A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

Paul Bowles

Jan 2019 · Pickle Partners Publishing

About this ebook

First published in 1962, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard by American author Paul Bowles is a book comprising four tales of contemporary life in a land where cannabis, rather than alcohol, customarily provides a way out of the phenomenological world. Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality. Idir’s victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker’s ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kit, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others, but above all with themselves.

“His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer.”—Time

About the author

Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, Morocco, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. Born in New York City, he was first published in the old Transition in 1928, and entered the University of Virginia in 1929, which he quit for the Left Bank. Two years later he made his first visit to North Africa, a tentative trip which lasted for four years. He intended to return there to live, but World War II interfered; instead, he spent five years in Latin America. After the war he returned to Morocco to buy a small house in the medina of Tangier, and from this base he began to travel southward and eastward. In 1949 he first visited Ceylon and India, and returned often, eventually buying a small island off the south coast of Ceylon, which served as his winter headquarters until 1959. Now, once again, he lives all year round in Morocco. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, became a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. His other novels include Let It Come Down (1952) and The Spider’s House (1955). He has also published short stories and collections, as well as books of travel, poetry, and translations. Bowles’s prolific career also included many musical compositions, having garnered one of the largest and most diversified collections of recordings of native North African music for the Library of Congress. He died in 1999 at the age of 88.