I lost my way…
It was long ago, in the 1970s, in the Hoggar, in the deepest reaches of the Algerian desert, that my story with the desert had begun, upon the plateau of the Timissao, to the south-west of Tamanrasset.
The Touareg call the Timissao Akal-n-Essuf, which means the land of the void and of solitude; it is there that I lost my way. Wandering for three days and three nights, by day with no landmark beneath the scorching sun, by night curling up on the sand itself in the glacial cold, under the distant, luminous and reassuring gaze of billions of stars.
The merciless light of the desert was a torture for the eye.
Between sky and earth, I walked, wandering at random over the sand dunes through long corridors bordered with rocks. A veritable labyrinth. A light wind caressed my face. It was a breath of infinite sweetness after the sandstorm that had cast me, gasping, upon this uncertain path.
Where, then, did I draw the strength to feel like a flood of tenderness around me, in this rocky universe whose majesty defied time? Whence came this heightened sensibility that made me perceive, like a melody, the faint shifting of the air around me.
The wind could not belie my certainty of finding my way again. Sooner or later. And so I kept on walking, entrusting my fate, when night came, to the wild stars that tore the sky apart.
And despite the protests of my aching limbs, I do not remember having moaned or wept. Wrapping my chèche around my head, I had taken refuge in a cleft of the rock face, from where I looked out over a field of dunes strewn with rubble. The sunset had been of a beauty to make one forget every sensation of this world below, the demands of the body and even its physical existence.
Time stood still.
An instant, a brief instant.
I was alone.
A world without path, without space, without air.
Without hands, without eyes…
The soul laid bare, in the utter nakedness of oneself.
It was a world that taunted me to tear my very entrails out.
A world without words.
The wind had withdrawn, leaving me alone before another expanse of silence.
The desert had just given me the strength to wrest myself from this time.
I remember the consecration of that day which lifts the dawn effaced by the light of the sun. My gaze, questioning the sky, ricocheted off the flanks of the cliff that had offered me shelter. It was there that I discovered the self-evidence of the world.
My soul had begun to listen in this land of silence and of stones made of life. Stones of words and words of stone…
Hidden far from the eyes of the living prayer of every night come from every star of another age, a fresco. In the morning, a message surged forth from the rupestral walls.
In that luxuriant morning, at the heart of the calm of my solitude and my distress, searing my memory, body to body, I could not believe my eyes : silhouettes of men on horses that galloped, breaking free of the rock face, flew toward me at the speed of light.
Above my head, animals, men, a whole scene of life…
At the threshold of my ignorance, an armada in motion awakens me.
Their four forelegs and their four hind legs outstretched, the horses are caught in their surge. The head and the body of the animal are doubled, and the rider upon his mount, one hand gripping the bridle and the other raised in the air, orchestrated the movement. They all came toward me as if to press me to rise up and to set off again.
Beyond space and time, I had just leapt across a gap without knowing it.
I had just crossed space and travelled back up the course of the ages to the era of the ancient Men of the desert.
Painfully, my hand reached out toward this living cloud of figures from that other time who enveloped me in an infinite tenderness.
The desert thus taught me that I was no longer alone.
This timeless message has remained engraved. Years later I returned to that place, I dozed off in the hollow of that cavity… They were still there, awaiting me in the infinite silence of eternity.