Norman Douglas

“ The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine. They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. ”

“ How good it is to be at home again, simmering and bubbling with contentment as you recognize the old things in their old places!
On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries are gone; they have strawed—strayed—elsewhere; they follow the clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. ”

“ What cared Madame Steynlin about hats? Her distressful appearance was not feigned; she was truly upset, though not about the death of the Commissioner's lady. With an effort whose violence nobody but herself could appreciate she had managed to extricate herself from the lion—like embraces of Peter the Great—to what purpose? To perform an odious social duty; to waste a fair morning in simulating grief for the death of a woman whom she loathed like poison. Nobody would ever understand what a trial in altruism had been. Nobody, in fact, ever gave her credit for a grain of self-abnegation. ”

“ Alas! the hammam is only a shallow tank covered with palm-thatching; there were some twenty Arabs splashing about this establishment and soaping themselves and their boy-children—bathing was out of the question. Near at hand lies the women's bath, which is built on the same primitive lines. A pious legend runs to the effect that this water of El-Hamma used to be cold, but an Arab marabout was persuaded to spit into it and, lo! it suddenly became hot and mineral....
As you approach Tozeur the landscape becomes more desert-like; mountains are left behind; stones are rarer; you wade in sand. ”

“ Talk to a simple creature, farmer or fisherman--well, there is always that touch of common humanity, that sense of eternal needs, to fashion a link of conversation. From a professional--lawyer, doctor, engineer--you may pick up some pungent trifle which yields food for thought; it is never amiss to hearken to a specialist. But the ordinary man of the street, the ordinary man or woman of society, of the world--what can they tell you about art or music or life or religion, about tailors and golf and exhaust-pipes and furniture--what on earth can they tell you that you have not heard already? ”

“ Even as a small Italian town would be incomplete without its piazza where streets converge and commercial pulses beat their liveliest measure, so every larger one contrives to possess a public garden for the evening disport of its citizens; night-life being the true life of the south. Charming they are, most of them; none more delectable than that of old Messina—a spacious pleasaunce, decked out with trim palms and flower-beds and labyrinthine walks freshly watered, and cooled, that evening, by stealthy breezes from the sea. ”

“ Really to have murdered Muhlen was the one and only point in the prisoner's favour. It made him worthy of his rhetorical efforts. All his clients were guilty, and all of them got off scot free. "I never defend people I can't respect," he used to say.
He began his speech in a rambling, desultory sort of fashion and quite a low tone of voice, as if he were addressing a circle of friends.
A charming place, Nepenthe! He would carry away the pleasantest memories of its beauty and the kindliness of its inhabitants. It was like a terrestrial paradise, so verdant, so remote from all danger. ”

“ For the last two days a sand-storm of unusual violence has been raging. On the ridges above the town one can hardly stand on one's feet; the grains fly upwards, over the crest of the hill, in blinding showers, mighty squadrons of them careering across the plain below. The landscape is involved in a dim, roseate twilight. But occasionally there comes a sickly radiance from behind the curtain of cloud that glimmers lustreless, like an incandescent lamp seen through a fog: it is the sun shining brightly in the pure regions of the upper air. ”

“ The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast is at an end.
I am glad never to have discovered anyone, native or foreign, who has been aware of the existence of this nocturnal emanation; glad because it corroborates a theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye--how atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. ”

“ With the heat, with every shower of rain, with every breath of wind, the earth crumbles away; there is an eternal trickling, day and night, until some huge boulder is exposed which crashes down, loosening everything in its wild career; a single tempest may disrupture what the patience and ingenuity of years have contrived.
Three more hours or thereabouts will take you to Serra San Bruno along the backbone of southern Italy, through cultivated lands and pasture and lonely stretches of bracken, once covered by woodlands. ”

“ To say that a cook must possess the requisite outfit of culinary skill and temperament—that is hardly more than saying that a soldier must appear in uniform. You can have a bad soldier in uniform. The true cook must have not only those externals, but a large dose of general worldly experience. He is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn. That is why you will never obtain adequate human nourishment from a young girl or boy. ”

“ Mentally, too, I am thawing once more; the hotel life and solitary walks of Gafsa had begun to affect me disagreeably. Such things are endurable and perhaps stimulating in youth and in the plenitude of health; but there comes a period when one lives less in future dreamings than in the experiences of the past—unpleasant company, for the most part; when one craves to see the faces and hear the opinions of rational fellow-creatures; when one requires, in short, to be distracted. This is the age, too, at which a man begins to realize the significance of those once-despised material comforts. ”

“ None but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river--a dangerous river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place--every drawback, or nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and poison. ”

“ Afterwards I reposed awhile in the upper regions, under an olive, and looked down towards the valley of the Neto, which flows not far from here into the Ionian. I thought upon Theocritus, trying to picture this vale of Neaithos as it appeared to him and his shepherds. The woodlands are gone, and the rains of winter, streaming down the earthen slopes, have remodelled the whole face of the country.
Yet, be nature what it may, men will always turn to one who sings so melodiously of eternal verities—of those human tasks and needs which no lapse of years can change. ”

“ As you say, the spectacle takes one back into mythological times. Would you not call it a procession of Titans, children of the Gods, storing up mountain-blocks for some earth-convulsing battle? Your eyes deceive you. Like Thomas, the doubting apostle, you must touch with your hands. And even then you are not wholly convinced. To me, who knows the capacity of human bone and muscle, these men are a daily miracle. They mock my notions of what is permissible. How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality! ”

“ Drive swiftly thence, if you are in the mood, as you should be, for something at the other pole of feeling, to view that wonder, the kneeling boy at the Museo delle Terme. Headless and armless though he be, he displays as much vitality as the Peruvians; every inch of the body is alive, and one may well marvel at the skill of the artist who, during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's fleeting outline--so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and texture. ”

“ All too soon, I fear, the railway to Tozeur will have done its work; dusty boulevards, white bungalows, eucalyptus trees and bureaux de monopoles will profane its strangely wonderful beauty, its virginal monotone of golden grey. Nefta will become a neurasthenic demi-mondaine, like Biskra.
Such, at least, is the prognosis.
But one is apt to forget on how precarious a tenure these gardens are held, with the hungry desert gnawing ceaselessly at their outskirts; for the desert is hungry and yet patient; it has devoured sundry oases by simply waiting till man is preoccupied with other matters. ”

“ Towards this sunset hour the unbroken dome of the sky often undergoes a brief transformation. High-piled masses of cloud may then be seen accumulating over the Sila heights and gathering auxiliaries from every quarter; lightning is soon playing about the livid and murky vapours—you can hear the thunders muttering, up yonder, to some drenching downpour. But on the plain the sun continues to shine in vacuously benevolent fashion; nothing is felt of the tempest save unquiet breaths of wind that raise dust-eddies from the country roads and lash the sea into a mock frenzy of crisp little waves. ”

“ Not for the first time did Madame Steynlin experience the drawbacks of her house, as regards natural situation. It was, as Don Francesco often pointed out, "the most unstrategic villa on Nepenthe." Ah, that peninsula, that isthmus, or whatever you called the thing—what on earth had attracted her to the place? What demon had tempted her to buy it? How she envied the other people—Keith, for example, who, if he had been a man of that kind, could have allowed any visitor, in the broadest daylight, to creep in or out of his mouldy old gateway in the wall without a soul being any the wiser! ”

“ How much of its peculiar flavour a town will draw--not from artistic monuments but from the mere character of building materials! How many variations on one theme! This mellow Roman travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns, wood-towns--how they differ in mood from one another!... ”

“ I was tempted to think that the sunset view from the Meda eminence was the finest in the immediate neighbourhood of Gafsa. Not so; that from the low hills behind Sidi Mansur, with the stony ridge of Jebel Assalah at your back, surpasses it in some respects. Through a gap you look towards the distant green plantations, with a shimmering level in the foreground; on your other side lies the Oued Baiesh, crossed by the track to Kairouan, where strings of camels are for ever moving to and fro, laden with merchandise from the north or with desert products from the oases of Djerid and Souf. ”