The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga by Mohamedou Ould Slahi;Larry Siems;

Author:Mohamedou Ould Slahi;Larry Siems;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

EVERYTHING AHMED had learned in his nomadic upbringing taught him never to run: nomads learn to walk at a moderate speed to save energy. Running is fatal, and life in the desert is a marathon, not a sprint. But in his dream that night he was running as hard as he could, with something pushing him and telling him that this was his only option to survive. To his dreaming mind, his home camp was not that far, and if he didn’t reach it before the break of dawn he would die.

To his left, Ahmed saw a large group of people running in a random formation toward the southeast, leaning slightly toward the east. They weren’t talking or communicating in any way, just running to safety with all the power and energy they could muster. Bending his direction toward them, he ran and ran as fast as he could, from one hill into a valley and up the next hill, and on and on.

He was trying not to lose sight of the running group. Something inside him told him that he needed to catch up to them and join them because they were headed to safety. Where that might be did not concern him at that moment. Ahmed had learned that priorities are forced by circumstances and not by people, and are often changed by external factors. What he needed now was a level of perfect concentration that would match a Chinese martial arts master. He needed to exclude the fear of the unknown and enjoy the new world around him. Nothing around him was of his choosing, and he needed complete calm and surrender.

Some of the group were lagging behind, and he tried to catch up to the stragglers. His first instinct was to ask them what was going on, and why nobody was allowed to stay in this country. As he got closer he recognized some of the runners. He saw the brother of his cousin Sidi Mohamed, his grandmother, and other people who had died. And yet these running dead didn’t look dead at all. They were full of energy, and looked younger, and much healthier and stronger, than when they left this world.

Nothing of the scene unfolding before Ahmed seemed odd to him, not even the fact that the dead looked and acted exactly like the living. He’d sometimes forget that some of the people he was running behind were not alive, and then he’d realize again that he was among the dead. But none of this seemed to have any effect, negative or otherwise, on his mind. There was no difference between the living and the dead or the past and the future. He could clearly remember events that happened in the future as well as those that had happened in the past, with no distinction between them. It was as though the straight line of time that we are running along at all times had bent itself around him in a big circle, with all events equally observable to him in that moment.

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