Lalla Meymuna near the tomb. In the cold night, he had listened to the voice of the old woman crying interminably inside the ruined house, like a song. He had fallen asleep on the ground, lying next to the tomb, and his body had remained motionless, dreamless, as if he too were dead. The next morning, and the following days, he had hardly left the tomb, sitting on the burning earth, enveloped in his woolen cloak, his eyes and throat burning with fever. Already, the wind was blowing dust onto the smooth earth of the tomb, gently obliterating it. Then the fever had seized his whole body, and he had lost consciousness. Some women from Tiznit had taken him home and cared for him while he was delirious, on the verge of death. When he recovered, after several weeks, he walked back to the ruined house where Ma al-Ainine had died. But no one was there; Lalla Meymuna had gone back to her tribe, and the wind had blown so hard, carrying so much sand, he wasn’t able to find the grave.
Perhaps that was the way things were meant to be, thought Nour; perhaps the great sheik had gone back to his true domain, lost in the desert sands, swept away in the wind. Now Nour looked out on the vast stretch of the Souss River, in the night, barely lit by the haze of the galaxy, the great glow that is the mark of blood left by the angel Gabriel’s lamb, according to what people say. It was the same silent land as that around Tiznit, and Nour sometimes thought he was hearing the long weeping chant of Lalla Meymuna, but it was probably the sound of a jackal yapping in the night. The spirit of Ma al-Ainine was still alive there; it was covering the entire earth, mingling with the sand and the dust, hiding in the crevices or glimmering faintly on each sharp stone.
Nour could feel his gaze, out there in the sky, in the dark spots on the earth. He could feel his gaze upon him, as he had once before, in the square in Smara, and a shudder ran over his body. The gaze entered him, hollowing out its dizziness. What did he want to say? Maybe he was asking something, just like that, mutely, out on that plain, encompassing the men in his light. Maybe he was asking the men to come join him, where he was, mixed in with the gray earth, scattered in the wind, turned to dust… Nour fell into a motionless, dreamless sleep, buoyed by the immortal gaze.
When they heard the sound of the cannons for the first time, the blue men and the warriors started running toward the hills, to look out on the sea. The noise shook the sky like thunder. Alone, off the coast of Agadir, a large battleship, like a monstrous slow animal, was spitting out flashes. The noise came a long time afterward, a long rumble, followed by the crashing sound of shells exploding inside the city. In a few minutes, the high walls of red stone were no more than a pile of rubble from which black smoke rose. Then the inhabitants spilled out of the broken walls, men, women, children, bloody and screaming. They filled the river valley, running away from the sea as fast as they could, in the throes of panic.
The short flame flashed several times from the cannons of the cruiser Cosmao, and the ripping sound of the shells exploding in the Kasbah of Agadir rolled out over the entire valley of the Souss River. The black smoke of the burning city rose high into the blue sky, covering the camp of nomads with its shadow.
Then the mounted warriors of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, appeared. They crossed the riverbed, falling back toward the hills in front of the inhabitants of the city. In the distance, the cruiser Cosmao was immobile on the metal-colored sea, and its cannons turned slowly toward the valley where the people of the desert were fleeing. But the flame didn’t flare again at the end of the cannons. There was a long silence, with only the sound of the people running and the cries of the animals, while the black smoke continued to rise into the sky.
When the soldiers of the Christians appeared before the crumbled ramparts of the city, no one understood at first who they were. Perhaps for a second even Moulay Sebaa and his men believed they were the warriors from the North that Moulay Hafid, the Leader of the Faithful, had sent for the holy war.
But it was Colonel Mangin’s four battalions, having come on a forced march to the rebel city of Agadir — four thousand men wearing the uniforms of African infantrymen, Senegalese, Sudanese, Saharans, armed with Lebel rifles and a score of Nordenfeldt machine guns. The soldiers advanced slowly toward the bank of the river, fanning out in a half-circle, while on the other side of the river, at the foot of the rocky hills, Moulay Sebaa’s cavalry of three thousand began turning in a circle, churning up a large whirling cloud, raising the red dust up into the sky. Moulay Sebaa, wearing his white cloak, standing at a distance from the cloud, anxiously watched the long line of enemy soldiers, like a column of insects marching over the dried earth. He knew that the battle was already lost, as in the past at Bou Denib, when the bullets of the black infantrymen had cut down more than a thousand of his mounted warriors from the South. Sitting still on his horse, which was quivering with impatience, he watched the foreigners advancing slowly toward the river, as if on maneuver. Several times, Moulay Sebaa tried to give the order to retreat, but the warriors from the mountains weren’t listening to his orders. They were spurring their horses on to gallop in that frantic circle, drunk with dust and the smell of gunpowder, letting out cries in their savage language, invoking the names of their saints. When the circling was over, they would jump into the trap which had been laid for them; they were all going to die.
Moulay Sebaa could do nothing more then, and tears of pain were already filling his eyes. On the other side of the dried riverbed, Colonel Mangin had prepared the machine guns on either flank of his army, atop the rocky hills. When the Moorish cavalry charged toward the center, just when they were crossing the riverbed, the crossfire of the machine guns would decimate them, and then it would simply be a matter of finishing them off with bayonets.
There was another heavy silence, as the horsemen stopped circling on the plain. Colonel Mangin took a look with his binoculars, trying to understand: were they going to retreat? Then it would mean marching again for days over that deserted land, pursuing that fleeing, exasperating horizon. But Moulay Sebaa remained motionless on his horse, because he knew that the end was near. The mountain warriors, the sons of the tribal chieftains had come here to fight, not to flee. They had stopped circling to pray before the charge.
Then everything went very quickly in the cruel, noonday sun. The three thousand horsemen charged in close formation, as if for a cavalcade, brandishing their long spears. When they reached the riverbed, the non- commissioned officers in charge of the machine guns glanced at Colonel Mangin, who had raised his arm. He let the first horsemen through, then suddenly brought his arm down, and the steel barrels started firing their streams of bullets, six hundred a minute, with a sinister sound that hacked the air and echoed through the entire valley, all the way out to the mountains. Does time exist when a few minutes are enough to kill a thousand men, a thousand horses? When the horsemen realized they were trapped, that they would never get through that wall of bullets, they tried to retreat, but it was too late. The bursts of machine gun fire swept over the riverbed, and the bodies of men and horses continued to fall, as if a large invisible wave were mowing them down. Streams of blood ran over the smooth stones, mingled with the thin trickles of water. Then silence fell again, while the last horsemen escaped toward the hills, covered with blood, on their horses whose hair was bristling in fear.
Unhurriedly, the army of black soldiers began marching along the riverbed, company after company, with the officers and Colonel Mangin in the lead. They took the eastern trail, in the direction of Taroudant, Marrakech, in pursuit of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion. They left without even glancing at the site of the massacre, without looking at the broken bodies of the men sprawled on the shingles, or the horses on their backs, or the vultures that were already on the banks of the river. They didn’t look at the ruins of Agadir either, the black smoke still rising into the blue sky. In the distance, the cruiser Cosmao was gliding slowly out on the metal-colored sea, heading northward.
Then the silence ceased, and the cries of the living could be heard, the wounded men and animals, the women, children, like a single interminable wail, like a song. It was a sound filled with horror and suffering that rose from all sides at once, on the plain and on the riverbed.
Now Nour was walking over the shingles, amongst the felled bodies. The voracious flies and wasps were already buzzing in black clouds above the cadavers, and Nour felt nausea tightening in his throat.
With very slow movements, as if they were emerging from a dream, women, men, children, drew back the brush and walked over the riverbed without speaking. All day long, until nightfall, they carried the bodies of the men to the riverbanks to bury them. When night came, they lit fires on each bank, to ward off the jackals and wild dogs. The women of the villages came, bringing bread and sour milk, and Nour ate and drank with relief. Then he slept, lying on the ground, without even thinking of death.
The next day, at the crack of dawn, the men and women dug more graves for the warriors, then they also buried their horses. Over the graves, they placed large rocks from the river.
When everything was finished, the last blue men started walking again, on the southern trail, the one that is so long that it seems to never end. Nour was walking with them, barefoot, with nothing but his woolen cloak and a little bread tied in a moist cloth. They were the last Imazighen, the last free men, the Taubalt, the Tekna, the Tidrarin, the Aroussiyine, the Sebaa, the Reguibat Sahel, the last survivors of the Berik Allah, those who are blessed by God. They had nothing but what their eyes saw, what their bare feet touched. Before them, the flat earth
