A settlement of earthen walls, and a small farm opened beneath the shade of date palms. In the wilderness, oases were scattered like jewels. There, a modest life—quiet and filled with peace—unfolded.
Just before the village lay a simple cemetery. At its center stood a whitewashed tomb known as a marabout, said to enshrine the village’s founder or a holy man. Around it stretched a vast number of grave markers. They testified that this tiny oasis had endured, generation after generation, over a long span of time.
The lifeline of the oasis was a single channel of water, led by tunnel from an underground stream along the mountain slope. Once brought to the oasis, the water branched into countless narrow channels, each guiding it to individual farms. To protect it from evaporation, these channels were no more than five centimeters wide—concrete grooves like capillaries. As one watched the thin trickle flowing through moss-lined channels, it became clear that for hundreds of years this fragile stream had nurtured life. In the oasis, one is reminded that life itself is water.
At the foundation of oasis life stands the date palm. Its fruit, rich in sugar and resembling dried persimmons, serves as a preserved food. Its fibrous, supple trunk provides beams and pillars—the only building material in a desert without timber. Its leaves are used for shade, roofing huts, and making handicrafts such as baskets and hats, while fibers from its bark are made into rope. Not only for oasis dwellers but also for nomads, it is indispensable.
In the oasis, I came to know a certain family. In their home lived an elderly couple, the wives of their two sons, and the children. The narrow farmland could not sustain them, and the two sons had left for distant towns to work, leaving their families behind. Beyond supporting daily life, the sons worked desperately to fulfill their parents’ lifelong wish: a pilgrimage to Mecca, for they were devout Muslims.
When I visited again five years later, the aging parents had completed their pilgrimage two years earlier. They had earned the title of Hajj (Hajja for a woman) and were living their days in quiet contentment.
The next time I returned to the oasis was fourteen years later, in 1993. A paved road had reached the village, electricity had arrived, and television antennas stood atop some of the earthen houses. When I visited that family again, the old couple had already passed away. I went to the cemetery where they were buried, but the simple graves—marked only by uninscribed stones—were faintly covered by sand, their traces fading.
At the graves stood unglazed clay jars, offerings used in the oasis to hold drinking water. Yet scorched by the sun and worn by drifting sand, they were slowly crumbling back into grains. Still, the dead beneath the earth are believed to rise again, radiant, at the end of time. The Qur’an promises that those who are devout and perform good deeds will be granted an eternal paradise—where inexhaustible springs flow, shaded groves spread, and maidens attend them.
From To a Land Beyond Dimensions, scheduled for publication by Kochi Shimbun, July 2000.
