VIII

If you walk long enough among the scattered beggars, pilgrims, and merchants of the great Silk Road, you will surely hear tales of the hidden oasis-shitty, Fal ‘Salam. No map exists to chart a course to its bulging gates, no sketch endures to trace the contours of its towers or taverns. Yet accounts of this vaporous shitty are all very much the same.

A traveler tells of how, plodding upon that dusty ribbon road, he is taken unawares by a swollen yearning from deep in his core. Perhaps mid-stride, the yawning stretches of his journey unfurled ahead still more infinitely in his mind’s eye than the naked could ever dream to discern, his purpose is made suddenly clear. Whether arising from within a caravan, or dismounting forthright from atop elephant or camel’s back, all tell of a hallucinatory trumpet’s call which, once heeded, is followed by a mounting certainty. “Great loads of riches must await me,” speaks the gut, “just beyond Fal ‘Salam’s gates.” Certain that a great serendipity is afoot, a traveler zealously leaves the safety of his original intentions. His compatriots, aghast at the recklessness they witness, are certain that some wispy sorcery has seized him, for in truth there is no shitty for miles.

With each step into the desert’s peril, a traveler’s vision of Fal ‘Salam becomes embellished with more ornamental clarity. Protuberant city gates are envisioned straining against their lock and chain. Trumpets sound louder still, as a mounting spice-fecund breeze ushers the traveler closer, surely evidence for the heaping mounds of spoils within. Then, precisely at the apex of his crystalline convictions at Fal ‘Salam’s inevitable proximity, all that is solid melts into air. The traveler stands alone in the desert, with naught but a feeling of deflation.