The Second Sight, page 23
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.
3
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.
4
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.
