The Spider's House Read Online Free PDF Page B

to keepfrom being led off to some new work of his father’s devising.
    Thus it was that among all his early friends Amar was the only one who had not learned to write and to read other people’s writing, and it did not matter to him in the least. If his family had not been Chorfa, descendents of the Prophet, his life no doubt would have been easier. There would not have been his father’s fierce insistence on teaching him the laws of their religion, or his constant dwelling on the necessity for strict obedience. But the old man had determined that if his son were to be illiterate (which in itself was no great handicap), at least he was not going to be ignorant of the moral precepts of Islam.
    As the years had passed, Amar had made new friends like himself, boys of families so poor that there had never been any question of their going to school. When he met his childhood friends now and talked to them, it seemed to him that they had grown to be like old men, and he did not enjoy being with them, whereas his new friends, who played and fought every minute as though their lives depended upon the outcome of their games and struggles, lived in a way that was understandable to him.
    A great thing in Amar’s life was that he had a secret. It was a secret that did not even have to be kept secret, because no one could ever have guessed it. But he knew it and lived by it. The secret was that he was not like anybody else; he had powers that no one else possessed. Being certain of that was like having a treasure hidden somewhere out of the world’s sight, and it meant much more than merely having the baraka. Many Chorfa had that. If someone were ill, or in a trance, or had been entered by some foreign spirit, even Amar often could set him right, by touching him with his hand and murmuring a prayer. And in his family the baraka was very strong, so powerful that in each generation one man had always made healing his profession. Neither his father nor his grandfather had ever done any work save that of attending to the constant stream of people who came to be treated by them. Thus there was nothing surprising about the fact that Amar himself should possess the gift. But it was not this he meant when he told himself that he was different from everyone else. Of course, he had always known his secret,but earlier it had not made so much difference. Now that he was fifteen and a man, it was becoming more important all the time. He had discovered that a hundred times a day things came into his head that never seemed to come into anyone else’s head, but he had also learned that if he wanted to tell people about them—which he certainly did—he must do it in a way that would make them laugh, otherwise they became suspicious of him. Still, if one day in his enthusiasm he forgot and cried: “Look at Djebel Zalagh! The Sultan has a cloud on his shoulder!” and his friends answered: “You’re crazy!” he did not mind. The next time he would try to remember to include their world, to say it in reference to some particular thing in which they were interested. Then they would laugh and he would be happy.
    Today there were no clouds on any part of Djebel Zalagh. Each tiny olive tree along its crest stood out against the great, uniformly blue sky; and the myriad ravines that furrowed its bare slopes were beginning to fill with the hard shadows of late afternoon. A threadlike road wound along the side of one of the round hills at its feet; tiny white figures were moving very slowly up the road. He stood and watched them awhile: country people returning to their villages. For a moment he wished passionately that he could be someone else, one of them, with a simple, anonymous life. Then he began to spin a fantasy. If he were a djibli, from the country, with his cleverness—for he knew he was clever—he would soon amass more money than anyone in his kabila. He would buy more and more land, have increasing numbers of people working on it, and when