The Book of Berber Magic

Chapter One

THE DERVISHES stood in silence on the white roof of The House. They stood motionless and immaculate in their embroidered dress, starched stiff like the uniforms of a
whirling military that had come to guard the secrets of the old world buried for centuries behind the  doors.

The men looked out to the Atlantic, with their sun-burned faces and brown searching eyes, lit up by the sunlight. Like those of a deer caught in the headlights, traversing the Highlands on a cold snowy night. White furls of waves carried flurries of snowdrops from distant climes, turning in the clutches of the unruly water, round and around, until they were hurled to land, where young boys kicked balls barefoot across a forgotten beach.

It was winter.

The men watched vigilantly, like coast guards protecting this war-torn North African kingdom. Until the sounds that surrounded the home, rising up from the slaves working knee-deep in soil, could be ignored no more. Black from the beating sun, the slaves had been captured in a picturesque port along the coast where bodies washed up each morning like sea-life in an oil spill. The vessels they arrived in were mostly half capsized. Usually still dripping wet, the slaves had been sold to a crooked builder that had, in return for his generous offer of bak-shish, been charged with rebuilding Casablanca. Removing the shanty town that surrounded The House. Replacing the ramshackle dwellings that had resided here for centuries. Recovering the city from the destruction of war. It had gone on for years here now.

As the sun blossomed into a smoldering pink floating like candy floss above the palm trees, that morning, the slaves worked feverishly. Shimmering copper piping hung around their muscled torsos like necklaces uncovered in the golden desert sands of the Sahara that stretched into the distance far from here. The men were building white high rise buildings fir the savvy new King of Morocco. His economic reform program that he had promised his impoverished subjects, continued here despite the war. The first of these ominous buildings now dwarfed the shantytown.  More of these soulless structures would soon encroach upon The House.

The Dervishes watched over this scene each morning like guardians of this unknown future. What had happened to the past? Until the sounds of banging and bull dozing, the tapping and rapping, the whirring and ringing, the clangs and chimes of bringing the new world to life, rose to such a pitch that they could be ignored no more.

It was then that the Dervishes would clip their shoes and began to twirl, brought to life by the ever-crescendoing sounds. Dancers, every one of them, the Dervishes would start their sequences with a jolt, twirling into a fury,  round and around they danced, their skirts billowing towards the skies, before standing motionless again like soldiers brought to attention. Looking back out to sea.

Watching silently.

The Dervishes' job was to guard The House. But they could not help but move to the cries of the city giving birth to the future. They danced in silent protest to the desecration of something sacred. Witnesses to the destruction of all that had come before. Moving in Holy Union, they performed as one, forced into motion by the commotion of this forgotten city being swallowed back into the ether and smashed to a smithereen.

People had no time to remember now.

Things moved too fast.

The House had been beaten up by weather. Sun too hot. Winds too harsh whispering of the deaths of countless fisherman in the sea just visible from the room. The dusty white facade was covered in a spidery web of pink Bougainvillea which hid part of its long history. It had once belonged to the spiritual leader of the entire continent, the ruler of an empire that stretched from the tearooms of Tangier to the tip of South Africa, far below.

Fatitia had been the Queen of Africa, the ruler of a matriarchy that had been stamped out long ago. She had presided over Mauritius and Senegal, The Ivory Coast, Angola, Namibia and New Guinea where there were now bodies piled in heaps, wiped out by the newfound plague.