Traveling through Morocco, I’ve been reading Paul Bowles in parallel. Now we’re in the Sahara, and this is no longer just a trip — it’s a ritual. A Bowles reader in Morocco is like someone who deliberately goes to a cemetery at midnight to make sure the shadows really do move.

I lie under Berber blankets, and the pages of his stories become an extension of the tent, another wall — not of fabric, but of words and darkness. The howl of the wind beyond the canvas blends with his sentences, and I can no longer tell where the real cold of the desert ends and where that icy terror begins, the one he described in such an even, dispassionate voice. His characters lose themselves in this landscape, and I, without noticing, begin to listen inward, wondering whether something of my own is vanishing too in this silent, humming expanse.

It’s dangerous reading, like staring into a mirror in the dark for too long. You look to his texts for confirmation of what you’re feeling, and you find it. But the price of that confirmation is the sense that you yourself are becoming a character in one of his stories — a person on the edge, where reality is so thin you could pierce it with a fingernail, and behind it lies either nothingness, or something far more terrifying than any desert.