The Mouth of the Whale

Reading by candlelight is overrated. 

My book, if it could voice an opinion on the matter, surely wouldn’t offer much in the way of disagreement, reeling as it is from its most recent brush with the diminutive hazard perched on the corner of my bedside table. As evening had fallen and the desert light faded to a smouldering red, it had initially served its purpose well. But now, as night draws in and the room grows truly dark, the candle’s dull glow is no longer sufficient. I have to move my book closer and closer, passing each sentence slowly past the flickering corona so that I can continue reading, word by ponderous word. Then, inevitably, I fly too close to the figurative sun, and it lashes out and brands the page with a tiny black scar before reassuming its prior state of zen-like tranquillity, the very image of deceptive innocence.

The ratio of charred dog-ears to paragraphs absorbed has reached a tipping point. I close the book and toss it on the table. I think of all those old illustrations I’ve seen of Czars and Sultans and Caesars consulting maps and drawing up battle plans by candlelight. I wonder how many borders may have been drawn accidentally due to a shifting shadow or an unsteady wick.

There is no electricity in the room. This is by design. The sole source of power for the building as a whole is the array of solar panels on the roof — putting 330 annual days of sun to good use — and their output is earmarked for sole use in the kitchens. Water is hauled in by 4x4 along a lone dirt road. Heating, on the very rare occasions that it becomes necessary in the Jordanian desert, is provided by burning bricks of reconstituted olive hulls. 

I check my watch.

9 pm. 

Not yet.

***

Betelgeuse

/ ˌbiːtəlˈdʒɜːz /

noun

A very remote luminous red supergiant, Alpha Orionis: the second brightest star in

the constellation Orion. It is a variable star.

Via French, from Arabic bīt al-jauzā' (“shoulder of the giant”)

***

I had arrived earlier in the day after a mostly relaxed drive up from the southern port city of Aqaba. The rental car was an anaemic automatic. I only had myself to blame for having gone for the cheapest option. Automotive bargains, after all, rarely translate to an excess of horsepower, something I would come to regret as I crawled my way up and out of the Jordan Rift Valley, being passed by a succession of dusty pickup trucks along the way. 

Out on the open road it became less of a problem, and I cruised northward through the desert with the wind at my back. I switched on the radio and browsed through the stations. 

A talk show of some kind. 

Click. 

What appeared to be a recitation from the Qur’an. 

Click. 

Dance music. 

Click. 

Something in Hebrew, not surprising considering how close I was to the Israeli border. 

Click.

… Russian? I was initially utterly baffled by this until I remembered that, due to the vast numbers of immigrants that arrived after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian is the most common native language spoken in Israel after Hebrew and Arabic. I recalled reading that there was also a sizeable Circassian community here in Jordan, descendants of the refugees who fled from Russia to the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the czarist genocide of the 1860s. I wondered if there were any Adyghe or Kabardian-language radio stations lurking out there in the æther as a result. But then again, I asked myself, would I even be able to recognise those languages if I heard them? No. I probably couldn’t even recognise them written down.

As I neared my destination, now lumbering slowly along a rock-strewn, unpaved part of the route, I noticed an elderly man squatting in the shade of a solitary tree. He rose as I approached, which I took to mean that he would appreciate a lift. Coming to a halt, I opened the window and attempted to confirm. Given that my Arabic was limited to the most basic of greetings — and a selection of ever-relevant words like “sword”, “book”, and “peregrine falcon” — this involved me pointing ahead in the direction I was driving, then gesturing to the empty passenger seat with what I hoped was a suitably questioning look. I did not want my first day in the country to be marked by the vehicular abduction of an elderly local.

He said something that sounded affirmative. I opened the door, and he settled himself laboriously into the seat.

As I pressed the accelerator and we began moving, the car’s operating system, having detected the presence of the new passenger, immediately began protesting that he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. We were at this point driving along the undulating, stony path at approximately the same speed as a particularly somnolent donkey — a pace that was not threatening to increase any time soon — so my immediate thought was to ignore it. The safety sensor would not take the hint. No doubt crafted somewhere on a Stuttgart supply line with the hazards of the autobahn in mind, its seatbelt warning steadily grew louder and more insistent. For the sake of peace, I tried miming to the old man that he should put his belt on in order for the car to leave us alone. I didn’t manage to get my point across, so eventually I had to lean over and fasten it for him, again trying to avoid an unfortunate end to my first day by making it seem as little like a homicidal lunge as possible.

He took it in good grace. But given our utterly relaxed pace and the fact that we would have seen any other car off in the distance a good 10 minutes before we ever met it, he must surely have gone home believing me to be of less than hearty constitution.

And so I arrived in the middle of the desert.

***

Fomalhaut

/ ˈfoʊ məlˌhɔt /

noun

A star of the first magnitude and the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus

From Andalusi Arabic fam al-ḥawt (“mouth of the whale”)

***

9:30 pm. Fuck it, that’ll do.

I leave my room and make my way through the candlelit corridors. A final right turn, a staircase, and I am on the roof. Flat and open. No candles up here, just the dark of the desert night.

“Welcome, my friend. There is space to sit over there. Please walk slowly.”

My eyes haven’t even begun to adjust to the darkness yet, but I recognise the voice from earlier in the day. Suleiman, one of the young local men who operate the lodge. Following the direction faintly indicated by the silhouette of his outstretched arm, I do indeed walk slowly, shuffling my feet in case of any invisible obstacles. 

I sit down, look up, and wait for the great tapestry above to slowly unveil itself.

***

Altair

/ ˈæltɛə /

noun

The brightest star in the constellation Aquila. Visual magnitude: 0.77; spectral type: A7 V;

distance: 16.8 light years

From Arabic al-nasr al-ṭā'ir ("the flying eagle")

***

I grew up in one of the few places in Western Europe — so otherwise aflame with voltaic conflagrations of neon that scour all detail from the night sky — where one can see some semblance of the stellar landscape that so fascinated and terrified our ancestors. Rural Ireland is not fully immune from this side effect of modernity, but there are pockets of peace, especially on the far western Atlantic fringes, where one can still sleep under the Great Fence of the Stars. The Fair Cow’s Path. Lugh’s Chain.

As a child, and even as a young adult, walking back home after meeting friends in some country pub, I never looked up. I wonder what I missed. 

As I grew older and more aware of what we had collectively lost, I began making an effort to always look up whenever I had the chance. Sitting in the hills above Akureyri in northern Iceland. Lying in the snow in Svalbard, keeping one ear out for snowmobiles and polar bears. Pacing the shores of Lake Baikal. Crawling out of my tent at 3 am in the Altai Mountains in western Mongolia. The night sky was not black, but a blazing kaleidoscope of blues and purples blooming around piercing white nebulae and shimmering halos of earthen reds.

It just so happened that most of my chosen observatories until now tended to be on the colder side, which made any kind of prolonged stargazing an uncomfortable prospect. The desert has its own chill bite that takes hold at night, but as I recline on the roof and allow my eyes to relax, the heat of the day still lingers pleasantly in the air.

Some other guests begin making their way up to the roof. I hear each one pause at the top of the stairs to get their bearings before launching themselves out into the dark. Suleiman greets one of them by name. The surprise in her reply is evident.

“How did you know it was me?”

He laughs.

“Bedouin eyes.” 

This isn’t a euphemism. Everyone who works at the lodge has been drawn from the scattered, semi-nomadic community dotting the nearby hillsides; from the engineers who maintain the solar panels, to the cooks in the kitchen, to the guides who lead people through the desert or across the night sky.

Suleiman’s voice echoes out from the darkness.

“Who knows this one?”

He pulls a small laser pen from his pocket and points at the orange-red speck smouldering in the east.

***

Aldebaran

/ (ælˈdɛbərən) /

noun

A binary star, one component of which is a red giant, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. It appears in the sky close to the star cluster Hyades. Visual magnitude: 0.85; spectral type: K5III; distance: 65 light years

Via Medieval Latin, from Arabic al-dabarān (“the follower”)

***

I once met a woman called Soraya in Mexico. A Persian name, derived from the Arabic term for the brightest sorority of stars in the night sky: al-Thurayyā, known in the West as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. It means “the little abundant one”, a reference, possibly, to the number of stars clustered together, or to the bounty of rain that typically falls during the time of year when al-Thurayyā is most visible above the Arabian peninsula.

This kind of star lore has a long history here. Stars served as invaluable navigational aids when traversing the open desert, their annual paths across the sky as a useful way of measuring the passing of the seasons and the upcoming changes to the weather that would entail. Even in the more sparsely documented pre-Islamic era, we see them referred to lovingly in the poetry of Ar-Rumma.

I arrived haphazardly when ath-Thuraya 

high overhead 

was like an aquatic bird soaring.

Its rear parts — the Follower — flying in her tracks, 

yet neither falling behind nor overtaking her.

The “follower” was the exact same carmine orb to which Suleiman was now drawing our attention. The binary star Aldebaran, who seems to pursue al-Thurayyā across the heavens, a determined suitor eternally out of reach. Ar-Rumma also composed an alternate depiction of this lovelorn figure as a red-turbaned camel driver, herding his camels — the stars of al-Thurayyā — ahead of him to a drinking hole. 

Suleiman, however, prefers the former interpretation.

“We sometimes joke that the Follower should be called the Womaniser instead. Because he is always chasing seven sisters…”

The study of the night sky reached its zenith during the Islamic Golden Age, when scholars from the far reaches of the Muslim world gathered in the famed Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”) of Abbasid Baghdad. Star tables. Astrolabes. Formulae for predicting the sighting of a crescent moon or an auspicious comet. One can only wonder how many other minute discoveries, the result of countless hours of cooperative scholarship in dusty archives and desert observatories, were lost when Hulagu Khan burned both the city and its people, and cast its books into the Tigris.

Thankfully, plenty survives.

Such as a name that, from Islamic Spain, crossed the Atlantic to take root in the Hispanophone lands of the New World. A name in Coyoacán, where Kahlo painted and Trotsky died. A name drawn down from the Arabian sky.

***

I return to my room. I light the candle. I shield my eyes.