...of spirit

They came up in front of the tomb. It was just four whitewashed walls set on a foundation of red stones. There was only one door, like the opening to an oven obstructed by a huge red rock. Above the walls, the white dome was shaped like an eggshell and ended in a spearhead. Now Nour saw nothing but the entrance to the tomb, and the door grew larger in his eyes, becoming the door to an immense monument with walls like cliffs of chalk, with a dome as high as a mountain. Here, the desert wind and heat, the loneliness of day stopped: here, the faint trails ended, even those where lost people walk, mad people, vanquished people. Perhaps it was the centre of the desert, the place where everything had begun long ago, when people had come here for the very first time. The tomb shone out on the slope of the red hill. The sunlight bounced off the tamped earth, burned down on the white dome, caused small trickles of red powder to sift down along the cracks in the walls from time to time. Nour and his father were along next to the tomb. A heavy silence hung over the valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra.
From the round door, as he tipped the large rock away, the guide saw the powerful cold shadows and it seemed to him that he felt a sort of breath on his face.
Around the tomb was an area of red earth, tamped with the feet of visitors. That is where the guide and Nour stopped first - to pray. Up there on top of the hill, near the tomb of the holy man, with the valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra stretching its dry streambed into the distance and the vast horizon upon which other hills, other rocks appeared against the blue sky, the silence was even more striking. It was as if the world had stopped moving and talking, had turned to stone.
From time to time, Nour could nevertheless hear the cracking of the mud walls, the buzzing of an insect, the wailing of the wind.
“I have come,” said the man kneeling on the tamped earth. “Help me, spirit of my grandfather. I have crossed the desert, I have come to ask for your blessing before I die. Help me, give me your blessing, for I am of your own flesh. I have come.”
That is the way he spoke, and Nour listened to his father’s words without understanding. He spoke, sometimes in a full voice, sometimes in a low murmuring singsong, swaying his head, constantly repeating those simple words, “I have come, I have come.”
He leaned down, took up some red dust in the hollow of his hands and let it run over his face, over his forehead, his eyelids, his lips.
Then he stood up and walked to the door. In front of the opening, he knelt down and prayed again, his forehead touching the stone on the threshold. Slowly, the darkness inside of the tomb dissipated, like a night fog. The walls of the tomb were bare and white, the same as on the outside, and the low ceiling displayed its framework of branches mixed with mud.
Nour went in now too, on all fours. He felt the hard cold floor of earth mixed with sheep’s blood under his hands. The guide was lying on his stomach at the back of the tomb on the mud floor. Palms on the ground, arms stretched out before him, melting in with the earth. Now he was no longer praying, no longer singing. He was breathing slowly, his mouth against the ground, listening to the blood beating in his throat and ears. It was as if something unknown were entering him, through his mouth, through his forehead, through the palms of his hands, and through his stomach, something that went very deep inside of him and changed him imperceptibly. Perhaps it was the silence that had come from the desert, from the sea of dunes, from the rock-filled mountains in the moonlight, or from the great plains of pink sand where the sunlight dances and wavers like a curtain of rain, the silence of the green waterholes, looking up at the sky like eyes, the silence of the cloudless, birdless sky where the wind runs free.

[Desert, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]