The Sahara. Pierre Loti
he spent it in observing and thinking.
Every evening he was wont to take a walk along the great stretch of beach, whose bluish sands were lighted up by sunsets of unimaginable beauty.
He would bathe in those great breakers of the African sea, amusing himself, like the child he still was, by letting himself be rolled over and over by these enormous waves, which covered him with sand.
Or he would take long walks, for the mere pleasure of movement, of breathing deeply the salt air that blew off the sea. At times this unending flatness vexed him, oppressed his imagination, accustomed to the contemplation of mountains. He felt, as it were, a need to go on and on forever, to widen his horizon, to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond.
At dusk, the beach was crowded with negroes returning to the villages, laden with sheaves of millet. Fishermen, too, were drawing in their nets, surrounded by clamorous swarms of women and children.
These hauls of fish in Senegal were always miraculous draughts; the nets would break under the weight of thousands of fish of every shape and form. The negresses carried away on their heads baskets full of them; the black babies returned home garlanded with big fish, still alive, strung together through the gills.
There were extraordinary-looking people, just-arrived from the interior; picturesque caravans of Moors and Peuhles, who had come down the Neck of Barbary; incredible scenes at every step, in the white glow of an unnatural radiance.
And then the blue summits of the sandhills turned pink; the last horizontal rays of light glided across this whole region of sand; the sun was quenched in blood-red vapour. And with one impulse all that black throng cast themselves face downwards on the ground to offer up the evening prayer.
It was Islam’s holy hour. From Mecca to the Sahara coast the name of Mahomet passed from mouth to mouth, wafted like a mysterious breath over Africa. Little by little it became fainter as it travelled over the Soudan, until it expired there on those black lips by the shore of the great, restless sea.
The old Yolof priests in their flowing robes, turned towards the sea, recited their prayers with their faces bowed upon the sand, and all the shores were covered with prostrate men. Then all was still, and night fell with the rapidity usual in those countries of the sun.
At nightfall, Jean returned to the spahi’s quarters in the south of St. Louis.
In the great white barrack room, open to the evening breeze, all was still and quiet. The numbered beds of the spahis were ranged in rows along the bare walls; the tepid wind from the sea swayed their muslin mosquito curtains. The spahis were out. Jean returned home at a time when the other men were scattered about the deserted streets, hastening to their pleasures, to their loves.
It was at such times that the isolated barracks seemed to him dreary, and that he thought most of his mother.
VI
In the southern quarter of St. Louis stood some old brick houses, Arab in appearance, which were lighted up at evening, and whose lamps continued to cast their red rays upon the sands at a time when all that dead-alive town lay asleep. Strange odours of negroes and alcohol, all blended and intensified by the torrid heat, issued thence. Here also at night broke forth an uproar as from hell itself. In that quarter the spahis reigned supreme. Thither betook themselves these unfortunate, red-jacketed warriors, to raise a racket and to forget their troubles; to absorb, actuated either by habit or bravado, incredible quantities of alcohol, and wantonly to spend the sap of their lusty youth.
A dishonouring intimacy with mulatto women lay in wait for them in these vile dens, and extravagant orgies were held, in a delirium caused by absinthe and the torrid heat of Africa.
But Jean avoided with horror these haunts of vice. He was very steady, and was already putting aside the little he could save out of his soldier’s pay, against the blissful moment of his home-coming.
He was very steady, and yet his comrades did not rally him on the subject.
Handsome Muller, a tall Alsatian, who set the tone in the spahis’ barracks by virtue of a past full of duels and adventure—handsome Muller thought a great deal of him, and every one was always of the same opinion as Fritz Muller. But Jean’s real friend was Nyaor-fall, the black spahi, a gigantic African, of the magnificent Fouta-Diallonké tribe, a strange, imperturbable figure, with a delicate Arab profile, and a mysterious smile always hovering on his thin lips—a splendid statue in black marble.
This man was Jean’s friend; he used to take Jean home to his native dwelling in Guet n’dar; he would make him sit beside his wives on a white mat, and offer him negro hospitality: kouss-kouss and gourous.
VII
In the evenings at St. Louis, social life followed the usual monotonous routine of small colonial towns. The fine weather brought a little animation to these dead-alive streets. After sunset, a few women who had escaped fever displayed their European frocks on the Place du Gouvernement, or in the avenue of yellow plains of Guet n’dar. This introduced a suggestion of Europe into that country of exile.
On that large Place du Gouvernement, surrounded by symmetrical, white buildings, one might have imagined oneself in some town of southern Europe had it not been for that immense stretch of sand, that interminable plain, which flung afar its uncompromising line.
These few persons who came to take the air were all acquaintances, and passed the time in staring at one another. Jean would look at these people, and they also would look at Jean. The handsome spahi, who walked alone with such a grave seriousness, roused the curiosity of St. Louis society, who imagined that his life contained some romantic episode.
There was one woman, in especial, who looked at Jean, a woman better dressed and prettier than the rest.
She was said to be a mulatto, but so white, so very white, that she might have been taken for a Parisienne.
White and pale she was, of a Spanish pallor, with fair chestnut hair—the fairness of mulattos—with large, half-closed, dark-shadowed eyes, which she turned slowly with creole languor.
She was the wife of a rich farmer of revenue on the river. But at St. Louis she was referred to by her Christian name, like a coloured woman. Cora they called her, in contempt.
She had just returned from Paris, as the other women could see from her gowns. Jean, however, was not yet sufficiently experienced to be able to define the difference. But he was well aware that her trailing gowns, even when they were simple, had something distinctive about them, a gracefulness, in which the other women’s gowns were lacking.
The point that he principally noticed was that she was very beautiful, and as she always flung her glances around him, he felt a sort of tremor when he met her.
“She’s in love with you, Peyral,” handsome Muller had declared, with the knowing air of a man who has had his successes in the pursuit of love affairs.
VIII
It was true that she was in love with him in her mulatto way, and one day she summoned him to her house to tell him so.
For poor Jean the two months that followed fled past in the midst of enchanting dreams. This unwonted luxury, this dainty, perfumed woman, all these things worked terrible confusion in his hot head and chaste body. Love, of which hitherto only a cynical travesty had been revealed to him, now intoxicated him.
And all this