When Nour drew near to the clay wall and the place where the old man had squatted to say his prayer, he threw himself face down on the ground and remained immobile, not thinking of anything. His hands clutched at the earth as if he were hanging from the wall of a very high cliff, and the ashen taste of dust filled his mouth and nose.
After a long time, he was bold enough to lift his face, and he saw the white cloak of the sheik.
“What are you doing here?” asked Ma al-Ainine. His voice was very gentle and distant, as if he were at the other end of the square.
Nour hesitated. He pulled himself up to his knees, but his head remained bowed because he didn’t dare look at the sheik.
“What are you doing here?” asked the sheik again.
“I — I was praying,” said Nour, and added, “I wanted to pray.”
The sheik smiled.
“And you weren’t able to pray?”
“No,” Nour said simply. He took hold of the old man’s hands.
“Please, give me your holy blessing.”
Ma al-Ainine ran his hands over Nour’s head, rubbed the back of his neck gently. Then he brought the young boy to his feet and he embraced him.
“What is your name?” he asked. “You are the one I saw the night of the Assembly, aren’t you?”
Nour said his name, his father’s and his mother’s names. When Ma al-Ainine heard this last name, his face lit up.
“So, your mother is a descendant of Sidi Mohammed, he whom we called al-Azraq, the Blue Man?”
“He was my grandmother’s maternal uncle,” said Nour.
“Then you are truly the son of a sharifa,” said Ma al-Ainine. He remained silent for a long time, his gray eyes staring at Nour as if he were trying to remember something. Then he spoke of the Blue Man, whom he had met in the oases in the south on the other side of the rocks of the Hamada, back in the days when nothing here, not even the city of Smara, existed yet. The Blue Man lived in a hut of stones and branches on the edge of the desert, having nothing to fear from man or wild beast. Every morning, he found a plate of dates and a bowl of sour milk as well as a jug of fresh water in front of the door to his hut, for God watched over and provided for him. When Ma al-Ainine came to ask to receive his teachings, the Blue Man refused to take him in. He made him sleep in front of the door, never meeting his eyes or saying a word to him for one whole month. He would simply leave him half of the dates and milk, and Ma al-Ainine had never tasted more succulent food; as for the water in the jug, it quenched his thirst instantly and filled him with joy, for it was undefiled water that came from the purest dew drops.
After a month, however, the sheik was very sad, for al-Azraq had still not looked at him. So he decided to go back home to his family because he thought that the Blue Man did not deem him worthy of serving God. He was walking despondently down the path that led to his village when he saw a man waiting for him. It was al-Azraq who asked him why he had left. Then the Blue Man invited Ma al-Ainine to stay with him in the very spot he had stopped. He remained at al-Azraq’s side for many months, and one day the Blue Man said he had nothing more to teach him. “But you haven’t yet bestowed your teachings upon me,” said Ma al-Ainine. Then al-Azraq pointed to the plate of dates, the bowl of milk, and the jug of water: “Haven’t I shared this with you, every day since your arrival?” After that he pointed to the horizon in the north, over by the Saguiet al-Hamra, and he told him to build a holy city for his sons, and he even predicted that one of them would become king. So Ma al-Ainine had left his village with his family, and he had built the city of Smara.
When the sheik had finished telling his story, he embraced Nour once again and returned to the cool shade of his home.
The next day as the sun was going down, Ma al-Ainine came out of his house to say the last prayer. The men and women in the camp had hardly slept, for they hadn’t stopped chanting and stamping their feet. But the great journey across the desert had already begun, and the feeling of abandonment inspired by the march along the trail of sand had already entered their bodies, its scorched breath was already filling them, making mirages shimmer before their eyes. No one had forgotten the suffering, the thirst, the relentless burning of the sun on the infinite stones and sand, or the ever-receding horizon. No one had forgotten the gnawing hunger, not only hunger for food, but all sorts of hunger. Hunger for hope and for freedom, hunger for everything that is missing and that digs out a dizzy hollow in the ground, hunger that pushes a man forward into the cloud of dust amongst the dazed animals, hunger that makes him climb all the way up hillsides until he must start back down again, with hundreds of other identical hills stretching out before him.
Again, Ma al-Ainine was squatting on the tamped earth in the middle of the square in front of the whitewashed houses. But this time the tribal chieftains were sitting by his side. He had placed Nour and his father very near to him, while Nour’s older brother and mother remained in the crowd. The men and women of the camp had gathered in a semicircle, some of them squatting, wrapped in their woolen cloaks to stave off the chill of night, others standing or walking around the walls. The musicians plucked the chords of their guitars and struck the skins of small earthen drums with their index fingers, making a sad music echo through the square.
The desert wind was now blowing intermittently, pelting the people’s faces with grains of sand that stung their skin. Above the square, the sky was dark blue, almost black already. The city of Smara was surrounded on all sides with absolute silence, the silence of the stony red hills, the silence of the deep blue night. It was as if there had never been any other humans but these, prisoners in their minuscule crater of dried mud, clinging to the red earth around their puddle of gray water. Out beyond was stone and wind, waves of dunes, salt, and then the ocean, or the desert.
When Ma al-Ainine began reciting his dzikr, his voice rang out oddly in the silence of the square, like the distant bleating of a goat. He chanted in almost a whisper, rocking the top of his body back and forth, but the silence that was in the square, in the city, and lying over the entire valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra had its source in the barren desert wind, and the voice of the old man was as clear and steady as that of a living animal.
Nour shuddered as he listened to the long appeal. Every man and every woman in the square stood motionless, as if their eyes were turned inwards.
Already, above the broken rocks of the Hamada in the west, the sun had made a large red stain. Inordinately long shadows had crept out over the ground, then had all run together like rising floodwaters.
“Praise be to God, the living God, the undying God, praise be to God who has no father and no son, who stands alone, who is one and of himself, praise be to God who guides us, for the Messengers of God came to bring truth…”
The voice of Ma al-Ainine wavered at the end of each invocation, breathless, frail as a flame, and yet with each long syllable distinct and pure, shattering the silence.
“Glory be to God who is the one and only provider, the one and only lord, he who knows, who sees, he who understands and commands, glory be to him, giver of good and evil, for his will is the only desire, for his word is the only safe haven from the evil that men commit, from death, from illness, from sorrow created along with the world…”
Night was gathering slowly, first on the earth and in the hollows of sand, around the foot of the mud walls in front of the motionless men, in the holes where dogs slept, under the roofs of the tents, in the murky depths of the well water.
“It is the name of the protector, the name of he who comes to me and gives me strength, for his name is the highest, his name is such that I have nothing to fear from my enemies, and I repeat his name within myself as I go into combat, for his name is the name that reigns on earth and in heaven…”
Up in the sky the sunlight was fleeing westward as the cold rose from the depths of the earth, seeped up through the hard sand and into the legs of the men.
“Glory be to God, the infinite, there is no strength or power but in God the most high, God the infinite, God the most high, God the infinite, he who is neither from the earth nor the heavens, he who lives beyond my sight, beyond my knowledge, he who knows me but whom I cannot know, God the most high, God the infinite…”
The voice of Ma al-Ainine resounded far into the desert, as if it were reaching the outer edges of the desolate land, far beyond the dunes and the rifts, beyond the barren plateaus and the desiccate valleys, as if it had already carried out as far as the new lands on the other side of the Draa Mountains, to the fields of wheat and millet where the people would at last find their nourishment.
“God the almighty, God the most perfect, for there is no other divinity but God, the wise gifted with power,
