It was almost noon when Rafig and I halted under a rock wall, where there was some shade. After we had unloaded the camels, the old man pointed to what looked like the mouth of a cave high up in the rocks.
‘That is an Umm Shash,’ he told me. ‘A desert seep, where water lies at the bottom of a deep crevice. I came here first when I was a boy. Our camp lay several sleeps away, and my father sent me alone to fetch water.’
‘Alone? And you were just a boy?’
‘It was a test, you see. I wanted to be a kahin – a seer – like my father. He said that, on the way here, I might have a dream or vision that would tell me whether I really wished to follow that path, or whether it was a whim.’
‘And did you – have a dream, I mean?’
‘On the way here, no. I lay down on the sand every night with a hollow belly – my father had forbidden me to carry food or a blanket. On my camel I carried only water and fire-sticks. I slept in snatches and though I dreamed, I could not recall my dreams – they did not make any impression on me.’
‘By the time I found this place I was already weak from hunger. I had to climb up to the cave opening, then crawl down – the crevice was only just large enough. I had to spend all day scraping away gravel to find water, and it yielded only a bowlful in a day. I had to fill a waterskin, so the work was very slow.‘At night I would climb down and rest here, and, hungry as I was, I could not sleep. I heard voices in the darkness. I saw glowing eyes and moving shadows. Then, one night, I did fall asleep and was woken by the sound of wings – the wings of a great bird. It was deafening, as loud as thunder, and a vast eagle-like bird – a roc – swooped down on me as I lay there. It grasped me in its talons and carried me off, and I was flying across the desert, and the world lay below me, then there was only the starry sky, and soon the stars lay below me too, and I was beyond the stars.
‘Then I wondered where I was – how the Roc was carrying me. I no longer felt its talons and I realized with a shock that it was not carrying me at all, but that I was the Roc, not separate from the Roc, and that the whole world, the stars, the sky, and everything that existed was the Roc.
‘I saw that the Roc was the Great Spirit, al-Haqq, the Great Spirit’s Dreaming, the Great Mystery – those were just names for the One thing, whose true name cannot be known. The Great Roc was also just a name, a form in my dream, representing what could not be imagined, and had no form, and was not like anything, because it was the source of everything.
‘I was full of joy at this revelation – more joyful than I had ever been before, and suddenly I awoke and found myself in the desert, and it felt as if I had been reborn in this world, in this body, and the body itself was an illusion. All bodies, all forms, were what the Roc looked like from behind the veil, from inside the circle that I had believed was myself, and in my dream I had seen beyond it.
‘Then I knew the truth – that the beings around me, the sands, the stones, the animals, birds, grasses, trees, stars, sun, moon, and clouds, and everything, Bani Adam, too – are part of a common essence, and that essence has always been. This essence is what the Roc is, what the Great Spirit is – the core of being.’
‘At that moment I felt reborn. I had seen beyond the veil, and in a single vision had understood that I was part of a whole.’
‘What did your father say?’
‘When I arrived back at our camp, starving, but with a full water-skin, he just looked at me and he knew. ‘Now you are ready,’ he told me. ‘You have left childhood behind you, and have become a man.
‘Condensed from ‘Sandlines – Tales from the Desert’ by Michael Asher