The Cargo

By Anthony Tan

A deep-blue ocean stillness was upon the sea, as if it was the earth’s last morning and the boat with its cargo of dead bodies was on its last voyage towards infinity.

He was in a daze, his mind unable to come to grips with the bare facts. It was wrestling with the intrusions of fear and despair, emotions for which, on the boundless sea, the only adequate and objective symbols were the crest and trough of the waves. They bore down on him, heavy as the sheer mass of the sea itself. He wanted to talk about them, about anything at all, but there was no one alive in the world. If there was a seagull, he could at least shout at it, or better still, curse it. But no seagull flew this far. If the earth had been flat, this part of the sea would have been its very edge before the boat would plunge into the abyss. Yet, he was aware, the sun was rising steadily, indifferently

Asmawil stared again. On the bow, under a green tarpaulin, the bundled bodies were still warm. They were seated as though they were merely suffering from seasickness. Their heads were bowed or turned. Why he had them seated he did not know. He knew them by their names, by their first names. One wearing a skullcap was his wife’s nephew. Unconscious of it, Asmawil had him seated beside the ship owner, whose bodyguard his nephew was. The motor launch had been drifting for three hours now. He had stopped the engine when he decided to drag the bodies to the bow. But even after he had put the tarpaulin over the bodies, and had securely tied its end to the posts supporting the roof, ha still had not started the engine. He was in no hurry to reach Siasi, the port of departure, nor any island. He was secure on his boat, and more than at any time in his life, he feared the living more than the dead. He knew what the folks believed about a dead body on a boat, that it was accompanied by forty-four evil spirits, and that was why any boat carrying a dead body was a slow boat. But he did not fear the dead nor their spirits. For one they did not ask any questions, or if they did, these were never on their lips, only in their eyes, in their faraway stare. They seemed to be looking for something farther than their eyes could see. They seemed to ask, but since their questions were never uttered, he did not have to answer them. Besides he was certain there were no spirits.

He went to the kitchen at the stern and brewed himself some coffee. He had not realized, until now, how hungry he was. When he sat down to drink his second cup, a cigarette between his fingers, he imagined what would happen when he got back to Siasi. The whole town would turn out and flock to the wharf and see his cargo. The people would be on the streets as on a morning when a hadji had come home from a pilgrimage to the holy land of Mecca. Except that there would be no school band, no streamers of welcome, no firecrackers, no rich and flowing robe, no turban, and no telltale bruise on the forehead, which was the true mark of a pilgrim who had kissed the black stone of Kaaba. Because his was a different pilgrimage. Just a night at sea and a boat of ten men, nine of them now dead. As for the bruise, it was not anywhere in the body.

And the people would ask all kinds of questions and interrupt themselves with accusations and curses. Did he kill them all? All of them? What a devil! Including his nephew? It’s only his wife’s nephew. The same. How can anyone do such a thing? He has a tail. Money, all that money. A hundred fifty thousand, maybe more. More. Abdul was a rich man. No, it was not his, the middlemen’s. Robber, just the same. They will get his neck. Think of the relatives of the dead. Sure, the sons of Abdul. Why do you think he did it? He has a tail. No, greed. Insanity. They will kill even the cats in their house. Curse upon their children! Upon my children?

He shuddered to think upon the curse of his children, upon his head he was ready to accept. He had seen enough of life to part willingly with it. And with that sharp, sudden pain at the back of his head each morning he woke up, he could accept the end of his life. But not the curse of blood upon his children. Never his children, never his wife. It was not right that they would suffer for his sins, whatever they were. Besides, he did not do it. So it was not just that his children must suffer. Neither must be.

For the first time since he was confronted with his cargo, his mind cleared up, and he recalled the incident only several hours before. It seemed ages ago, but when he looked again at the tarpaulin, he recalled that it was only yesterday afternoon that he had seen the longshoremen roll two black and dented barrels of gasoline on a slender gangplank. He had feared the plank would break under pressure. As a boat pilot for many years he had seen enough of loading and unloading to know that the plank would only bend. He knew that as well as the longshoremen did. Yet he had some fear that the plank would break. Perhaps he had been wishing it would, so the trip would have to be delayed. If one of the barrels dropped to the sea, as he had wished, it would give him a few more hours at home. Let the crew worry about it. He would go home and be with his wife.

When the last barrel had been rolled safely and stacked on each side of the deck, one of the longshoremen, gave Asmawil a wide grin as if to mock him for his fear and selfish wish. Instead of being relieved, Asmawil was mildly angry and discomfited that his wish has not come true. Courteously, he smiled back at the longshoreman, who was still grinning and looking intently at him. Then something more than angry and frustration suddenly seized him. Immediately he went inside the poop to blow the horn. Two long, hoarse and impatient whistles roused up the languid sundown, but the afterimage of that grinning face remained. A breath of vague sensation breezed through him.

The owner of the boat came out of the restaurant with his bodyguard and other members of the crew. A successful trader for some years, Abdul Tungki was a short, corpulent man whose waddling movement was made more pronounced by his bulging back pockets. Whether they were full of money or just business papers, nobody was certain. People who saw him waddle down the street on a busy day assumed that it must be money which made the trouser pockets bulge. As a trader he made a fortune buying barter goods from Sandakan for the middlemen in Siasi. Even in the days before the national government sanitized the word contraband into barter, Abdul Tungki had always overstocked his pockets the most successful businessmen did. It was a status symbol, like carrying a chromium plated cal. 45 the new should not be deprived of. They were to be envied for it, and only the poor bystanders of finer sensibilities were repulsed by it. On a trip like this, Abdul’s bodyguard, slinging an armalite, carried his black attaché case.

Asmawil had come out of the poop and lighted a cigarette. Deeply he inhaled the first smoke and blew it out slowly into the clear air. He was relieved to know that the weather was fine. It was not dark yet. High in the west the moon was an imperfect crescent. A feeble star hung above one of its horns. A week before, when he and his wife were relaxing on the porch of his house in South Land, he had noticed that the star was directly above the valley of the crescent, and the moon looked like the crook of a mother’s arm cradling an infant. Looking at the moon and the star close together never failed to amuse him because of what the folks believed, that the conjunction of these two heavenly bodies meant that somewhere two young lovers were going to elope. Yet when he himself ran off with his wife, there was no such heavenly sign. He doubted the accuracy of the folk belief, but he was certain that, moon or no moon, young lovers always ran off because it was the cheapest way to get married. Their hot blood did not wait for heaven’s sanction, nor for any distant signs, only for the encouraging glint of their lover’s eyes. The young had common sense. For them the way through the knot of convention was not to untie it but to cut it. Only in their acceptance of the risks when they ran off where they somewhat romantic. And Asmawil knew those risks.

He thought of his wife, seven months pregnant, and getting heavier every time he came home from Sandakan. He would amuse her by pretending to listen to the vigorous kick of the foetus, but afterwards he would tickle her by kissing her navel. It was definitely going to be their last, boy and girl. He had promised that to her. He had said the same thing three years before, but when the child turned out to be another boy, he reneged on his promise because he wanted a girl so he could name her Napsa, after the dancer in a famous story, and he wanted her to be a dancer like her mother.

His wife had been a dancer of no mean fame, but there was no more trace of that lithe, willowy girl with whom, many years ago, he had run off a pump boat to his grandmother’s place in Sibaud. After seeing her dance the pangalay on the first night of one of the most lavish wedding of the beautiful Mindamora to Hadji Datu Tunggal, whose wealthy parents showered coins from the balcony of their large house to a crowd of children — Asmawil decided to run off with her. On the third and final night of the celebrations, above the din of the gongs and kulintang and voices clamoring for her to dance, the motor of the pump boat was heard in the distance. Nobody knew what it meant. The people were disappointed when she failed to show up. She was out with him on the dark sea, sitting on one of the thwarts of the open boat, in her dancer’s suit of lavender silk dotted with sequins. She took off her gold necklace and came to where he was at the stern steering the rudder post. She hung it around his neck and kissed him on the brow and told him not to be afraid, for she was his, here and hereafter.

Yet not even the nearness and the whiff of powder from her body assured him that she was all his. Half of him was worried about her male relatives who could be scouring the island when they knew what happened to her. He knew that they would be armed. He turned from her to see if his automatic carbine was still there. It was his only weapon, but it was enough to ward them off, to prevent them from forcibly taking her back from him. No one, not even her father, could take her away from him now. He had sworn that to himself and by all his ancestors that they could only take her away from him over his dead body. He could not shame himself; above all, he could not shame her. For he had sworn to her, too, the same vow all true and pure blooded Tausugs had made to their lovers, even if in his veins he knew there was a tint of that abhorred Samal blood, because what was important in the vow was not the purity of the blood of the swearer, but his capacity to fulfill the vow, to wear it like his face and skin, and not like a piece of clothing. And because he knew that no woman would run off with a man who would not swear by his sacred name and who could not do what he had sworn to do. This woman, this girl, had complete trust that he was man enough not to run.

He tried to rouse himself from his reverie, but the comfort it gave him was so immense that he could not shake it off his mind. He lighted another stick of cigarette, and as the smoke made indefinite circles in the air, his mind sank back to that afternoon when Abdul Tungki entered the poop and told him to start going. In turn Asmawil ordered the crew to release the cables from the bitts at the wharf and in a few minutes the boat, all agog with the raucity of the engine and the bell from the poop, set sail for Sandakan — one day and two nights away.

The wooden hull of M/L Morning Glory was very light for its size, designed for fast sailing by the skilled boat makers of Sibutu Island. Fitted with two 90-horsepower Yanmar engines, it used only on a safe regular trip. The second was a standby engine in case the boat ran into naval boats on patrol at the boundary between the Philippines and Borneo. Once in a rare while it was used to keep it in shape. In the days of smuggling blue-seal cigarettes, when naval patrols were more frequent, the slower boats always ran out of luck. They were caught and towed behind a naval boat to Bongao, the nearest port of call from the boundary, where the crew were imprisoned, the boats impounded; or they lost their merchandise and the lives of the crew to the rapacious pirates, who made guns their own capital in the lucrative business. The fastest boat was the luckiest, and Asmawil was proud that the Morning Glory — the name he had chosen himself because, invariably, it would have sight of its destination in a blaze of glorious sunrise — had never suffered humiliation or loss. Allah be praised for such a boat, he would pray in his unconventional way. He would never be a pilot of a slower boat. He would not take so many risks.

In the past he had known what fear was — the very shape of it, the way it struck him like cold air that, suddenly from nowhere, pierced his skin and stiffened his nipples and entered the hollow pit of his stomach, and he would experience having a torso empty of its bowels. Often it came in the shape of heaving sea. What lurked beneath the sudden swell, the mysterious and the unpredictable, what the eyes could not see and the mind could not anticipate, was what he feared more than the broadsides of the patrol boats or the firepower of the pirates. He knew one could always return the compliments with one’s own firepower that was only the last resort. The easiest way was to steer away from the course of the enemies or outrun them on the high seas. But that which he could not anticipate he could not forearm himself against, and to respond to the unpredictable, when it happened, took a superior intelligence and vast composure. Yet such fear, rational as it was, was not to be revealed to another man, even to his copilot, who was confidently steering the boat windward.

Last night he had no such fear. The weather was good. The cold wind was gentle and caressing. Within the range of his vision were lights from the fishermen’s boat and crystals of foam on the otherwise still surface, and the only sounds were the engine throbbing almost like the heartbeat of the night itself, and the gentle incessant vibrations on the tailing against which his body was pressed. Not fear, but awe, and awe so sacred that only an act of total surrender could capture its sanctity, that to capture it in images would only spoil its immediacy and ineffableness. Last night awe filled his being as he wondered how in their silence the sea and the sky were one. No horizon separated them. Black merged into black. He had the uncanny feeling that if this boat was to sail on indefinitely, it would, on a night like this, be lifted one degree higher to touch the sky’s rim. So quiet were the empty spaces he felt like a solitary earthling on an odyssey between the galaxies. The illusion of the nearness of the constellations to one another made him feel that no distance was far enough for his boat.

He looked toward the stern, and he saw the smokestack emit a steady stream of blackish smoke. There was something about machines, he had thought, that made them a reassuring companion. They were so predictable, even the most sophisticated. Until they conked out or were abused. Then they became dangerous, as if in their weakness or misuse they asserted their superiority and independence.

Many years ago he had thought about going back to school to finish a teacher’s degree at the local college. He had two more tears to go when he quit school to support his wife and children. He wondered how different life would have been. Would he have enjoyed teaching children in one of the remote islands like Bulikullul? He knew it would have been a constricting, sedentary life, and the afternoons in a remote island would stretch like one big yawn. But he would have had more time with his family, and certainly, without physical danger at all, and for that reason it would have been a less exciting life.

Besides, sailing had always been his life. It was a matter of necessity for him and his father, a boatman who had ferried passengers from Siasi to Hambilan and back. In those days there had been no motorized vintas, and he and his father had to use the sails, or the paddles on windless days. The sails were triangular and old, with various patches of clothing materials, and these patches made the sails colorful. When the wind was strong, and the sails were unfurled, it was smooth sailing. He would sit back at the stern, the paddle held securely in the crook of his leg. One-third of the paddle was underwater, serving as the rudder of the vinta. This way he could daydream during much of the trip, or he simply watched the sea birds dive for food on the surface of the water. His father would go about collecting ten centavos from each passenger.

His father went out of business when pump boats became fashionable. But that was many years later. Meanwhile he had grown up, muscles and height, and the Samal tint of his hair had almost completely disappeared. One summer vacation when he was big enough to stir the helm, he was an apprentice pilot with M/L Sisabros, the fastest motor launch ever to ply the Siasi-Jolo route. Its famous pilot, Harudji, taught him everything he knew. Most pilots of that time maneuvered their boats in a safe, wide arc, bringing their boats far beyond the right wing of the wharf, so that when they docked, the boats, whose engines had been reduced to half speed, would move slowly parallel to the wharf. Harudji disdained that kind of maneuver as too time consuming. He would boldly steer his boat perpendicular to the right wing, running at full speed ahead as if he would ram the boat against the cluster of piles. At less than twenty meters he would spin the helm several times around, swerving the bow to a sharp angle, at the same time reducing speed, until the old tire-bumpers on the starboard creaked menacingly against the piles. About the time he entered college, Asmawil had learned the dangerous art of this maneuver and had developed a deep sense of pleasure for the dangerous.

School bored him. The teachers were unimaginative. What kept him in school for two years was the opportunity to read stories of high adventure on the sea, of sea captains who were hunters and hunted, rapacious mutinous crew, and uninhabited islands with buried treasures at the end of the globe. Pequod and Patna haunted him until he saw in each a world more real than his own. When he quit school and found a job as an assistant pilot of a smuggling boat, he had few regrets. He felt he was simply going back in time, repeating the work of his father, going back into the world of his boyhood. It was, he felt, his birthright, his romance with the sea.

He had been so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice the wind had changed course. He had been drifting for hours, but still no island fringed the horizon. By his reckoning it was nearly noon. The distant water had begun to shimmer under the heat, and under a light breath of wind the sea was like a million fish scales. He went to the kitchen and cooked something for lunch, after which he went down into the engine room. He noticed the bilge had risen to a dangerous level, had, in fact, reached the wooden frame on which the engines were mounted. He started the motorized water pump. It began to make a sucking sound.

He went up and examined the bodies. The blood had dried and caked around the wounds and on the floor, and its bad smell assailed his nose. The heat, he thought. He went back into the engine room, and after hesitating a moment, carefully wound a light piece of rope around the ridge of the circular head of one engine. With one vigorous pull the engine thundered in his ears, and his whole body shook in the subsequent vibrations of the hill.

Taking the helm turned around the bow 180 degrees and watched the compass needle slowly move East. He was moving opposite the sun’s path, against the wind, in the direction that would lead him back to Siasi. He knew that, and he knew that there was no other place for the dead but Siasi, where their families would bury them and avenge them; and he knew, too, on whose head their vengeance would fall. It should not be on his head, but it could well be because they would doubt his story, for vengeance would make them doubt the most naked truth. He was not turning back to Siasi for the sake of the truth. He knew its consequences not only for him, but also for his wife and children. Yet he was turning back to Siasi because it is the only place for the dead, and the dead needed burial. He was not concerned with decorous rites, the bathing of the body, the shaving of the face, the white shroud, and appropriate, mesmerizing prayers chanted through the night. The rites were for the living who needed distractions because they could not face their grief in silence, because they could not see death in its sheerest simplicity. As for the dead, even those who had made their living on sea, they needed one thing only, a place in the bowels of the earth.

And he could not, as his nephew suggested, throw the bodies into the sea. He believed that the sea was perhaps the proper graveyard of the sailors but the thought of sharks and squids feeding on the bodies of his friends revolted him, horrified him.

The tarpaulin was flapping incessantly on the bow, and the wind was blowing the smell into the poop. Leaving the helm he went back into the engine room and started the other engine. He knew he had to get back to Siasi before evening, before the smell would become unbearable. He thought again of the folks who believed that each dead was accompanied by forty-four evil spirits. If so, he thought, there should be three hundred ninety-six of them on the boat, and they could gang up on him and hurl him against the engines or drown him on the bilge. It would have been better, he thought, if they did, and it would be the end, rather than this journey of infinite solitude. The thought of these spirits in the engine room made the hair on his nape stand on end. Ha slapped his nape three times. He climbed to the deck. He hurried to the poop. And then he realized that there was no one but he and the wind and the sound it made on the tarpaulin and the smell it carried and the engines and the vibrations and wavelets in a half-empty glass beside the binnacle.

He knew what he would do when he got back to Siasi. He would tell the story exactly as it happened, no more, no less, exactly as he remembered it. The bare facts would suffice and they were easier to tell. In less than thirty minutes the authorities would know all they would want to know. But the truth was a different matter. It would be more difficult to tell. Besides, it would not be necessary. It was powerless to bring back the dead, anyway.

He would not tell the authorities, unless they wanted some embellishments, how the sharp, metallic sound of the armalite had broken his sleep, how for a moment he had lain frozen, wondering if it was a nightmare, and then how it was followed by another burst of rapid sounds, like hammer on a nail, and he had jumped out of the bunk and entered the poop and had seen a shadow dragging something, for it was dark. And all he had done was asked what it was, and the shadow answered, and he knew it was his nephew.

Plainly, he would tell the authorities that it was his nephew who had killed the men. Why Tadji did it only Tadji knew and he, too, was now dead. How could he, Asmawil, know what it would take to kill eight people? Only madness, and he had called his nephew insane. Tadji said it was for a reason. Abdul had insulted him, called him lagak, glutton, and Asmawil said it must have been only a joke. Tadji insisted that Abdul meant to insult him, or why did he do it in a restaurant, where there were many people, where Sali, Akmad and Ummar and the others were present, who also laughed when Abdul said that Tadji was big because he ate too much and made a great deal of sounds like a pig. But if Abdul got what he deserved, what about the others? Because they laughed, too, and they heard the insult; and if they lived, they would talk about the insult. They would also talk about his crime. That was how Tadji explained his madness, but it did not explain human madness at all, why there was such a thing in the world. The authorities would accept the explanation as plausible, would even accept the world as it was. So Asmawil thought he would simply repeat what Tadji had said. He would add only what he had seen at dawn, that Tadji was counting the money in the attaché case, and that it came close to a hundred and eighty thousand. He would not tell the authorities, because it was beside the point, that he knew the wife of Tadji had inordinate fondness for jewels and movies and clothes, and that Tadji was a devoted husband. He would not tell that Tadji, with a mysterious smile, had asked him if he wanted some of the money, and he said no, he did not want the money of other people, and the smile suddenly changed into a threatening glare. He would not quote Tadji, who said it was not the money of Abdul, but the money of the middlemen. He would not tell how he did not argue the point because it was dangerous to make a madman see that it was all the same because it was not his money, and that in silence he called his nephew a pirate. He would ask the authorities to return the money to the middlemen whose names, and the barter merchandise they had ordered, Abdul had carefully written down in his notebook.

There was only one thing left for him to tell, and that needed an explanation. He would confess that he killed his nephew, his wife’s nephew, in self-defense. He hoped the authorities would be satisfied with an explanation of how he had done it, how he had outwitted a big, young man with an armalite, and that they would not ask him, until later in court, to re-enact the whole sequence of his crime because it was painful to go through the details once more. Later perhaps, he would be kinder to himself, he would absolve himself of any guilt because it was necessary to defend himself against a madman. Just now, he hoped, he would only explain how he had done it, but even that was painful enough because it was shameful and sordid. It was not worthy of him to have done it, but it was necessary to kill a madman while he was off his guard, while he was squatting half-naked over the hole of the toilet, his back facing the door. Why Tadji trusted him after Tadji had threatened to kill him, Asmawil thought, he could not explain. He had attributed it to the mysterious workings of fate because, quite simply, fate did not want him to die that day, that it was Tadji’s life which had run its full course. But whether it was fate or chance was another matter. Tadji said he would kill him because he knew his uncle would talk and he suspected that Asmawil wanted part of the money in spite of his denial. He said he was sparing his life for the time being because he needed his uncle to take him back to Siasi, that as soon as they were near the island his uncle had to die, too. He told him that in Siasi he would tell the police that they had been robbed by pirates, and that his life was spared only because one of the pirates knew his wife. Asmawil wanted to laugh at his ingenious lie, but it was a madman with an armalite who stood before him, and he had not been tempted to wrestle with him for the gun. Tadji told him to keep his eye on the helm while he was in the kitchen to look for something to eat, and he warned him never to come near it, or he would shoot him. Asmawil heard him no sound of utensils from the kitchen for a long while. He grew excited when the suspicion struck him that Tadji was in fact in the toilet. That Tadji had the armalite with him did not deter him from going to the kitchen for the knife. Ha had to take the only chance to save himself. The long curve of the head of the knife had caused Tadji enormous pain, he thought, for Tadji swallowed the smoke of his cigarette and coughed when the knife struck the hollow around his collar bones, and a prolonged snore came from his mouth.

That was the story, not as he would like to tell it to the authorities, but as he remembered it. He would tell the other details, if they were necessary to convince them, but he would rather not. They would ask for the approximate time of the day when it happened, as if a man would slaughter another man at specific time, like he would a goat or cow at the slaughterhouse. Goats and cows were killed mercifully, he thought, with the sharpest blade like a kris or a barung, with one’s own personal weapon, so that death was swift, and there was less pain. On more than one occasion he had seen an Imam, a religious man, slaughter a goat after a solemn prayer. Perhaps because its meat was to be eaten.

Would the authorities like to know about the weather, too? He would tell them of last night’s windless lull, of a world so peacefully asleep. But even if the wind and the sea raged, their fury was nothing compared to the madness of last night. The veteran sailors and the competent weathermen could tell you when a storm would strike. They knew the places where the waves were always huge the whole year round, and they would tell you to avoid those places. Look for a harbor in the season of habagat, the sailors would say. Sail in April and May when it is uttarah. The wind and the sea had their season of peace, as if they had a mind of their own and obeyed a meaningful pattern. No, he decided, the authorities would not ask him about the weather. It was not their duty to know about it. They were not sailors. It was also beside the point. The weather had nothing to do with the madness of man. And he knew the authorities were right.

The sun was down in the west when he got near Sirum, the island before Siganggang which lay opposite Siasi. Two hours more, he said to himself, but, almost immediately, he remembered he was running on two engines. One hour, he corrected himself.

When he saw the mountain of Siasi rise slowly in the horizon, a sudden vision of his own death gripped him. Turn back, an inner voice told him, turn back. Yet he felt powerless against the lure of some harbor. He was tired, and the desire to lie down beside his wife in a comfortable bed overpowered his instinct to preserve his life. Besides, where would he go? Out there on the high seas what would he have? He could not drift forever. Soon he would run out of oil, and he was sure the weather would change. Ha would have to find a harbor, a foothold on some land. If it meant facing the avengers of the murdered sailors, so be it. There was a slim chance though that they would believe him. But then again, it meant he would have to face the avengers of Tadji. He had not thought of Tadji’s brothers when he killed him in self-defense. He knew that self-defense did not exempt him from the stringent law of vengeance. Was it any better if it was he, instead of Tadji, who was dead? For having outlived Tadji, for having bought a fraction of human time, of more eternity, he knew he had to pay with his own blood, and perhaps with the blood of his own children, too. While his mind was debating whether in bringing back the dead to Siasi he had acted wisely, the boat had moved irrevocably within sight of the island.

In the twilight sky the tallest landmarks of the island stood above the lights from the squat houses. From the distance the telecommunications tower was a sharply tapering edifice, without lights now since its antennae had been struck down by lightning many years before. The church belfry did not look so imposing now as it had looked when he was a boy. A very long time ago, he used to sit beneath a camanchile tree at Angelus, not to listen to the clang of the bell, which did not please him, but to watch the startled doves fly out of their niches when the bell rang, and for a moment they circled uncertainly about the belfry, like erratic silhouettes in the dusk. The needle-like minarets of a mosque did not soar so high as they did at noon when their chalky whiteness glinted in the sun. Darkness seemed to dwarf them. The faithful who built them had wanted them to soar beyond the highest pitch of the muezzin’s call to prayer, to soar to the bosom of heaven itself. The dome of the mosque was crowned., appropriately, by the ubiquitous symbol of Islam: a star above the crescent moon. Yet the sight of it did not summon religious fervor in his heart, nor the images of turbaned missionaries who had come to this shore centuries ago, nor the fiery swords of Bedouin sheiks crushing their icon-worshipping enemies. What images it summoned were supplied by the folk belief about fugitive lovers pursued by the armed relatives of the girl. He saw two runaway youth who would consummate their desire and repeat the eternal drama of love and birth. Further into his vision the images of children of those lovers rose before him like the procession of the future itself, not ghostly faces, but clear, bright and brown faces, like those of his own children, wearing in their smiles the innocence of those who would not inherit the blight of their human parents, as if they were to be the new creatures, running and playing on the primal shore, basking themselves in the maternal warmth of the earth’s first morning.