands they had placed his only possessions, his holy book, his calamus, his ebony prayer beads. The loose earth tumbled over his body, the red dust of the desert, then they had put down large stones so the jackals wouldn’t dig up the body; and the men had stamped on the earth with their bare feet until it became smooth and hard as a slab of stone. Near the tomb stood a young acacia with white thorns, like the one in front of the house of prayer in Smara.
Then, one after the other, the blue men of the desert, the Berik Allah, the last companions of the Goudfia had knelt on the grave, and had run their hands slowly over the smooth earth, then over their faces, as if to receive one last blessing from the great sheik.
Nour thought of that night, when all of the men had left the plain of Tiznit, and he had remained alone with
