Page 61 - November 2020

61
Litterateur
November 2020

The Charcoal Garden

Mohamed Al-Ashry

Translated by Roger Allen.

Mohamed Al-Ashry works as an expert in the field of
Petrophysics. He works for PETRONAS Company in
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on June 2013. Besides his
job in the field of digging out for Oil, he is also a
columnist and a novelist. He has published five
novels and won several prizes for his literary works.
He is also a columnist in a number of Arab
newspapers and magazines. Some of his stories as
well as chapters of his novels were translated into
French, Spanish and English, and were published in
international literature periodicals and anthologies
in Spain and Argentine.

If you venture far into the desert, you see above you the heavens arrayed like a
gigantic bell. The stars scattered across the sky turn into apertures through
which you can observe the vast expanse of the universe; they hold out their hand
to show you yet more bells embracing other people.Eventually you see a group of
lofty domes connected to each other by pathways that allow you to move from
one to the next. The process takes many, many years, and you can spend an
entire lifetime wandering among those domes, in open spaces without number,
and all in quest of your soul. You may eventually find it hanging over your own
head, tied to a thin thread of light that draws it ever upwards, but you may still
neither discover nor understand anything about your surroundings