When he set out, the sun was still high and scorchingly hot; in the full light, these desert plains had an impressive majesty. He walked for a long time by the desolate shore, over the ridge of the sandhills, or along the top of the red cliffs, so that he might command a more distant view. A high wind blew upon him, and ruffled the immense stretch of sea that lay at his feet, and still he saw the ship speeding onwards.
He was so distraught that he no longer felt the sun burning him.
Riveted for two more years to this country, when at this very moment he might have been on yonder ship, sailing over the sea, on his way to his beloved village....
Good God! What were these sinister influences, spells, and amulets that had held him back?
Two years! Would the time ever be fulfilled? Would there indeed be an end of it, a deliverance from this exile?...
And he ran towards the north in the direction the ship had taken, that he might not lose sight of her yet. Thorny plants tore him; a swarm of large, wild crickets, disturbed among the grasses that flourish in the winter season, flew against his breast like hail....
He was very far away, alone in the midst of that austere landscape, the silent and melancholy region of Cape Verde. For a long time he had seen ahead of him a great solitary tree, larger even than the baobabs, with dense, dark foliage, a tree so huge that it might have been taken for one of those giants of the flora of the ancient world, remaining there forgotten through the centuries.
Exhausted, he sat down on the sand under the dome-like shade, with bowed head, and burst into tears.
When he rose to his feet, the ship had disappeared, and it was evening.
At evening the mournful country grew stiller and colder. In the twilight the great tree appeared as amass of absolute blackness, rearing itself aloft in the midst of the vast African solitude.
Before him in the distance lay the pacified sea, infinitely calm; beneath him, at his feet, the cliffs descending in terraces to the great Cape Verde; flat stretches of land, intersected by straight ravines bare of vegetation—a wide landscape of a heart-rending dreariness of aspect.
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. Moths flutter about the poisonous flowers. Everywhere among the tall grasses is heard the plaintive call of the turtle doves. This whole land of Africa is shrouded in a deadly vapour, and already the horizon is vague and sombre.
Yonder, behind him, lies that mysterious interior of the land, which once inspired his dreams, ... but now, between this and Podor or Medina or the country of Galam or mysterious Timbuctoo, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that he would care to see.
He knows, or can imagine, all the melancholy, all the suffocating heat of this land. His thoughtsare elsewhere now—in a word, this whole country fills him with dread.
His one desire is to break away from all these nightmares, to depart, to go hence at all costs.
Tall, wild-looking African shepherds pass by, driving before them to the village their lean herds of hump-backed cattle.
That simulacrum of the sun, which the Bible would have called “a sign in the heavens,” fades slowly like a pale meteor. Night is here.... All things are veiled in unhealthy vapour, and the silence grows intense.... Beneath the great tree it is still and dark as in a temple.
And Jean dreams of his cottage, with the aspect it wears at this hour on summer evenings; of his old mother and his betrothed. And it seems to him that all is over; he dreams that he is dead, and that he will never see them again.
The die was cast, and he must go where he was sent. Two days later Jean embarked, in his friend’s stead, on a small warship for the distant outpost of Gadiangué in the Ouankarah. Some troops and munitions were being sent to reinforce that forlorn outpost. The surrounding country was disturbed. Caravans no longer passed by; there were conflicting negro interests, strife between rapacious tribes andpredatory chiefs. It was thought that this state of affairs would come to an end with the winter season, and when the force returned in two or three months’ time, Jean would be sent back to St Louis, there to complete his service, as the Governor of Goree had promised the spahi Boyer.
The little vessel was overcrowded. First of all, there was Fatou, who had succeeded in securing a passage by dint of importunity and subterfuge, claiming to be the wife of a black rifleman. She was there in the capacity of follower, with her four calabashes and all her possessions.
There were about ten spahis from the garrison of Goree, who were being sent into the exile of camp for a season; besides these, some twenty native riflemen, dragging their entire families along with them.
These native troops brought with them a remarkable equipage—several wives and children to each man, millet in calabashes for food, and in addition, clothing, household utensils—all packed in calabashes—with amulets in heaps and domestic animals in herds.
At the time of departure the deck was a scene of violent commotion and confusion. At first sight it seemed as if this medley of people and things would never be reduced to order.
Not so, however. After they had been an hour under way, the kit was piled up in miraculous order, and all was still. The negresses who were on board lay asleep on deck, rolled in theirpagnes, packed as tightly and lying as quietly as fish in a tin, and theship glided smoothly towards the south, cleaving its way steadily towards regions of ever intenser heat and ever bluer skies.
A night of intense calm on the equatorial sea. 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.
In the distance the two planes are merged in one. Sky and water, both are blended in cosmic, vague, infinite depths.
And the moon is very low in the sky, a great disk of red, rayless fire, hanging in the midst of a world of pale, flax-coloured, phosphorescent vapours.
In the earliest geological ages, before day was divided from night, the universe must have been permeated with this same expectant calm. The pauses between the acts of creation must have been fraught with this same indescribable immobility in those epochs when the worlds were yet nebulous, whenlight was still diffused and vague, when the brooding clouds were vapourous lead and iron, when infinite and eternal matter was sublimated by the intense heat of aboriginal chaos.
The voyage has lasted three days.
At sunrise the whole world is bathed in a dazzling golden light.
And on this fourth day the rising sun reveals in the east a long line of green—which is at first likewise tinged with gold, changing to a shade so unnaturally vivid that one might compare it to the precise and delicate colouring on a Chinese fan.
This line is the coast of Guinea.
The troopship has arrived at the Diakhallémé outlet, and is approaching the wide entrance to the river.
The land there is as flat as Senegal, but its natural characteristics are different. With it begins a region where the leaves never fall.
The whole country is covered with wonderful verdure, a verdure already equatorial, a verdure that never dies—an emerald green whose vividness is never matched by that of our own trees, even in the radiant month of June.
Further than the eye can see there is nothing but this one interminable forest, of an unvarying flatness, mirrored in the warm, stagnant water, an unhealthy forest whose damp soil teems with reptiles.
In this country, too, there was a melancholy stillness, yet it was restful to eyes accustomed to those desert sands.
At the village of Poupoubal on the Diakhallémé the vessel halted, unable to sail further up the river.
The passengers disembarked and waited for the canoes or pirogues which were to convey them to their destination.
At nine o’clock one night in July, Fatou and the spahis from Goree took their places in a canoe manned by ten black rowers, under the orders of Samba-Boubou, a skilful skipper, a pilot with experience of the rivers of Guinea. They were bound for the outpost of Gadiangué, which was situated several leagues higher up the river.
It was a night without a moon, but cloudless, hot, and starry—a night characteristic of the equator.
They glided up the calm river with surprising speed, borne towards the interior on the swift current, aided by the indefatigable efforts of the rowers.
In the darkness both banks slid past mysteriously; the trees, massed together in the gloom, flitted away like great shadows. Forest after forest sped by.
Samba-Boubou led the chorus of the rowers; his mournful, shrill voice would pitch upon a wild, high note, then trail plaintively down to the depths of thebase, and the choir would take up the burden in slow, solemn tones; during the long hours the same strange phrase was repeated again and again, with the same response from the rowers. For a long time they sang the praises of the spahis, their horses, even their dogs; then of the warriors of the family of Soumaré, and then of Saboutané, a legendary woman of the banks of the Gambia.
And when the regular movement of the oars flagged under the influence of weariness or sleep, Samba-Boubou made a hissing sound between his teeth, and this snake-like noise, repeated by all the rowers, rekindled their ardour as if by magic.
Thus they glided at dead of night through the whole length of the sacred wood of the Mandinga religion, and overhead the ancient trees stretched out their massive grey branches, angular shapes like structures of gigantic bones, rigid as stone, their outlines vaguely revealed in the diffused starlight, until they passed out of sight.
Mingled with the singing of the negroes and the sound of the flowing water were the weird voices of monkeys screaming in the woods, or the shrieks of birds of the swamp; all the calls, all the mournful cries that are heard at night in the echoing forests. There were human cries, too, sometimes—death cries heard from afar, fusillades and the muffled sounds of the war tom-toms. Here and there, when the canoe passed by the outskirts of some African village, the glare of great incendiary fires could be seen in the sky. War was already being waged through all this region. Sarakholes against Landoumans;Nalous against Toubacayes; and right and left villages were going up in flames.
And then, league after league, all was still again with the silence of night and the deep forests. And ever the same monotonous singing, the same sound of the oars cleaving the dark waters; the same fantastic voyage as through a land of shadows; the river bearing them ever onwards on its swift current; silhouettes of tall palm trees ever gliding past overhead; forest ever succeeding forest.
The speed at which they travelled seemed to increase from hour to hour. The river had dwindled surprisingly; it was now a mere stream, flowing through the woods, and carrying them deeper into the interior. The night was profound.
The negroes’ songs of praise continued. Samba-Boubou still uttered his weird head note, with which mingled the shrieks of monkeys, and the chorus still made its sombre response. They sang as if in a kind of dream, and they rowed furiously, with superhuman strength, as if galvanised, in a feverish anxiety to reach their goal.
At last they come to a place where the river flows between deep banks formed by two chains of wooded hills. Lights appear high up on a great rock which stands out in front of them; the lights seem to be moving hastily down to the banks. Samba-Boubou kindles a torch and utters a rallying cry. The garrison of Gadiangué are here to greet them. They have reached their destination.
Gadiangué is perched there on the summit of this perpendicular rock, and is reached by steep paths, where negroes show them the way with torches. A large hut has been made ready for the spahis, and they lie down on mats to sleep until morning, which is not far off.
The first to awake after barely an hour’s sleep, Jean opens his eyes and sees the white light of dawn filtering between the planks of the hut, shining upon the young men, who are lying half-naked on the ground, their heads pillowed on their red jackets—Bretons, Alsatians, Picards—almost all of them fair-haired men from the north. In this moment of waking, Jean had a kind of prophetic vision, a mournful, mysterious, comprehensive foreknowledge of the destiny of all these exiles, their lives menaced by an ever-lurking death and recklessly cast away.
Close to him lay a graceful feminine form with two black, silver-braceletted arms curving towards him as if to embrace him.
Then, little by little, he remembered that he had arrived the previous night at a village in Guinea, lost in the midst of vast savage regions, that he was farther than ever from home, in a place where even letters would not reach him.
Quietly, so that he might not disturb Fatou and the still sleeping spahis, he approached the open window and gazed out at this new country.
He was overlooking a precipice some three hundredfeet deep. This hut that he was in seemed suspended in the air above it. At his feet lay a landscape with the characteristic features of the interior, as yet but vaguely revealed in the pale light of dawn.
There were steep hills, covered with masses of verdure, such as he had never seen before.
Below, right at the foot of the precipice, flowed the river which had brought him thither, a long, silver ribbon upon the mud, partly veiled by a white cloud of morning mist. The crocodiles that lay on the banks looked like small lizards, seen from such a height. The air was filled with an unknown scent.
The exhausted rowers were sleeping down there, where they had halted the previous night, lying in their canoe upon their oars.
There was a clear stream flowing over a bed of dark pebbles, between walls of wet, polished rock. Trees formed an arch above it; the landscape had a freshness that one might have associated with any other place rather than an obscure corner in the heart of Africa.
Naked women, of the same reddish-brown colouring as the rocks, their heads ornamented with amber, were everywhere washingpagnes, and excitedly recounting the events and combats of the night. Warriors armed to the teeth were fording the stream on their way to battle.
Jean took his first walk around the village, whither his new fate had brought him for an indefinite period.
There was certainly trouble brewing, and the little post of Gadiangué foresaw a time when it would be obliged to close its doors to allow the negro communities time to settle their own affairs—as one closes one’s windows during a passing shower.
But in all this there was movement, vitality, originality even to excess. There were forests, verdure, flowers, mountains, running water—awe-inspiring, natural splendour.
There was no element of gloom in it, and it was all new and strange.
From the distance comes the sound of the tom-tom, the warlike music draws nearer, until it is close at hand and deafeningly loud. The women at their washing by the clear stream, and Jean himself, raise their heads and look up into the blue space framed in polished rock. An allied chief is passing by overhead with his fighting men, scrambling with monkey-like agility over the trunks of fallen trees. He proceeds on his way with pomp, with music heading the procession.... The arms and amulets of the warriors in his train glitter in the sun, as they file past with swift, light step, in the overwhelming heat.
It is almost noon when Jean climbs back along the green paths to the village.
The huts of Gadiangué are grouped together in the shade of great trees. They are of a good height, and have almost a certain elegance, with their highpitched roofs of thatch. Women are sleeping on mats on the ground; others, seated on the verandahs, are soothing small children with long-drawn lullabies. And warriors, armed to the teeth, recount to one another their exploits of the previous night as they wipe their big iron knives.
No. Certainly, there is no element of melancholy in all this. The intensely hot air is terribly heavy, but it has not the overwhelmingly depressing quality of the air on the banks of the Senegal, and the vital, equatorial sap circulates through everything.
Jean looks around him and feels alive. He is not sorry now to have come. He has never imagined anything to equal this.
Later, when he has returned to his home, he will be glad that he has set foot in this distant region, and he will look back on it with pleasure.
He regards this sojourn in the Ouankarah as a spell of freedom spent in a wonderful hunting country, clad with verdure and forests. It seems to him a period of respite from the terribly monotonous existence, the deadly routine of life in exile.
Jean had a poor old silver watch by which he set as much store as Fatou by her amulets—it was his father’s watch, which the latter had given to him at the moment of parting. This, and a medal, which he wore on a chain round his neck, were his most cherished possessions.
The medal bore the Virgin’s effigy. Once when he was ill his mother had laid it on his breast, and though he was then but a tiny child, he remembered the day when it had been placed there, and it had never been removed. He was lying in his first little cot, suffering from some childish ailment, the only one that had ever attacked him. He had woken up and had seen his mother weeping by his side; it was a winter afternoon; through the window the snow was visible, covering the mountain like a white cloak. Gently raising his little head, his mother had hung the medal round his neck. Then she had kissed him, and he had gone to sleep again.
That was more than fifteen years ago. Since then the dimensions of his neck and throat had increased greatly, but the medal remained in its place. He had never suffered so acute a pang as one night, the first he had ever spent in a place of ill-fame, when the hands of some girl had chanced upon the sacred medal, and the miserable creature had burst out laughing as she touched it....
As for the watch, it was some forty years since it had been bought, secondhand, by his father, with his first savings out of his soldier’s pay. Once upon a time, apparently, it had been a very remarkable watch, but now it was somewhat old-fashioned, large and cumbrous, and it struck the hour in a way that proclaimed its very venerable age.
His father still valued it highly. (Watches were not very common possessions among the mountaineers in his village.)
The watchmaker in a neighbouring market town,who had repaired it before Jean went away on service, had pronounced its works to be uncommonly good, and his old father had entrusted this companion of his youth to his care with all kinds of recommendations.
At first Jean had worn it, but with the regiment, whenever he looked at the time, he heard bursts of laughter. The jokes made on the subject of this “turnip” were so uncalled for that once or twice Jean had turned quite red with rage and pain.
Rather than hear this watch disparaged he would have suffered all kinds of insults to himself, and he would have welcomed blows in the face that he could have repaid in kind. It pained him all the more, because privately he was obliged to admit to himself that there was something a little ridiculous about this poor, dear old watch. His affection for it increased; it caused him inexpressible pain to see it thus held up to derision, especially as he realised its oddity himself.
Then he ceased to wear it, to save it from these insults. He did not even wind it, so as to give its works a rest, especially as the jolting it had suffered on the voyage, and the great unaccustomed heat, had caused it to indicate the most unlikely hours—in fact to go entirely off the lines.
He had put it away tenderly in a box, where he kept his most cherished possessions, his letters, his little souvenirs of home. This box was a fetish box; one of those absolutely sacred boxes such as sailors always possess, and soldiers now and then.
Fatou had been formally forbidden to touch it.
Nevertheless, this watch attracted her. She had discovered how to open the precious box. When Jean was away, she had found out by herself how to wind up the watch, how to move the hands and make it strike. When she put it close to her ear she would listen to the little cracked tones, with the inquisitive air of an ouistiti which has found a musical box.
At Gadiangué one never experienced a sensation of coolness or physical well-being. Not even the nights were fresh, as in the winter season in Senegal.
From morning onwards, the same oppressive, deadly heat prevailed in the shade of that wonderful verdure. From morning onwards, before sunrise, at whatever hour, in whatever place, always, always, the same temperature, the temperature of a vapour bath, moist, overpowering, poisonous, pervading these forests, the abode of chattering monkeys, green parrots, and rare humming birds; these shady paths, these tall dank grasses, where serpents glided. All the heat and heaviness of the equatorial atmosphere was concentrated during the night under the foliage of the great trees; and everywhere the air was steeped in deadly miasma.
As had been foreseen, at the end of three months, the country was quiet. The war, the negro massacres were over. The caravans resumed their journeys, bringing to Gadiangué from the depths of Africa gold, ivory, feathers, all the products of the Soudan and the interior of Guinea.
And the order having been given to withdraw the reinforcements, a ship was sent to wait for the spahis at the mouth of the river to bring them back to Senegal.
Alas, poor fellows! not all of them had survived. Out of twelve that had fared forth, two failed to obey the order of recall; two lay asleep in the hot earth of Gadiangué, victims of fever.
But Jean’s hour had not yet come, and one day he set out on his return journey along the route that he had taken three months before in Samba-Boubou’s canoe.
This time it was high noon; the spahis were journeying in a Mandinga pirogue, shaded by a moistened awning.
They kept close to the dense verdure of the banks, gliding beneath branches and hanging roots of trees for the sake of the scanty shade, warm and danger-haunted, which these cast upon the river.
The water seemed stagnant and motionless, heavy as oil, with wisps of fever-impregnated vapour hovering here and there above its polished surface.
The sun was at its zenith; it darted down its perpendicular light from a sky of violet grey, leaden grey, dim with the miasma of the swamps.
The heat was so appalling that the black oarsmen, in spite of all their pluck, were obliged to take a rest. The tepid water could no longer quench their thirst; they were exhausted, and seemed to be melting away in perspiration.
And then, when they halted, the pirogue, carried gently along by an almost imperceptible current, drifted onwards. The spahis could study at close quarters a whole strange world, the underworld that had its being beneath the mangroves and peopled all the marshes of equatorial Africa.
In the shade, in the obscure network of great roots, this world lay asleep.
There, two steps away from the canoe, which glided past without a sound, stealing by so quietly that not even the birds were awakened—near enough to touch it—lay dull-green crocodiles, their sleek forms stretched out on the mud, yawning and grinning idiotically with gaping viscous jaws. There were graceful white herons asleep likewise, snowy white balls, standing on one leg, and to avoid contact with the mud actually perched on the backs of the crocodiles in their trance-like sleep. There were kingfishers of every shade of green and blue taking their noonday rest by the water’s edge, in the company of sluggish lizards and great, wonderful butterflies that had come to life in a temperature like a boiler’s, slowly folding and unfolding their wings wherever they happened to alight, resembling dead leaves when their wings were closed, brilliant as mysterious jewels when their wings were spread, all glittering with blue enamel and metallic gleams.
Above all, there were roots of mangrove trees, roots and still more roots, trailing down everywhere, like sheaves of filaments; roots of all lengths and thicknesses, falling in tangled masses from every direction. You would have said thousands of nerves,tentacles, grey arms, eager to enmesh and envelop all things. Great stretches of country were covered with these entanglements of roots. And swarming all over the mud and the roots and the crocodiles were colonies of great grey crabs, continually brandishing their single pair of ivory white pincers, as if seeking in dreams to clutch an imaginary prey. 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. Once more they were in the midst of the vast plain, with its inextricable tangle of mangroves covering it like a mantle of uniform green.
The overpowering heat of noon was past, and some birds were flying about. Nonetheless a perpetual stillness possessed this region; beyond the reach of sight there was the same monotony, the same trees, the same calm.
There was nothing to be seen but a never varying border of mangroves, recalling from a distance the familiar aspect of poplars by our riversides in France. To right and left, at intervals, there opened out newwatercourses where the same silence brooded, watercourses which vanished from sight in the remote distance, ever bordered by these same curtains of perpetual verdure. All Samba-Boubou’s wide experience was needed to pilot the pirogue through the labyrinth of these creeks.
No sound, no movement was perceptible, except, now and then, the tremendous plunge of a hippopotamus, who, disturbed by the measured cadences of the oarsmen, disappeared, leaving great swirling eddies on the mirror of the warm clouded waters.
For this reason Fatou, lying for greater safety in the very bottom of the canoe, with a double screen of leaves and wet cloths over her head, kept her eyes tightly closed. This she did, because she had made enquiries and knew what denizens one might expect to see on these river banks.
When she arrived at Poupoubal, she had accomplished the whole journey without having dared to cast a single glance about her all the way. To induce her to stir, Jean had to assure her very positively that they had reached their destination, and that, moreover, it was black night, and the danger, therefore, at an end. She lay, quite benumbed, in the bottom of the pirogue, and replied in the querulous voice of a coaxing child. She wanted Jean to take her in his arms and carry her himself on board the ship from Goree, and this he did.
These wiles were generally successful with the poor spahi, who would yield at times and spoil Fatou, simply because he felt the need of someone to pet,someone to cherish, and Fatou was better than nothing.
The Governor of Goree did not forget his promise to the spahi Boyer; on his return Jean was posted again to St Louis, there to complete his term of exile.
Jean was conscious of a certain emotion as the country of sand and the white town came into sight; he had an affection for them, such as one always feels for places where one has lived and endured a long time. And then, in the first moments, he took a kind of pleasure in revisiting what was almost a town, almost civilisation, and resuming former habits and friendships. It was only by virtue of his prolonged deprivation of all these things that they acquired the slightest importance in his eyes on his return to them.
There is small demand for lodgings in Senegal. Samba-Hamet’s house had no new occupants. Coura n’diaye witnessed the return of Jean and Fatou, and opened the door of their former dwelling to them.
For the spahi, the days relapsed again into their former monotonous routine.
Nothing had changed in St Louis. In their quarter the same tranquillity prevailed. The tame marabouts that lived on their roof clacked their beaks, asthey sunned themselves, with the same sound of dry wood, such as is made by the cogged wheels of a windmill.
The negresses still pounded their everlasting kouss-kouss. Everywhere the same familiar sounds, the same monotonous stillness, the same calm of prostrate nature.
But Jean was growing more and more weary of it all.
Day by day he drew further away from Fatou; he was utterly out of conceit with his black mistress.
She had grown more exacting and also more malicious, more especially since she had realised her power over Jean—ever since he had stayed behind on her account.
Scenes were frequent between them. At times she would exasperate him from sheer perversity and spitefulness.
Latterly he had acquired a habit of striking her with his riding whip, not very hard at first, but as time went on with increasing violence. His blows sometimes left marks like parallel scorings on Fatou’s bare back—black on black. Afterwards he would be sorry and ashamed.
One day, as he was returning to his dwelling, he had seen from a distance a Khassonké, a big, black gorilla of a man, beating a hasty retreat through the window.
On this occasion he did not so much as say one word. After all, he was indifferent to anything that she might do.
He had come to the end of any sentiment of pity, or tenderness even, that at moments he might have felt. He had had enough of her; he was tired of her; disgusted with her. He kept her, simply because he was too lazy to get rid of her.
He had entered upon his last year; everything pointed to the end, to his departure. He began to count the months.
Sleep had abandoned him, a common sequence to a long sojourn in these enervating countries. At night he would spend hours leaning on his elbow at the window, breathing in with rapture the cool air of his last winter season—and above all, dreaming of his return.
The moon, in her quiet course over this desert land, generally found him there at his window. He loved these beautiful, tropic nights, the rosy glow upon the sand; the trails of silver on the gloomy waters of the river. Each night the wind wafted to him from the plains of Sorr the distant cry of the jackals—and even this doleful cry had come to be a familiar sound.
When he reflected that soon he would be leaving all this for ever, the thought seemed to cast a vague gloom upon the joy of his return.
It was several days since Jean had opened his box of treasures and looked at his old watch.
He was on duty in barracks, when he suddenly thought of it with a feeling of uneasiness.
He returned home, walking more rapidly than was his wont, and on his arrival he opened his box.
His heart felt a sudden shock. The watch was nowhere to be seen.... In feverish anxiety he ransacked the contents of the box.... No, it was no longer there!...
Fatou was humming a tune with an air of indifference, watching him all the time out of the corner of her eye. She was threading beads; arranging colour effects for her necklaces; busy with great preparations for the next day’s festivals, the bamboulas of Tabaski, at which one had to look one’s best.
“You have put it somewhere else? Quick, Fatou, tell me.... I had forbidden you to touch it. Where have you put it?...”
“Ram!” ... (I don’t know), answered Fatou unconcernedly.
A cold sweat broke out on Jean’s forehead, distracted as he was with anxiety and rage. He took Fatou by the arm and shook her roughly.
“Where have you put it?... Come, tell me at once.”
“Ram!”
Suddenly a light dawned upon him. He had caught sight of a newpagne, with a pink and blue zig-zag pattern, carefully folded, hidden away in a corner in readiness for the next day’s festivities....
He understood. Snatching up the pagne he unfolded it and flung it on the ground.
“You have sold the watch,” he cried. “Come, Fatou, be quick, tell me the truth.” ...
He threw her on her knees on the floor in a furious rage and seized his whip.
Fatou knew perfectly well that she had touched a precious fetish, and that it was a serious matter. But she possessed the audacity that comes of impunity. She had already offended so many times, and Jean had so many times forgiven her.
Yet she had never before seen Jean like this; she uttered a cry; she was afraid. She began to kiss his feet.
“Pardon, Tjean!... Pardon!”
In such moments of fury Jean did not realise his own strength. He was subject to these fits of almost savage passion common to children who have grown up in the woods. He rained blows upon Fatou’s bare back, inflicting stripes from which the blood gushed, and with the falling of the blows his rage increased.
At length he grew ashamed of what he had done, and throwing down the whip he cast himself on his couch....
A moment later Jean was running towards the market of Guet n’dar.
In the end Fatou had confessed, and had told him the name of the merchant to whom she had sold the watch. He had some hope of finding his poor old watch still there, and of being able to buy it back; he had just drawn his monthly pay, and this sum ofmoney should be sufficient for the purpose.
He walked very rapidly; he ran; he hastened to reach the market, as if, while he was actually on his way, some black purchaser were standing there bargaining for the watch, and on the point of carrying it off.
On the sands at Guet n’dar tumult prevails. A confused throng, composed of every type of negro, is gathered together, uttering a babel of all the languages of the Soudan. There, throughout the year, is held a great market, crowded with people from all parts of Africa, and every imaginable article is offered for sale—precious things, absurd things, merchandise useful and fantastic, the most incongruous wares, gold and butter, meat and unguents, live sheep and manuscripts, prisoners and porridge, amulets and vegetables.
One side of the picture is framed by an arm of the river, St Louis in the background, with its straight lines, its Babylonian terraces, its white limewash splashed with brick red, and here and there the yellow crest of a palm tree, erect against the blue sky.
On the other side lies Guet n’dar, the negro ant heaps, with its thousands of pointed roofs.
Close by caravans are halting, camels lying on the sand, Moors unloading their bales of ground nuts and their fetish pouches of wrought leather.
Pedlars of both sexes are crouched on the sand, laughing and quarrelling, jostled and trodden upon, they and their wares, by their customers.
“Hou! dièndé m’pât!” ... (women selling sour milk out of goatskins sewn together, with the hair on the inner side).
“Hou! dièndé nébam!” (butter sellers—women of the Peuhle tribe, with great, three-cornered chignons, ornamented with copper discs—diving with both hands for their merchandise into vessels of hairy goatskin—rolling it between their fingers into little grimy balls, sold at a halfpenny each—then wiping their paws on their hair).
“Hou! dièndé kheul!... dièndé khorompolé” (women selling simples, little bundles of enchanted herbs, lizard tails, and roots with magic properties).
“Hou! dièndé tchiakhkha!... dièndé djiareb!” ... (women squatting on the ground selling grains of gold, fragments of jade, amber beads, silver frontlets—all spread out on the ground on pieces of dingy linen and trodden upon by the customers).
“Hou! dièndé guerté!... dièndé khankhel! dièndé jap-nior ...” (women selling pistachios, live ducks, absurd eatables, meat dried in the sun, sweet pastes, devoured by flies).
Women selling salt fish, pipes, things of every description; old jewels; old dirty verminous pagnes robbed from the corpse; Galam butter, used for frizzling the hair; little old tails of hair, cut or torn from the heads of dead negresses, and plaited and gummed ready for use just as they are.
Women selling grigris, amulets, old guns, gazelles’ dung, old copies of the Koran, annotated by pious Marabouts of the desert; musk, flutes, old silver-handled daggers, old iron knives that have alreadybeen plunged into men’s vitals; tom-toms, giraffes’ horns, and old guitars.
Beggars and vagabonds, the dregs of negro humanity, sit about under the gaunt, yellow cocoanut palms; old leper women stretching out hands covered with white ulcers for alms; old moribund skeletons, their legs swollen with elephantiasis, with big fat flies and maggots feeding on the open sores.
On the grounds ordure of all kinds.
And overhead, darting down its perpendicular rays, burns one of those scorching suns that seem to be almost on one’s head, the radiating heat roasting one, like a brazier too close to one.
And always, always, the desert for horizon—the infinite flatness of the desert.
It was there, before the wares displayed by one Bob-Bakary-Diam, that Jean halted with beating heart. Hastily he cast anxious, scrutinising glances upon the hugger-mugger of objects scattered about in front of him.
“Ah, yes, my white man,” said Bob-Bakary-Diam in Yolof, with a quiet smile, “the watch that strikes! Four days ago the girl came and sold it to me for three silverkhâliss. Very sorry, my white man, but as it was a watch that struck, I sold it the very same day to a Trarzas chief, who left with a caravan for Timbuctoo.”