And so it was the tenth day of the seventh month amidst the seventy third year of the twentieth century, Anno Domini, when the swell of the silent sonic storm arrived, countless miles away from the solitary tree, at a caravan moving slowly West across the aeolian sands of the Siberian desert. A great assemblage of myriad tribes made up of many diverse peoples had banded, some on foot and others upon the backs of tamed and bridled panthers, pumas, leopards, lions, tigers, jaguars, and cheetahs. Together they formed a formidable protective mass all around a palanquin of such strange beauty that its least attractive quality evoked the feeling most often succumbed to upon beholding the breathtaking characteristics of Gothic and Mughal architecture. The vehicle’s cabin was attached with densely entwined silken braids to the middle of two Maiasaura spines with ends resting upon the shoulders of several dozen tall and slender men with long dark beards and wearing pure white ankle-length bishts and keffiyehs. Accompanying these diamond-eyed porters was a whole host of clowns, jugglers, acrobats, equilibrists, contortionists, stilt walkers, plate spinners, globe rollers, hoopers, chapeaugraphers, fire eaters, fire breathers, fire dancers, sword swallowers, knife throwers, strong men, magicians, and side show freaks. Countless men, women, and myriad combinations and deviations thereof, were scantily clad in various presentations of milky white erotic attire, pierced with studs, rings, bones, precious gems, and scarred, tattooed with black and red tribal war designs and vibrantly colored images of the peaceful and wrathful Gods and Goddesses of every spiritual tradition. Some were in cotton and linen and others in silk, satin, lace, latex, and leather. Straight, gay, lesbian, bi, metro, curious, and so many yet-to-be-labeled and others simply unlabelable all prancing around seductively in bustiers, chemises, body stockings, babydolls, thongs, g-strings, garter belts, and with whips, chains, clips, ropes, cuffs, rings, gags, dildos and accompanied by a swarm of countless lime green luna silk moths hovering in the spaces in between them. It was all burlesque, vaudeville, pantomime, and tableau vivant.

A large ornate parasol covered the roof of the palanquin and the four sides of its cabin were cloaked in clandestine layers of lush royal purple velvet curtains adorned with long golden tassels dangling all along the edge of their perimeters. As for the mystery of the passengers, the palanquin’s eternally enshrouded desert hajjis, or the enigma of the most notorious untellable secret ever told, well, this is the answer to a riddle so radiantly empty that it is forever revealed in the very absence of its own revelation. It is the unveiling of a spiritual epicurean opulence, unrecognizably hidden within plain sight yet so obviously revealed in our utter blindness that it is known more intimately to all who behold it ignorantly than whom we have erroneously come to believe ourselves to be. It is the secret of the universe. The only secret that has ever been whispered and the only announcement that has ever been exclaimed. It is the deafeningly silent Word of God. From the void, through the void, and to the void, the “Ah”, the “Aum”, the “Amen”, the ”Allah”, the “Alleluia”, the breath that begat the peals of the seven reverberating vespers. The secret silent song of the tinkling bells that arrived in the sacrosanct cabin of the holy palanquin at the very heart of the sunset-bound desert caravan.

When the seven waves of sacred silence penetrated through the veil of the royal velvet hymen and into the carcair of the holy hesychasts, their eardrums rattled like perfectly tuned copper tympanis stimulating the oval window of their spiraled cochleas. This caused the mechanically gated ion channels to open swiftly, depolarizing the stereocilia which resulted in a receptor potential that released neurotransmitters through the voltage gated calcium channels. The motion of the cells was converted into electrical signals that rolled out across the auditory nerve, through the auditory brainstem and into the auditory cortex. And so the music of the Heavens had at last arrived at the grey matter of a woman and a man reclining together entirely uncloaked and intimately enmeshed upon pillows of cornflower blue and scarlet red.

As the reception of the secret sonic sacrament finally occurred, this holy couple, the royal Mother and Father, Matryoshka and Palindrome, were prudently passing back and forth to one another the ornately carved wooden end of a long golden hookah hose. It protruded from the tall glass blown narjileh that rose from the surface of a short mother-of-pearl inlaid Moorish table at the center of the palanquin’s cabin. Within the concave of the bowl of the ghalyun was a small sticky brown residue of slowly burning opium, lightly glowing orange with each long, slow, drawn-out pull from the wooden end of the shisha’s hose. The opium smoke licked the buds of their tongues just as the tones of the bells tickled their cochleas and Palindrome’s pulsing steeple lingam thrusted and the semen surged into Matryoshka’s quivering chapel yoni. The cabin filled up with a radiance more vibrant than that of one hundred million suns kindling their corneas, irises, rods, and cones as frankincense and myrrh seeped, thick and white, into the little temple from thuribles, two golden and two silver, that hung from hooks on the ceiling at the four corners of the mobile sanctuary. In that very instant, both Matryoshka and Palindrome whole heartedly agreed that opium should be the religion of the masses. And so the Holy Father sang to Mother Matryoshka with the hallucinogenic voice of a pre-dawn twilight turtle dove and in an entheogenic swoon the Holy Mother responded to Father Palindrome with the voice of a pre-dusk twilight nightingale.

Out from the center of the roof through a small protruding tin cone-topped chimney rising out from the center of the parasol plumed a languorous rising cloud of spiraling smoke. The rapturous aroma of frankincense and myrrh, entwining like ida and pingala around a sushumna of slowly mushrooming opium smoke, diffused through the desert air inducing a deep hypnotic trance, mesmerizing this eclectic circus of exotic esoteric eroticists. All at once the scent of the incense, the taste of the opium, the sight of the radiance, the sensation of the pulsating genital muscles, and the sound of the bells converged at the pituitary gland, the ajna chakra, the third eye, causing an undulating fire to slither up through the echo chamber of their spines igniting their nervous systems like an old dried up fig tree crackling in the scorching dog days of the midday desert sun.

At the very same instant, the massive plume of braiding opium smoke, frankincense, and myrrh towered ever higher into the sky above the roof of the palanquin spiraling in fractals, spirals within spirals, in golden means, crystallizing into visions of sunflowers, nautilus shells, hurricanes, ram horns, ocean waves, Saturnian rings, and human skeletal proportions. All eyes were drawn to the grandiose rising splendor like flora to the rising sun or fauna to a startling approaching curiosity. Quickly the wispy spirals of smoke converged into a towering vaporous concrescence and, as though an invisible pair of gifted and carefully sculpting hands were at work, it began to shape itself into an enormous triadic totem pole that gazed down upon the astonished from heights far above the flight of Ruppell’s griffin. Side by side in the clear desert sky, firm and erect, and many miles high, appearing like three totemic obelisks, rooted as one to the orgasmic tantric blissfully ecstatic union of the holy dyad inside the divine palanquin, loomed three great spirits. To the right, the White Swatara; to the left, the Black Swatara; and in between the infinitely vast prismatic spectrum of their union, or the Fata Morgana Swatara.

The caravan came to a halt and the voices fell into utter astounded silence as the consecrated carneys looked fixedly up into the sky with arms hanging limp at their sides, mouths agape, and eyes wide open with corneas rolled back and pupils fully dilated. Comedic faces, catastrophic faces, and strange hybrids of the two materialized and dematerialized in and out of the cloudy substance, myriad faces made up of faces and making up so many other diverse faces, appearing and disappearing before their very eyes, some human in form and others animalistic, insectoid, or indescribably and inexplicably alien to the common human experience. The scent of opium, frankincense, and myrrh was thick in the air and all could feel the beads of sweat sliding down their brows as tiny rainbows formed upon the surface of the little prismatic hemispheres, some of which came to rest as salty droplets upon the surface of their tongues and others which fell through the radiant space between their sweat-soaked flesh and to the sand so very far below.

From deep within the bowels of the White Swatara came an electrical discharge that incandesced like a thousand lightning bolts, his vocal chords gusting like a thousand hurricanes as the word “Hakkrah-Vallam!” issued forth from across the surface of his tongue like a thousand angelic birth bells tolling! Palindrome’s cock pulsated in ceaseless waves of limitless ecstasy as millions of comets, meteorites, and shooting stars exploded from the seminiferous tubules of the testes and through the epididymous, the vas deferens, the prostate, the urethra, and into Mother Matroyshka’s vagina just as a juddering from deep within the recesses of the Black Swatara resounded like a thousand thunderclaps, her vocal chords tremoring like a thousand earthquakes as the word “Anraka-Dnu!” issued forth from across the surface of her tongue like a thousand demonic death bells knelling! Matryoshka’s cunt palpitated in everlasting particles of boundless bliss as millions of tadpoles, eels, and sea snakes flowed through her vagina, several hundred through her cervix, her uterus, and past her fallopian tube isthmus to the tube’s ampullary region where only one omnipotent sperm beheld her one omniscient oocyte, penetrating, uniting, and dividing as an omnipresent ovum. The suffusion occurred at the very instant that the White Swatara and the Black Swatara merged with the Fata Morgana Swatara and the word “Hakkrah-Vallam-Anraka-Dnu!” issued forth incessantly from across the surface of its tongue like a tocsin of a thousand angelic and demonic birth and death bells tolling and knelling!

The White Swatara, The Black Swatara, and the Fata Morgana Swatara plumed ever higher into the atmosphere as their mantra spun around and around high above the desert floor in ceaseless revolutions of “Hakkrah-Vallam-Anraka-Dnu”. Hakkrah, according to the noble art of gemetria, amounts to 252, three snakes lurking in the serpent’s den and Vallam equaling 108, a penis, a vagina, and the symbol of eternal infinity, the number of prayer or the repetitions of the mantrum recited on the malas during the sacred practice of japa. The sum total, or the uniting of the serpent’s den, 252, with the practice of japa, 108, is 360, a pair of breasts, a sperm cell, and an ovum, a perfect circle, completion. Anraka is the hidden light of 273, the female and the male both united and divided by the holy number seven, the obstruction of the mystic number 23 and Dnu, the number 60, a vision and a trial by fire, the journey of the sperm from the vagina to the ovum. The sum total of the hidden light, 273, and the trial by fire, 60, being 333, the secret holy trinity or the holy ménage a trios of the Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Feminine spirit, sexual excitement or the Lord of Hallucinations. The meaning of the mantra “Hakkrah-Vallam-Anraka-Dnu”, therefore, being 693, sulpher, the eternal aspiration to achieve enlightenment, or “the revelation of the hidden light through the sacred practice of japa amidst a visionary trial by fire with the Lord of Hallucinations within the boundless depths of the serpent’s den”.

Palindrome and Matryoshka howled in unison with their eyes rolled up tight as the mantra of the Fata Morgana Swatara everlastingly pirouetted in self-perpetuating purls of limitless, boundless ecstasy and bliss revealing the divine heliotropium of Heaven’s hallucinatory heart hologram.