Star of Gypsies

Since mud is something infrequently encountered in a desert, and this desert was even more bleak and parched than deserts normally are, you may be wondering why this creature is called a mudpuppy. Sandpuppy might be more accurate. There is a reason. The mudpuppy spends almost its entire existence burrowed deep down in the desert sand, far below the scorching heat of Duud Shabeel's remorseless sun. It lies asleep in its tunnel, scarcely even breathing. Once every five years-or ten, or twenty-rain comes to that desert. Sometimes it is the merest light shower, but more often, when it rains there at all, it rains a deluge. Trickles of water make their way between the grains of sand and awaken the mudpuppies. Hastily they begin to dig toward the surface. If they are lucky, they emerge while it is still raining. The torrential downpour turns the sand to mud and creates short-lived ponds and pools in the low-lying places. In a single frenzied night of mating the mudpuppies dance wildly around, choose their partners, and copulate desperately until dawn. The males die at the break of day; the females lay their eggs in the pools and ponds and then they die too. Forty-eight hours later the tadpoles begin to hatch.

The childhoods of these creatures last about two weeks. That is all they can possibly get, for after the rain comes the heat again, and the desert begins to dry. Within a couple of weeks the little ponds and pools have vanished. The tadpoles, if they have reached maturity before that happens, hastily begin burrowing into the sand, digging themselves down far below the surface. There they rest, slumbering, dormant, until the next time it rains, years hence, when it will be their turn to arise and dance and mate and die.

It rained while I was living in the desert of Duud Shabeel. I watched the mudpuppies emerge, I saw them do their dance. And I wondered: What is the virtue of such a life? What merit is there in sleeping under the sand for years and years in order to have a single night of joy? What purpose can there be in it? These poor creatures are victims of nature's blind impulse toward self-perpetuation. The only purpose they serve is to create the next generation, whose sole purpose it will be to create the next.

And then I thought, Is it not the same with us? Are not we just a more elaborate kind of mudpuppy, arising and going through our little mating dance and dying so that our places can be taken by those who follow after?

I confess that these thoughts threw me into the deepest despair I have experienced in my life, worse even than when I lay imprisoned with the overthrown Loiza la Vakako, worse than when I suffered in the passageways of Alta Hannalanna. For suddenly I saw life as purposeless, and that was terrifying to me. I saw us as mere prisoners throughout all our days, as the mudpuppies are in their burrows in the sand: hoaxed and deceived by nature, filled with philosophical nonsense designed to keep us working at our task of replacing old life with new. If I had been less sturdy and resilient of soul I think I might have wanted to kill myself, thinking these thoughts, alone in that melancholy desert.