WHEN MERYEM WAS A CHILD, THE JA’WABI STILL SPENT SUMMERS IN the mountains with their flocks and winters with their camels in the Sahara. They believed that they were the first people to know the camel. It had never been a wild animal, they said, but had been created to assist them in crossing the desert in pursuit of the Philistines, whom Yahweh had commanded them to destroy. Although they did not eat its flesh as the Arabs did, the Ja’wabi esteemed the camel in every other way. In winter it drank only every eight or ten days and subsisted on the thorns and wild artichokes it found in the desert. Its urine sobered the drunken. Its hair had a multitude of uses: when reduced to ashes it stopped the worst hemorrhages, and in its natural state could be spun and woven into clothes, tents, rugs, and other useful and beautiful objects; its oil was good for the skin. Camel’s milk was always drunk when dates were eaten to counteract the urgent effect of the latter. Although difficult individuals occurred among camels, their character on the whole was admirable. The gelded male worked without complaint. The female, after being covered by the fâal, or stud, invariably fell deeply in love with him and never wanted to be separated from him.
“Yahweh has never made anything better than the camel,” the Ja’wabi said, but they also loved horses. They said:
Horses for pleasure
Camels for the desert
Sheep for Yahweh
When in the desert the tribe lived in tents, traveling continually from pasturage to pasturage on a long, loop-shaped route until, in the early spring when the ewes and she-camels were ready to give birth, they arrived at the foot of the Idaren Draren again. On the outward journey, twelve camels, never more or fewer, were loaded with two large panniers containing about 250 pounds of salt each. These camels were zouzdls, or geldings, chosen for their exceptional docility and obedience. Because the Ja’wabi traveled with about one hundred camels, the twelve plodding geldings carrying the salt were hardly noticeable as long as they showed no signs of temperament. Their good behavior was important, because the salt was the real reason for the winter journey of the Ja’wabi. Their destination was a pair of oases in the Azouâd Timétrine called Oen and Laster. These oases, each containing a spring and date trees, were located one day’s journey apart.
Each year, on arriving at the northernmost oasis, the main body of the Ja’wabi set up camp while twelve men mounted on camels set out for the second oasis, leading the zouzdls by long leather reins. On arrival, just before sunset, they unloaded the baskets of salt and left them beside the spring. Then they returned to camp in darkness, navigating by the stars. The next morning, when they returned, the salt was gone, and in its place they invariably found twelve small bars of gold, each stamped with a thumbless hand on which the twelve finger joints were clearly etched, and the twenty-four empty panniers (arranged in two groups of twelve each, one on either side of the spring) in which the salt had been transported the year before.
This silent trade had been going on for hundreds of years. The Ja’wabi had never seen the people who took the salt and left the gold. They knew only two things about them: that the number twelve was significant to them, and that they did not wish to be seen. If fewer or more than twelve camel loads of salt were deposited, or if fewer or more than twelve Ja’wabi brought the salt to the oasis, the other people left it undisturbed and went away, taking their gold with them. Once or twice, in the remote past, young Ja’wabi men had concealed themselves in the dunes overlooking the oasis, hoping to catch a glimpse of the owners of the gold. In those years the baskets of salt had been left untouched.
The twelve bars of gold were always carried back to the Idáren Dráren scattered among the pack saddles of the twelve zouzâls which had carried the salt to the oasis. Over the centuries the Ja’wabi had laid up a large treasure of the small gold bars. This gold was the reason for the tribe’s survival. With it they had purchased land and built their village of Tifawt in the mountains; with it they armed themselves, bribed their enemies, paid their taxes, and educated their children. The gold was communal property, and any Ja’wabi could ask for some of it, or its equivalent in currency or goods, for any good reason. Such requests were never refused, but they were rare, because the tribe owned nearly everything in common, and its members almost never needed cash.
The place where the gold was kept was known only to one man and one woman in each generation; they passed the secret on to another of their sex before they died. It had never happened that both had died violently before passing on their knowledge of the treasury’s whereabouts, but of course this was a possibility.
While alone in the Sahara, the Ja’wabi lived according to their proverbs, without regard to the scrutiny of others, without calls to prayer, without the mask of alien customs and religion. Religious occasions were observed by animal sacrifices, with sprinkling of blood and the animals being burned in a fire to the accompaniment of prayers before their flesh was eaten.
Every year the exchange of salt for gold was the occasion for celebration. Sheep were slaughtered and eaten, wine was drunk, the camels were given extra rations of grain.. The twelve camels which had carried the salt, and were now carrying the gold bars, were given dates.
It was during this celebration, in the year when Meryem was six, that she saw her first pictures of the future. While her mother was combing and braiding her hair in preparation for the celebration, Meryem, while wide awake, had a dream in which one of the gold-bearing zourtâls was led away into the desert by a rat. She and her mother were alone, inside the tent with the flaps closed. Meryem described what she was seeing as it happened in her dream. Her mother went on combing.
“What did the rat say to the camel?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Meryem replied. “He had the rein his mouth.” “Was the rat stealing the gold?”
“No, he wanted salt.”
That night a tethered zouzâl carrying a bar of gold in its saddle did escape, and when it was found the next day, miles away from camp among the dunes, the rat which had set it free by chewing through its leather tether was still tugging the obedient zouzâd toward the horizon. The boys who recaptured the camel had to kill the rat with stones because it would not let go of the rein; the leather was delicious to the little creature because it was permeated with the salt of human sweat.
After this first experience of clairvoyance, Meryem frequently saw pictures of the future. Usually these were small glimpses of homely details—the color of a stranger’s coat, something spilled, the sex of an unborn child. If the people in the pictures spoke, she heard what they said. These visions occurred more frequently, and the details were more clearly observed, when she was in the desert. Inside the walls of the village her powers were much weaker, though even there she could determine the sex and sometimes the character of unborn babies and make other useful predictions. She knew when storms were coming and when the French were marching over the mountains to collect taxes.
As she approached puberty Meryem began to see and hear scenes from the past, also—people she recognized as ancestors of the Ja’wabi moving through a different, greener desert with thousands of camels and horses and other animals; men slaughtering and burning goats and lambs and heifers in roaring fires on a snowy mountaintop she recognized as Tinzár; a tremendous storm in which the sky suddenly turned aubergine from horizon to horizon and was rent by lightning while hailstones as large as dates pelted people and animals, drawing blood and causing the livestock to stampede.
She said nothing about this vision. By this time Meryem’s family took her phantasma for granted. Although no one in the tribe had possessed the gift of prophecy for a long time, there had been other seers among the Ja’wabi, and these had almost always been females. The tribe recognized the reappearance of the gift in Meryem as they would have acknowledged an inherited physical characteristic, as something to be expected from generation to generation. Very often, they knew, these visions did not last beyond childhood.
Then, just before her twelfth birthday, Meryem dreamed, while wide awake as usual, of a woman with blue tears tattooed on her cheeks who smeared honey over her breasts and told two young men, one of them a Berber and the other an Arab captured in battle, to eat the honey as if they were children suckling at her bosom. “Those who are fed from the same mother’s breasts become brothers,” the woman said. This was a firm belief among the Ja’wabi, whose women nursed each other’s babies as a matter of course, in the conviction that it bound them, and therefore the tribe, together for life. Later in the same dream Meryem heard the same woman, who now seemed to be older, tell the two young men that she had a vision in which she saw her own severed head being handed over to the enemy.
The appearance of the woman with blue tears in Meryem’s dreams produced an entirely different effect on her family and the rest of the tribe, because the older Ja’wabi recognized what she had seen as true episodes from the life of Queen Kahina.
Meryem’s dream was correct in all the essential details: After the battle on the Meskyana River Kahina had adopted a captured Arab warrior named Khaled, telling him, “You are the bravest and most handsome man I have ever seen.” She had bonded her adopted son to her natural son by suckling them with honey (the Arabs said oil and barley flour) as in Meryem’s dream. It was also known that five years later, on the eve of the battle in which Kahina’s army was defeated by the Arabs, the queen had a vision of her own severed head being handed over to the victorious enemy. “Take care of the future,” she told her sons, “for I am as good as dead.” Khaled, the adopted son, urged her to flee into the desert without giving battle, but she refused; evidently she loved him too much to suspect (as the Ja’wabi had always believed) that he was still an Arab at heart, still a Moslem, and that he had betrayed her plans and given the order of battle to the enemy. As she had foreseen, she was killed and decapitated the next day at a place called Birel Kahina, Kahina’s Well. Her sons converted to Islam and were placed in command of twelve thousand horsemen charged with the duty of converting the Berbers by the sword.
After the death of Kahina the Ja’wabi had separated themselves from the Jerawa forever and begun to live apart from all other Berbers and Arabs. Although the existence of Kahina and the details of her battles with the Arab armies were recorded in Arab histories, the Ja’wabi regarded the person of Kahina and her deeds as belonging to their own secret lore.
Because Meryem was not yet twelve years and one day old, the age at which Ja’wabi girls became women according to law, and because the Ja’wabi were strictly forbidden to utter any detail of the tribe’s history aloud, even to one another, except during secret coming-of-age ceremonies in which boys and girls were taken into the mountains or the desert by a single adult and told who and what they really were, it was impossible that she could have known about Kahina’s existence before it was revealed to her in a vision.
WHEN MERYEM CAME OF AGE A FEW WEEKS AFTER HER DREAM ABOUT Kahina, an old woman called Ashbeah took her into the desert, and told her who the Ja’wabi were, and how Joab had led them out of Israel in pursuit of the Philistines. According to Ashbeah, Joab was King David’s nephew, the son of David’s older sister Zeruiah and the commander of the combined armies of Israel, which numbered eight hundred thousand men, and of Judah, numbering five hundred thousand.
Joab was David’s right arm. All his life he had carried out the king’s hidden wishes—arranging to let the enemy kill Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, so that he would not learn that his beautiful wife was pregnant by the king; assassinating Abner and Amasa, the commanders of the two armies, so that these armies, and therefore the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, could be combined into one; killing the king’s rebellious son Absalom by thrusting three darts into his heart with his own hand; and permitting David to deny to the world, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted these things to happen.
On returning to the city after the victory over Absalom’s army, the soldiers found David inside his palace, weeping and crying, “My son Absalom! Oh, Absalom my son, my son!” With the dirt of battle still upon him, Joab went inside to the king and said, “Today you have made all your servants feel ashamed—today, when they have saved your life, the lives of your sons and daughters, the lives of your wives and of your concubines!—because you love those who hate you and hate those who love you. Today you have made it plain that commanders and soldiers mean nothing to you—for today I can see that you would be content if we were all dead, provided that Absalom was alive! Now get up, come out and reassure your soldiers; for if you do not come out, I swear by Yahweh, not one man will stay with you tonight; and this will be a worse misfortune for you than anything that has happened to you from your youth until now!” King David did as Joab said.
More than any other man, Joab knew the sins, weaknesses, and secrets of the king, because he had taken them upon himself. When David lay dying with the most beautiful girl in Israel beside him in his bed to keep him warm, he told his son Solomon, child of Bathsheba, that he must kill Joab if he wished to rule Israel and Judah without carrying the burden of Joab’s sins. “You will be wise,” David told Solomon, “not to let his gray head go down to Sheol [the grave] in peace.”
So when he became king after his father’s death, Solomon sent another famous champion, Benaiah of Kabzeel, son of Jehoiada, to kill Joab. Knowing Solomon’s intentions, Joab had taken sanctuary in the Tent of Yahweh. Benaiah knew Joab well. He was a hero of the wars against the Philistines, and he had served as a member of the Thirty, King David’s bodyguard, under the command of Joab’s brother Abishai. Benaiah found Joab clinging to the horns of the altar. He refused to come outside away from the protection of Yahweh, saying, “Kill me here.” But Benaiah, knowing of the great services Joab had rendered to Yahweh, was afraid to execute Solomon’s death warrant.
But Solomon sent Benaiah back to the Tent of Yahweh, saying, “Strike him down and bury him, and so rid me and my family of the innocent blood which Joab has shed … without my father David’s knowledge. May the blood come down on the head of Joab and his descendants forever, but may David, his descendants, his dynasty, his throne have peace forever from Yahweh.”
Benaiah knew that he would be rewarded for killing Joab by being named commander of the army in his place. Yet he loved Joab because of his bravery, because of his obedience to Yahweh which had always been greater than his loyalty to David, and because he had forced the king to acknowledge his debt to the army.
Inside the Tent of Yahweh, Joab said to Benaiah who had been sent by Solomon to murder him, “The army knows the truth about David and Solomon, whose mother Bathsheba has put him on the throne, and if you kill me in the name of the king’s lies, they will not follow you.”
Benaiah knew that this was so. “Then what am I to do?” he asked.
“Ask Yahweh,” Joab replied, handing him urim and thummim, the dice cast by the priests when prophesying.
Benaiah took the dice, saying, “Yahweh, God of Israel, if I am to kill Joab give urim, but if I am to let him go, give thummim.”
Joab seized his hand before he could cast the dice and said, “I am telling you, Yahweh, that if you give thummim, I will pursue the Philistines who have sailed away in ships and kill them all and utterly destroy their temples, as you commanded Joshua to do and he failed to do. But I will kill them all and destroy their god. Now throw.”
Benaiah threw, and it was thummim. Joab picked up the dice and placed them in his girdle. He carried them on his person for the remainder of his life.
To make the king think that Joab was dead as he had ordered, Benaiah wrapped him in a shroud stained with the blood of a goat and carried him to his home in the desert. But instead of burying him, as Benaiah reported to Solomon, he placed him at the head of an army composed entirely of men of the tribe of Judah, descendants of Joab’s ancestor Caleb, whom Yahweh had sent with Joshua and ten others to spy out the land of Canaan, and who, alone among the twelve spies, had obeyed Yahweh completely, and to whom, in reward for his steadfastness, Yahweh afterward gave the land of Canaan.
Joab led this army with its camels, horses, flocks and herds, wives, children, and slaves (but no priests because there were no descendants of Aaron among them) into Sinai and then across Egypt and Libya, killing Philistines where he found them, until he reached the Idáren Dráren, where the Philistines had set up an altar on a hilltop to their god Baal and his companion the bull.
As the Ja’wabi attacked, a curtain of darkness came over the mountains and advanced across the plain with the Ja’wabi in sunshine on one side of the curtain and the Philistines in darkness on the other. The sky turned black, lightning flashed, and hailstones fell on the Philistines like missiles from a multitude of slingers. The horses and camels of the Philistines were terrified and ran away, but those of the Ja’wabi, basking in sunshine, were calm and steady. When the hail ceased to fall Joab and his army charged with spear and sword and destroyed the Philistines to the last man, woman, child, and animal. Then they demolished the temple of Baal as Yahweh had instructed Moses: “You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.”
As they completed this work of destruction on behalf of Yahweh, the clouds rolled away from the mountaintops, revealing the snowy peak the Ja’wabi called Tinzár. Believing this mountain to be the highest place in the world, the Ja’wabi climbed to its summit and erected an altar to Yahweh, sacrificing and burning lambs, kids, and young bulls.
Joab’s escape from Solomon and his destruction of the Philistines is not recorded in the Bible. Because Joab left Palestine, as the Ja’wabi believed, before the history of the Kings of Judah and Israel was written, the tribe knew what they knew about Saul and David and Solomon from the stories Joab himself had told them. As to the events described in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, these were the life stories of the Ja’wabi’s own families, as familiar to them as the gossip of their camps or their own genealogy, which they kept with great scrupulosity according to Yahweh’s orders. They believed in the authenticity of what their ancestors had known before they left the Promised Land, and in nothing that had been recorded afterward: in their eyes, the Bible after the Book of Joshua was the work of priests relying on hearsay—or, worse, on King Solomon’s version of events.
Even though they were far from Israel with many other gods between them and Yahweh, the Ja’wabi kept the main provisions of his law. They circumcised their male children on the eighth day, as Yahweh had commanded Abraham, offered animal sacrifices as he had instructed Moses, and in general followed the rules of sanitation and quarantine he had dictated to Moses. It was impossible for a people living in the desert as an army, as the Ja’wabi had done while pursuing the Philistines across North Africa and fighting other enemies for many generations afterward, to carry out Yahweh’s wishes in every particular.
In his encounters with Moses after he led the Israelites out of Egypt, Yahweh had issued closely detailed instructions on almost every conceivable subject from the design of altars, sanctuaries, and priestly vestments to ecclesiastical law (“if a priest’s daughter profanes herself by prostitution she … will be burnt alive”) to common law (“if, when two men are fighting, the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband from the other’s blows by reaching out and seizing the other by his private parts, you must cut off her hand and show no pity”) to etiquette (“you will stand up in the presence of gray hair”).
When Joab died, soon after his last victory of the Philistines, he bequeathed the dice to the Ja’wabi, instructing them to consult them whenever a question of life and death arose for the tribe. Thereafter they tested Yahweh’s assent to all such decisions by casting the dice that Joab had taken from the Tent of Yahweh, calling out, “Yahweh, God of Israel, if you wish us to do thus, give urim, but if you wish us to do so, give thummim.” They had found the oases where they traded salt and gold by casting dice: after they wandered away from the main body of Kahina’s people after the defeat of her army, the dice told them which direction to take and which oasis to camp upon. The salt had been left behind by mistake, and when men went to fetch it after casting the dice, they found the gold in its place. The dice were ignored at the tribe’s peril.
Apart from the influence he continued to exercise over the dice, the Ja’wabi had heard nothing from Yahweh for at least a hundred generations. This did not surprise them. He had ignored them for centuries in the past. It never crossed their minds that Joab himself might have seen Yahweh after he died: They had no concept of an afterlife in which God conversed with the spirits of the dead. They thought that Yahweh could not know what had happened unless the living told him what had happened; they thought it possible that he would never know, because he was so far away and there were so many other gods between them and him.
They had no idea that this moody god who had appeared from nowhere and chosen Israel as his people because all other peoples already had gods of their own could travel as far as they had traveled, much less that he was everywhere. Nor did they believe that they could return to Israel. How could they do so without revealing their secret? Joab himself had asked the dice if they might return to their own country after the victory over the Philistines and Yahweh had given urim, which always meant no.
THE JA’WABI SAID, “DOGS COLLECT TAXES, SHEEP PAY, WOLVES REFUSE.”
They were wolves. Until the appearance of the French in the Idáren Dráren in the late nineteenth century, they paid no taxes. No other tribe of Berbers was ever strong enough to subdue them, and neither the Romans after the destruction of Carthage nor the Vandals after the fall of Rome ever penetrated the Idáren Dráren. After the defeat of Kahina the Ja’wabi lived in such isolation, and were thought to be so poor, that Arab tax collectors seldom approached them. When they tried to do so, they were attacked in the passes. Few outsiders ever reached Tifawt. Those who did came in peace and discovered what seemed on the surface to be a devout Moslem community. As soon as visitors left, of course, the charade ceased and the Ja’wabi went back to the practice of primitive Judaism.
Their isolation ended in the early years of the twentieth century when the French, who had already occupied Algeria and slaughtered or dispossessed most of the population of Casablanca, were attempting to subdue the remainder of the Maghrib. Like the Ja’wabi before them, and the Philistines before the Ja’wabi, they recognized the strategic importance of Tifawt, which commanded the marches to the only two passes through the high mountains. Logic dictated that this objective must be taken.
The French surprised the Ja’wabi by approaching Tifawt through the desert in winter, when most of the tribe was encamped far away in the Sahara. The village was garrisoned by a force of fifty men, of whom twenty were youths under eighteen. At the age of sixteen every Ja’wabi male was given the single-shot rifle, sword, and dagger he would carry on his person until he was sixty, and the shock troops of the tribe, called Ibal Iden (“Another Spirit”), after Yahweh’s description of his faithful servant Caleb, were always teenagers. Joab himself had laid down the rule that soldiers chosen for the most dangerous missions must be nineteen or younger; twenty was too old.
The French attacking force numbered 219 riflemen, or one some what understrength company of infantry, supported by a single 75mm. rapid-firing gun drawn by a team of four horses. To the Ja’wabi, these odds of slightly more than four to one seemed excellent. “If you live according to my laws,” Yahweh had told Moses on Mount Sinai, “… you will pursue your enemies and they will fall before your sword; five of you pursuing a hundred of them, one hundred pursuing ten thousand.” Tifawt had been built as a fortress, with parapeted stone walls twenty feet high and two thick gates of oak with an iron portcullis gate in between. Tunnels running beneath the walls in all four directions made it possible for the defenders to pass beneath an attacking force and fall upon it from the rear. The minaret made an excellent observation post, commanding a view of the country for several miles around.
Although the Ja’wabi knew little about the French, it was evident that the French knew something about them. Immediately after their arrival they unlimbered their field gun and wheeled it into position with the muzzle pointing directly at the gates of Tifawt. To the sound of bugle calls, the infantry fixed bayonets and deployed into three sections. Because it was midafternoon and strangers were present, the muezzin called out the salat al-asr as a party of Frenchmen approached the walls under a white flag. Speaking to the Ja’wabi through an Arab interpreter, they demanded the immediate surrender of the town and its formal submission to French authority. One of the Ibal Iden shot the Arab through the heart as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
Without further warning, the French fired three rounds from the field gun, shattering the heavy timbers of the outer gate. They then launched a bayonet charge by one platoon of infantry while a second scaled the opposite wall with ropes and ladders. The Ja’wabi let the French advance through the wreckage of the main gate to the inner gate, then dropped the portcullis behind them. Snipers concealed on the parapet fired into this cage, methodically slaughtering the men trapped inside while other defenders on the opposite wall peppered the scaling party with rifle fire.
Meanwhile twenty Ibal Iden shock troops ran through a tunnel and emerged behind the French gun position. Rising up out of the ground, they overwhelmed the crew and turned the gun on the French reserve of about a hundred men, which was drawn up in two compact ranks a few hundred paces away. The entire Ja’wabi garrison thereupon went through the tunnels and surrounded the remnants of the French force, which had already suffered heavy losses as a result of being shelled by the captured field gun, and destroyed it in a withering crossfire. All 219 of the enemy died. The French officer in command, realizing the hopelessness of his situation, committed suicide where he stood. The Ja’wabi lost three men killed and five wounded.
Despite these favorable results, it was clear to the Ja’wabi that they had been fortunate to win the battle. The arms employed by the French—their powerful field gun and their 8mm. Lebel repeating rifles—were far superior to their own weapons or any others they had seen before. Clearly a people so well equipped for war had no other important purpose besides war. They would come back to fight again.
This happened in an unexpected way. Between the Iáren Dráren and the Sahara lies a range of low, barren mountains. The only way through this obstacle for 100 miles in either direction is a narrow pass that forms the knot in the noose-like route followed by the Ja’wabi on their annual trek into the desert. This gap in the rock is nowhere more than five paces wide, and in some places it is so narrow that its walls, made up of many-colored marbles, have been polished by the rubbing of pack saddles.
It was here, almost exactly one year after the massacre at Tifawt, that the French fought their second battle with the Ja’wabi. The tribe was traveling that year with about 500 camels, together with several thousand sheep and goats. Their own numbers were 554, of whom 300 were men of fighting age, including fifty Ibal Iden. The French were encamped on the other side of the gap with three companies of infantry, just under 750 men, and three field guns. Two of these were somewhat different in design from the gun they had used at Tifawt; it was difficult to tell because they were draped with canvas. These facts about the enemy were discovered by a party of Ibal Iden who were sent ahead of the main party to spy out the gap. The Ja’wabi had been attacked at this natural military position a number of times in their history, and they always sent a reconnaissance party ahead to make sure it was clear.
After hearing the report of the spies, the Ja’wabi consulted the dice, asking whether to attack the French or avoid battle by going around the end of the mountain range, a journey requiring six extra weeks. Yahweh’s answer was thummim—attack. The Ja’wabi were not so confident in the protection of their absent god as to think that they could force the gap in the mountains when it was so heavily defended with such excellent weapons as those possessed by the French. They knew they would have to take it by surprise and subterfuge. Their plan of attack was simple: the Ibal Iden would climb over the mountains, infiltrate the camp, capture the guns and turn them on the French as before, driving the enemy toward the gap; the main body of Ja’wabi would ambush and slaughter the enemy there.
Leaving the rest of the tribe encamped in the desert, the Ja’wabi fighting men advanced at night toward the gap. The approach was overgrown with scrubby desert bushes, and during the day the Ja’wabi scattered, each man burying himself in the sand in the shade of one of these shrubs. They ate bread, dates, and curds, and drank a little water.
On the fourth night they climbed the mountain above the French camp. A hundred fires burned in the darkness below, silhouetting row on row of identical white military tents. There were no enemy lookouts on the mountaintop, and the French had no dogs to warn them of the approach of an enemy. Their camp was guarded instead by men who marched along its perimeter, shouting words of encouragement to each other in the darkness.
It was a moonless night. The Ibal Iden descended the mountain and crawled on their bellies into the sleeping camp. Their objective was the battery of guns, which they planned to capture and turn against the enemy as before. The remaining Ja’wabi, divided into two parties, approached in a pincer movement. At the explosion of the first round from the captured guns, they would hit the enemy from two sides, firing the captured rifles for their shock effect, then closing with sword and bayonet.
When the Ibal Iden reached the guns, they found that they were not guns at all but constructions of wood made to resemble guns. They immediately slashed the canvas of the nearest tents and found them empty. The French sentries had stopped shouting, and a peculiar silence enveloped the encampment. Realizing that they had walked into a trap, the Ibal Iden barked like dogs, the warning signal to the others, and prepared to die.
At this moment a tremendous fusillade erupted on two sides of them, and the last thing any of the lost boys of the Ibal Iden saw against the screen of the darkness was the flowery light created by the muzzle flashes of four hundred massed French rifles. Some of the older men on the other side of the mountain lived long enough to smell the dervishes of burnt cordite that swept across the desert floor, but none survived. The French troops who died to the last man before Tifawt had been members of this battalion.
APART FROM KILLING ALL BUT SIXTY OF THEIR MEN, DISARMING THE rest, and levying a fine of 500 camels and 3,000 sheep against the tribe, the French inflicted no further punishment on the Ja’wabi except for insisting that they pay taxes and learn French.
Without men and camels it was impossible to travel through the desert, so the silent trade of the twin oases ceased, and the tribe lived at Tifawt the whole year round. French officials, and later on journalists, anthropologists, and adventurous tourists began to visit the village. Because the Ja’wabi had made themselves interesting through their brilliant victory over a people that considered itself superior to all others not only in its modern inventions but also in its immemorial genes, they were closely questioned by nearly every French person who arrived among them. The Ja’wabi were unused to questions: there was little need for them within the tribe because they all knew the same things. Nevertheless they found a way to respond:
—What is your creation myth? (God made the world.)
—How long have you lived in the desert? (Since God made the world.)
—Why do you love your camels so much? (Because God made them.)
—Why did you massacre the French so cruelly? (God sends us our enemies.)
—What will you do with so few men and so many women? (Make more men with God’s help.)
Outsiders never stayed more than a few days because the Ja’wabi offered them no hospitality, but they invariably went away satisfied and happy. More came in their place, asking the same questions, receiving the same answers, and departing with the same reassuring sense of having banality reconfirmed. The Ja’wabi never asked the French questions about themselves because everything interesting about them—their guns, their tribal pride, their amazing innocence—was obvious.
From the start, the French assumed that the Ja’wabi were devout servants of Allah. No other explanation occurred to them. Why would they have fought so fearlessly against such impossible odds if they did not expect to ascend immediately as martyrs into al Jannah, the Garden of Delight, where they would enjoy, as the Holy Koran promises,
Wide-eyed houris
as the likeness of hidden pearls
… Spotless virgins,
chastely amorous.
As the Ja’wabi quickly discovered, this idea of post mortem sexual pleasure appealed deeply to the French, some of whom had acquired a theoretical knowledge of the Koran and Islamic religious practice that was far more detailed than that of any Ja’wabi—or, for that matter, of most genuine Moslems. The French seemed to think that it was possible to know everything by memorizing words. It was this lust for the superficial that made them, in the estimation of the Ja’wabi, so mad and so dangerous. Of the French, the Ja’wabi said, “They beat the camel to death in order to inhale the dust of its coat.”
Before the French came, the muezzin sang in Tifawt only when there were strangers inside the gate. After the two massacres, the French removed the gates, making it impossible to know whether outsiders were present. Thereafter the Ja’wabi caused the call to prayer to be sung five times a day and assigned old men the duty of answering the muezzin’s call so that the French would hear and see what they expected.
The Ja’wabi did not ask the dice if Yahweh approved of this subterfuge; it was clear for at least two reasons that the only possible answer was thummim. First, the French followed a policy of exaggerated respect for Moslem holy places. They had refused to fire on the minaret during the battle of Tifawt even when snipers concealed within it were killing French soldiers. After taking possession of the Ja’wabi stronghold they searched the mosque from top to bottom to make certain there were no arms concealed there, but never entered it again in the brief time, a little more than a century, that they controlled the Idáren Dráren. This bizarre politesse had the practical effect of giving the Ja’wabi (who would, of course, have razed every cathedral in France if the position had been reversed) an excellent safe house.
Second, it did not take the Ja’wabi long to realize that many of the Frenchmen they encountered loved Moslems because both hated Jews. They were always talking about a Jew called Dreyfus who had betrayed France. This man, an army officer, was an alien, they said; a danger to his comrades even if he had not turned out to be a spy: The Ja’wabi, of all people, would understand that.
The French learned Arab taunts: “Fleeing and even abandoning their women! Jews! Sons of Jews! May God curse them!” And Arab proverbs: “Only the Jewess surpasses Satan in malice”; “The Jew always comes into the house of the faithful with the money bag or the medicine bottle in his hand.” When wishing to establish an atmosphere of camaraderie during their visits to Tifawt, they quoted these sayings.
The Ja’wabi listened with grave attention. They said, “Twist the horse’s lip with a cord called hatred and he will not notice what is happening underneath his tail.”
—Has there ever been a traitor among the Ja’wabi? (God has spared us that.)