Man of the Umbrella

Bitter traces of mountaineering stripes of smoke dance salsa-like clear of an old Marrakchi man’s creased nostrils, his yellow turban resting serenely against a dignified chest of an ancient palm tree. He seemed to so little mind the fiery grey head of ash that had crashed with an excruciatingly martyring sluggishness on his Jellaba, mucky, threadbare, and scruffy, forming, in quite a miraculously absurd design, a black-lashed eye. By way of the cork-colored mouthpiece of his contraband cigarette, he drew in an elongated puff he escorted leisurely down to where it resided in placating lethargy. Within the precincts of some logic, bizarre and fantastic, the old man’s cigarette seemed the yardsticks that benchmarked time, the palm tree his nomadic dwelling, the jellaba and turban his kingly robe and majestic crown. After an ostensibly protracted intermission—wherever relativity displayed its stupendous attestations and foolish corroborations—the old man eventually granted the orphaned smoke an egress that thus escalated the air in deliberate tardiness, and knitted the dangling threads of light with dawdling indolence. It rose and rose till it lastly embraced the muggy labyrinth of smoke which was thriving in purity and limpidness, surveying the ghostly glacial crests of the mountains, the Almoravid crimson ramparts, the colonial edifices, the baroque palaces roofed with dyed shafts of radiance and life, the straps of trees, and the crooked alleys of the old medina that twist eternally like a famished intestine.
In prompt rapidity, the smoke habituated the space and seemed to now cast a final, heartrending glance at its human provenance, the old man, and the nicotinic filter he flung away with his finger nail, before it spectacularly underwent its last conversion into a sanitary, sparkling, lungful of air.