After hiding in
a hallow log, in the morning I walked on, at a more frantic pace. I had to leave the trail, and cut through the
dense growth; the slow going only made me more frenetic, more desirous to move.
Then I reached a broad
clearing. Reaching such a place was both
the promise and great danger of the tropical forest: the unexpected was upon
you before you had time to react. There
were several women collecting twigs. I
screamed to them in the little dialect I knew.
They saw me and their blank expressions congealed to horror. The white skin, disheveled hair, the
eyeglasses covered by sweat and grim, it was the very image of the forest
devil, or perhaps less supernatural: a simple intruder, a natural enough
phenomenon, but to be feared as much as any specter. Strangers brought great peril.
And for these people, the Muslims of the
mountains, the stranger required protection, and the succor he demanded was a
curse. They scattered and I chased
them. At first, I could not tell which
one I would be upon first, but then I had one by the arm. I began to speak rapidly to her in English
and French. Her face was contorted. I squeezed her arm too tightly. Here, I held a Muslim woman in my arms, and I
broke two taboos, one from Islam, touching a woman who is not family and one
from Africa, a lack of civility.
She rightly began to scream, saying something
in dialect with great effort, as if squeezing an object out of her lungs,
through her mouth, beyond her teeth; then she began to say, in French, with
great breaths in between, “He, marabout… He, marabout,” and I felt a flutter of
movement behind me and let her go, and she fled into the shield of high
scrub which surrounded us.
Behind me was a
man out of one of Charles’ childhood photos.
Small, brown, dressed in a tan robe shiny from over washing, he had a
small round head shaped like a dumpling, a face composed of alternating lines
and creases, and a long, tangled white beard which framed his face like a
border of snow around a fissured brown stone.
Around his shoulder hung a dry leather bag, bulging with herbs,
collected recently, damp with dew. This
was a Muslim marabout, the heroes of Charles’ youth, the mediator between this
world and the next. But for the Muslim
lack of adornment, and the prayer beads, he was indistinguishable from the
native version of the same functionary.
This was Islam’s foray into the jungle and here stood in front of me the
results. Islam had been extruded through
a unique African cipher and the “witch doctor” had emerged with these
distinctive Muslim markings. If you
removed this man from this forest and flew him to Mecca, he would wilt and die.
I took a few
steps toward him and began to speak in Arabic.
He listened to me without betraying whether he understood Arabic in the Cairo dialect. His fingers began to nervously race around
the round, wooden, prayer beads. He
opened his mouth once, to lick at his lips, revealing a smattering of blackened
teeth.
Now I could see that this white
man speaking the tongue of the Prophet disturbed him immensely. His small frame quaked with tremors; five
hundred years of contact with the white man had instilled, even in these
remote, upland people, a trembling mistrust.
White men brought grief, illness, dislocation, slavery. Here, the very trails to the coast were
trodden by the slavers, their minions and captives. Along the coast, fringed with palms and
studded with fishing dhows, were the dark hulks of slave forts: the last
foothold of the slave in Africa.
So,
as I stood before the marabout, his eyes fixed on mine, it was apparent that he
wanted to disengage himself from me. But
I continued to speak my mangled form of Cairo Arabic and the gist of my plea
emerged to him from the confused grammar.
I sought sanctuary from my enemies.
I sought his hospitality and protection.
His face then slackened, and he walked quickly toward me.
He took both my hands and pressed them to
his. An African gesture; my hands were
being pressed from the capital all the way to the mountains, with varying
levels of intensity, with different shades of truth or subterfuge. He began to mumble softy in the northern
language, and then he began to intone something from the Qu’ran. He stepped back, he stooped, he raised
himself up, he pressed his eyes up to the overhanging trees (since he could not
see the sky) and reveled in some trance, as if he was communing with the spirit
of this vast, nearly silent forest.
But
no, this was not an African gesture.
What the marabout was invoking was a foreign rubric of conduct, brought
down with the Arabs and Magrebis came south through
the northern mountains or the rivers from the coast – to give sanctuary
and hospitality to the stranger in need, no matter what danger it brought. And it was just in time. Down the logging road, we heard the rumble of
trucks. The marabout grasped me by the
wrist and whisked me silently into the forest.
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