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    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

    By Paul Bowles

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1962, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard by American author Paul Bowles is a book comprising four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality. Idir’s victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker’s ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kit, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others, but above all with themselves.

    “His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer.”—Time
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherValmy Publishing
    Release dateJan 13, 2019
    ISBN9781789123654
    A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
    Author

    Paul Bowles

    Paul Bowles was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco. A devastatingly imaginative observer of the West's encounter with the East, he is the author of four highly acclaimed novels: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World. In addition to being one of the most powerful postwar American novelists, Bowles was an acclaimed composer, a travel writer, a poet, a translator, and a short story writer. He died in Morocco in 1999.

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      Book preview

      A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard - Paul Bowles

      This edition is published by Valmy Publishing – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – valmypublishing@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

      © Valmy Publishing 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      A HUNDRED CAMELS IN THE COURTYARD

      BY

      PAUL BOWLES

      A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard.

      —NCHAIOUI PROVERB

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

      PREFACE 4

      A FRIEND OF THE WORLD 6

      HE OF THE ASSEMBLY 13

      THE STORY OF LAHCEN AND IDIR 23

      THE WIND AT BENI MIDAR 29

      GLOSSARY 38

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 40

      PREFACE

      Moroccan kif-smokers like to speak of two worlds, the one ruled by inexorable natural laws, and the other, the kif world, in which each person perceives reality according to the projections of his own essence, the state of consciousness in which the elements of the physical universe are automatically rearranged by cannabis to suit the requirements of the individual. These distorted variations in themselves generally are of scant interest to anyone but the subject at the time he is experiencing them. An intelligent smoker, nevertheless, can aid in directing the process of deformation in such a way that the results will have value to him in his daily life. If he has faith in the accuracy of his interpretations, he will accept them as decisive, and use them to determine a subsequent plan of action. Thus, for a dedicated smoker, the passage to the other world is often a pilgrimage undertaken for the express purpose of oracular consultation.

      In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as in a mosaic. The problem was to create a story line which would make each arbitrarily chosen episode compatible with the others, to make each one lead to the next with a semblance of naturalness. I believed that through the intermediary of kif the barriers separating the unrelated elements might be destroyed, and the disconnected episodes forced into a symbiotic relationship. I listed a group of incidents and situations I had either witnessed or heard about that year.

      A. had an old grudge against B. When B. was made a policeman, A. sent money to him, seeing to it that B.’s superior was made aware of the gift. B. was reprimanded and given a post in the Sahara.

      C. acquired an old pair of shoes from D. When he had them resoled he discovered that he could no longer get them on. As a result he quarreled with D.

      In another personal feud, E. consulted with a witch to help him deal with his enemy F.

      Finding his kitten dead with a needle in its stomach, G. decided that it had been killed because he had named it Mimí.

      H. slipped a ring over the head of a stray bird, and the bird flew away with it.

      I. although brought up as a Jilali, hated and feared the Jilali.

      J. ate so many cactus fruit that the peelings covered his gun and he was unable to find it.

      K. frightened a Jewish woman by leaving the ingredients of magic on her doorstep.

      This constituted the bulk of the factual material I gave myself to work with. To get three stories out of it, I combined A., B., G. and K. (for A Friend of the World); and C., D., and H. (for The Story of Lahcen and Idir; and E., F., I. and J. (for The Wind at Beni Midar). No one of the actual situations had anything to do with kif, but by providing kif-directed motivations I was able to use cannabis both as solvent and solder in the construction.

      He of the Assembly has no factual anchors apart from three hermetic statements made to me that year by a kif-smoker in Marrakech: The eye wants to sleep, but the head is no mattress, The earth trembles and the sky is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers, and A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. He uttered these apocalyptic sentences, but steadfastly refused to shed any light on their meanings or possible applications. This impelled me to invent a story about him in which he would furnish the meanings. Here the content of each paragraph is determined by its point of view. There are seven paragraphs, arranged in a simple pattern: imagine the cross-section of a pyramidal structure of four steps, where steps 1 and 7 are at the same level, likewise 2 and 6, and 3 and 5, with 4 at the top. In paragraphs 1 and 7 He of the Assembly and Ben Tajah are seen together. 2 and 6 are seen by Ben Tajah, and 3 and 5 by He of the Assembly, and 4 consists of He of the Assembly’s interior monologue.

      A FRIEND OF THE WORLD

      Salam rented two rooms and a kitchen on the second floor of a Jewish house at the edge of the town. He had decided to live with the Jews because he had already lived with Christians and found them all right. He trusted them a little more than he did other Moslems, who were like him and said: No Moslem can be trusted. Moslems are the only true people, the only people you can understand. But because you do understand them, you do not trust them. Salam did not trust the Jews completely, either, but he liked living with them because they paid no attention to him. It had no importance if they talked about him among themselves, and they never

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