Pierre Loti

“ At times, behind their brick walls, the ear of the passer-by might catch some negress’s plaintive, drowsy song, or perhaps the eye might light on a small, coal-black negro asleep on a doorstep, lying on his back in the sun, quite naked, with a necklet of coral, forming a dark patch in the midst of universal radiance. On the smooth sand of the streets, the lizards were chasing one another with curious little swaying movements of the head, drawing their tails along the ground and tracing an infinity of fantastic zig-zags, complicated like an Arabic design. ”

“ The air is full of the odours of negroes, of leather amulets, of kouss-kouss, and of soumaré.
Small negro children begin to show themselves at the doors; their round bellies with projecting navels are adorned with a row of blue beads; they smile from ear to ear, and their pear-shaped heads are shaven, except for three little tails.
They all stretch themselves, gazing at Jean with a look of astonishment in their great, shining eyes, and sometimes the most daring of them say, “Toubab! toubab! toubab! good-morning!”
All this savours of the country of exile and of remoteness from home ”

“ Further on were other herds that no one shepherded, herds of grey crocodiles, hundreds of them asleep in the sun, submerged belly-deep in the warm waters.
And Fatou-gaye would smile. Her eyes would light up with a strange joy, for she recognised the approach of Galam, her native land.
None the less there was one thing that kept her uneasy. When she passed great, grass-grown marshes, wide, gloomy pools, bordered with mangroves, she would shut her eyes for fear of seeing the black muzzle of a hippopotamus (n’gabou) emerging from the stagnant waters. ”

“ Other unfortunate spahis, like himself acclimatised and enervated in this land of Africa, have sometimes regretted the desolate banks of the Senegal. The long expeditions on horseback, the freer life, the larger light, the boundless horizon—all these things are missed when, having grown accustomed to them, one is cut off from them. In the quiet of home life one feels as it were a craving for the devouring sun, the never-ending heat, a yearning for the desert, and a home sickness for the sand. ”

“ How odd it would be to marry that great booby who plays the gentleman. I let them talk, because I know that no one in the world can be the same to me as my dear Jean.
You can be quite easy; there is no fear of their persuading me to go to balls; I do not mind their saying that I give myself airs. To dance with Suirot or that great blockhead Toinon or others like him—no, thank you. In the evening I sit very quietly on the bench in front of Rose’s door, and there I think and think of my dear Jean, who is worth all the others put together, and you may be sure I am never weary of thinking of him. ”

“ By the side of the handsome spahi in his red jacket sat Fatou with her high headdress of amber and copper spangles.
Night had fallen, and in the lonely square the little negro girls continued to chase one another, flitting hither and thither in the dusk—one of them entirely nude—the other two looking like white bats with their long floating bou-bous.
The cold wind incited them to run; they were like kittens in our country, who feel an impulse to gambol wildly when the dry east wind is blowing, which brings us frost. ”

“ To the north a low hill bounds the horizon. Southwards as far as the eye can see stretch the great levels of Dialakar.
All is still and desolate; the sun mounts tranquilly into an azure sky.
In this African landscape, which would have fitted equally well into some solitary tract of ancient Gaul, horsemen come into view. They sit their horses proudly, handsome fellows all of them, in their red jackets, blue pantaloons, large white hats slouched over their bronzed faces. There are twelve of them, twelve spahis sent out as scouts in charge of an adjutant, and Jean is one of them. ”

“ Besides these, there were two or three white women in dainty gowns, and behind them, as if to serve as a foil, a crowd of negroes, decked with grigris and barbaric ornaments—all Guet n’dar in holiday dress.
All the animation and life that St Louis could produce; all the population the old colony could muster in its dead-alive streets—all were out-of-doors for a single day—ready to return on the morrow to their listless existence in those silent houses, each in its coat of white limewash, like a corpse in a winding sheet. ”

“ Jean understood and shuddered. Afterwards, whenever he heard at night these dismal concerts, he remembered the explanation which Nyaor’s mimicry had made so clear, and he, who in broad daylight was seldom afraid, shuddered and felt chilled to the bone by one of those vague and gloomy forebodings that assail the superstitious mountaineer.
The noise grows fainter and dies away in the distance; it breaks out again, somewhat muffled, at another point of the horizon, then it ceases and all is still again. ”

“ A small evil-smelling lamp shed its light on a jumbled litter of objects, crowded painfully together in the dense atmosphere—red jackets and bare, black flesh, weird entanglements, broken glasses and broken bottles on the table and on the ground; red caps, negro bon-bons, spahis’ sabres, all in floods of beer and alcohol. The temperature of the hovel was that of a vapour bath. The heat was maddening, the atmosphere dense with black, or milky, smoke, and with the odours of absinthe, musk, spices, soumaré, sweat of negroes. ”

“ Suddenly, while the mêlée was still proceeding, the spahis saw as in a dream, a great company of negroes passing by over the hill; warriors half naked, covered with grigris, were doubling in the direction of Dialdé in disorderly hordes. They had with them enormous war-drums, which four men together could hardly drag along. Their lean desert horses, seemingly full of fire and fury, were decked with tawdry harness, spangled with copper, their long tails and manes stained blood-red. It was a fantastic, demoniac procession, an African nightmare, swifter than the wind. ”

“ The Falémé continued on her way through the vast desert; she plunged swiftly into the interior, sailing up the yellow waters of the narrow river which separates Moorish Sahara from the great mysterious continent with its black population.
Jean, in melancholy mood, saw one desolate region succeeding another. His eyes followed the ever-receding horizon—the winding ribbon of the Senegal [181] lost in the infinite distance that lay behind him. These accursed plains, unfolding themselves endlessly before his gaze, made a painful impression upon him. ”

“ He remained there a long time lost in thought, dreaming of his village, this poor soldier on the banks of the Senegal. With sunset and nightfall, his thoughts plunged themselves in unrelieved gloom.
From the direction of N’dar-toute came the hurried drumming of the tom-tom, summoning the negroes to the bamboula, and fires were lighted in the Yolof huts. It was an evening in December; a vexatious winter wind sprang up, whirling the sand in eddies here and there, and the great, parched land shuddered with an unwonted sensation of chill. ”

“ Jean had to pay her passage to Dakar with the last khâliss of his pay.
He did this willingly, glad to humour this last fancy of hers, and to keep her with him a little longer.
The tears she shed, the “widow’s complaints” she uttered, after the custom of her country, were sincere and heart-rending. Jean, touched to the heart by her despair, has forgotten that she is ill-natured, untruthful, and black.
The wider his heart expands with the joy of his home-coming the greater is the pity he feels for Fatou, a pity, moreover, not unmixed with tenderness. ”

“ The white vapours that hang above the sleeping waters grow denser with the approach of morning. One is penetrated and chilled to the bone by the glacial dampness of the swamps. It is a curious sensation, to experience cold in this country. The dew falls. Little by little the moon glides down the western sky, is obscured, extinguished. The heart is wrung by the solitude.
At last, low on the horizon, appear the thatched roofs of the village of Dialamban, where at dawn the spahis are to pitch their camp. ”

“ The somnambulistic movement of all these crabs under the dense verdure was the only sign of life perceptible throughout this sleeping universe.
When the black oarsmen had recovered their breath, they resumed, in low voices, their wild singing, and rowed furiously. Then the spahis’ pirogue cut through the quiet waters of the Diakhallémé and sped down the winding river, gliding very swiftly through the heart of the forests.
As the canoe approached the sea, the hills and the great trees that had characterised the interior disappeared. ”

“ Jean used to take long, solitary walks, with his rifle over his shoulder, shooting or dreaming—ever the same vague reveries of the mountaineer.
It amused him, too, to paddle a pirogue up the banks of the yellow river, or to plunge into the mazes of the creeks of the Senegal.
There were swamps, extending further than the eye could see, where the warm, still waters lay asleep; banks, whose treacherous soil would not support a human foot.
White herons stalked solemnly among the monotonous verdure of the mangroves. Enormous blowing-lizards crawled upon the mud ”

“ At the close of day the people gather together in groups. On these occasions the women wear bright-coloured pagnes, and bedeck themselves with ornaments of fine Galam gold. Their arms are covered with heavy bracelets of silver, and their necks with an astonishing profusion of grigris and beads of amber and coral.
And when the red disk of the moon appears, ever magnified and distorted by mirage, casting up the horizon broad, blood-red streaks of light, a frantic clamour bursts from the whole assembly. ”

“ Blue lizards haunted it; cats, parrots, tame gazelles chased one another over the fine Guinea mats; negro women servants went dolefully backwards and forwards across the room, shuffling their sandals, diffusing pungent odours of soumaré and musk-scented amulets. The ensemble produced an indefinably melancholy atmosphere of exile and solitude. It was very dreary, all of it, especially in the evening, when the sounds of life ceased and gave place to the eternal complaint of the African breakers. ”

“ It was three years since Jean Peyral had first set foot in this land of Africa, and since his arrival he had undergone an extraordinary transformation. He had passed through several phases of moral development. Environment, climate, nature, had gradually exercised all their enervating influence upon his youthful personality. Slowly he had felt himself gliding down unknown slopes—and to-day he was the lover of Fatou-gaye, a young negro girl of Khassonké race, who had cast upon him I know not what sensual and impure seduction, what talismanic enchantment. ”

“ Women who had been pounding millet, children playing in the brush, hens pecking up food, dogs sleeping in the sun, all of them had hurried home, and were herded together beneath the narrow, peaked roofs.
Then the huts, already overcrowded, are invaded by the spahis, who step into calebashes and upset the kouss-kouss. Some kiss the little girls; others peep out-of-doors, like big children, for the pleasure of getting wet and of feeling the rain from heaven trickling down upon their heated, harum-scarum heads. ”

“ Walking on aimlessly, like a drunken man, sinking ankle-deep in the sand of the deserted streets, Jean came to Guet n’dar, the negro town with its thousands of pointed huts. In the darkness he stumbled over men and women who lay sleeping on the ground rolled in pieces of white cotton, seeming to him like a population of phantoms. ”

“ Behind him, on the side verging upon the interior, rose mysterious ridges of low hills, stretching away out of sight, and distant outlines of baobabs, resembling silhouettes of madrepores.
Not a breath of air disturbs the dense atmosphere; the sun, already obscured, sinks down among heavy vapours, its yellow disk strangely magnified and distorted by the mirage.... All over the sand the daturas open their great white calyces to the influence of evening; the air is heavy with their unwholesome perfume and charged with the maleficent scent of belladonna. ”

“ With a jingling of grigris and beads they approached the young soldiers. They stirred them with their feet; as they desecrated them with obscene touch they laughed and uttered mocking ejaculations, resembling the gibbering of monkeys. They profaned these corpses with gruesome buffoonery....
And then they stripped them of their gilt buttons, which they stuck in their frizzled hair; they took from them their steel spurs, their red jackets, their belts....
Fatou-gaye was crouching behind her clump of brushwood, holding herself back, like a cat about to spring. ”

“ Others still preserved their dignity, bracing themselves against intoxication, still holding their heads erect—handsome faces with strong features, the lustreless eyes retaining their seriousness with an indescribable expression of melancholy and loathing.
Distributed among them, haphazard, was Virginie-Scholastique’s whole pack of little twelve-year-old negro girls and small negro boys.
Outside a listening ear could hear in the distance the cry of jackals prowling around the cemetery of Sorr, where for some of those now here there were places already marked out beneath the sand. ”

“ In the midst of absolute stillness, the lightest rustlings of the sails are audible—from time to time a negress, sleeping on deck, utters a groan; the vibrations of the human voice are startlingly loud.
All things lie in a tepid stupor. The atmosphere is sluggish with the dull torpor of a slumbering world.
The milky, phosphorescent sea reflects in its vast mirror the hot transparent night. One might fancy oneself between two mirrors, opposite one to the other, eternally reflecting each other, or imagine oneself suspended in vacancy, for no longer is there a distinguishable horizon. ”

“ So died the son of Jean Peyral.... A mystery! What god had thrust him into life, the spahi’s child? What had he come to seek on this earth, and whither did he return?
Then Fatou-gaye wept tears of blood—her piercing lamentations echoed over the plains of Dialakar. And last of all, she took the Marabout’s leather wallet and swallowed a bitter paste contained therein. [214] Her death throes began, a lingering and cruel agony. For a long time she lay in the sunlight shaken by death rattle and death sob; she tore her throat with her nails, and plucked out handfuls of hair mingled with amber. ”