Anamalis fobil!shrieked thegriots, as, with eyes inflamed, muscles taut, bodies dripping with sweat, they beat their tom-toms.
And the whole assembly, frenziedly clapping their hands, repeatedAnamalis fobil!Anamalis fobil!... words whose translation would blister these pages.... “Anamalis fobil!” the first words, the motive and refrain of a diabolical song, delirious with licentious passion, the song of the springbamboulas....
Anamalis fobil!the howling of frenzied desire of the sap of negroes heated to excess by the sun, of burning hysteria ... the negro’s alleluia of love, a hymn of seduction chanted likewise by nature, air, earth, plants, and scents.
At the springbamboulas, the young men mingled with the young girls who had just arrayed themselves in the pomp of their wedding finery. To a maddening rhythm, to a frantic melody, they all sang, as they danced upon the sand,Anamalis fobil!...
Anamalis fobil!All the big, milky buds on the baobabs had burst into tender leaf....
And Jean felt this negro spring-time burning in his blood, flowing like a consuming poison through his veins....
He was exhausted by all this renewal of life, because it was a life in which he had no part. The blood that boiled in men’s veins was black; the sap that rose in the plants was poisonous; the perfume of the flowers was dangerous, and the insects were swollen with venom.
In him, too, the sap was rising, the sap of his two-and-twentyyears, but with a feverishness that exhausted the source from which it sprang, and in the end this terrible renascence would have brought him to the verge of death.
Anamalis fobil!How rapidly this spring advanced!... June was scarcely over, and already, under the influence of deadly heat, in an atmosphere no longer endurable, the leaves were turning yellow, the plants were dying, and the sere grasses drooped earthwards....
Anamalis fobil!... There are in hot countries certain fruits of harsh and bitter flavour—such as the gourous of Senegal—that are detestable to the palate in our cool latitudes, but which, out there, appeal to the taste in special conditions of thirst or ill-health. You may have a passionate craving for them, and they may seem to you curiously delicious.
It was the same with that little creature with her shock of black sheep’s wool, her body of sculptured marble, and her glittering eyes, already fully aware of what they asked of Jean, yet downcast in his presence with a childish presence of timid modesty.
This highly-flavoured fruit of the Soudan was precociously ripened by the tropical spring, bursting with poisonous juices, rife with morbid voluptuousness, febrile and foreign.
Anamalis fobil!
Jean had dressed for the evening hastily, almost frenziedly.
That morning he had told Fatou to go at nightfall to the foot of a certain solitary baobab in the marshes of Sorr, and to wait for him there.
Then, before setting out, he had leaned on his elbow at one of the large windows of the barracks, troubled in mind, trying to think—to think, if that were possible, while he drew a few breaths of less oppressive air. He shuddered at the thing he was about to do.
If he had withstood temptation for several days, his resistance was due to the very complicated emotions struggling within him. A kind of instinctive horror still mingled with the terrible urgency of his senses. And superstition, too, played a part, the superstition inborn in a mountaineer, a vague dread of charms and amulets, horror of I know not what enchantments, what bonds of darkness.
It seemed to him that he was about to cross the fatal threshold, to sign some sort of sinister pact with that black race, that darker veils would descend, separating him from his mother and his betrothed and all that he had loved and regretted in his home overseas.
The warm twilight sank upon the river; the old, white town turned rosy in the light, blue in theshadows; long lines of camels were wending their way across the plain, moving northwards to the desert.
Already in the distance could be heard the griots’ tom-toms beginning, and the song of frantic desires.Anamalis fobil!—Faramata hi!
The hour of his assignation with Fatou-gaye was almost past. Jean set off at a run to join her in the marshes of Sorr.
A solitary baobab cast its shadow upon their strange nuptials. The saffron sky stretched above them its impassive vault, melancholy, oppressive, laden with electricity, with terrestrial emanations and vital elements.
To paint that nuptial couch would require warmer tints than any palette could provide—African words, sounds, rustling noises, and, above all, silence, all the odours of Senegal, tempest, sombre fire, transparency, obscurity.
And yet there was nothing to be seen, save a single, solitary baobab in the midst of a great, grassy plain.
Mingled with his delirious infatuation, Jean still felt a sort of secret horror, as he saw, contrasting with the background of dusky twilight, the intenser blackness of his bride; as he saw, close to his own, the glitter of Fatou’s rolling eyes.
Great bats flitted noiselessly above them, their silken-winged flight seemed like the rapid fluttering of black cloth. They flew so low that they brushedthem with their wings, their bat-like curiosity greatly excited by Fatou’s garment of white cotton, which showed up on the parched grass.
Anamalis fobil!...Faramata hi!...
... Three years had passed....
Three times the terrible spring and the cold weather season had come again; three times the “season of thirst,” with its cold nights, its wind from the desert....
... Jean was lying asleep on histarain his whitewashed lodging in Samba-Hamet’s house. Near him lay his yellow dog, motionless, with open eyes, his paws straight out in front of him, his head on his paws, his tongue hanging out thirstily; he resembled in attitude and expression those hieratic pictures of jackals in Egyptian temples.
And Fatou-gaye lay on the ground at Jean’s feet.
It was noon, the still hour of the siesta.... It was hot, very hot, extraordinarily hot. Call to mind the most overpowering noons you have known in July, and imagine a far greater heat and an intenser light.
It was a December day. The wind blew very softly from the desert, with its unvarying regularity. Everything was withered and dead. The wind traced upon the sand thousands and thousands oflittle wavy fluctuating streaks, like tiny ripples on the great sea without water.
Fatou-gaye was lying face downwards, resting on her elbows. The upper part of her body was bare (her indoor costume), and her smooth back sloped upwards in a graceful curve from her shapely hips to the extraordinary erection of amber and coral which crowned her head.
Around Samba-Hamet’s hut there was silence, the rustling movements of lizards, the buzzing of flies, the shimmering of sand.
Fatou, half asleep, with her chin resting on her two hands, was singing to herself. She sang airs she had never heard sung, which were, nevertheless, not of her own composing. They were the expression, in strange, drowsy music, of her languid dreams, her voluptuous lassitude; reflex action, the effect produced upon her young negro girl’s brain by all that weight of circumstances, manifesting itself in song.
In that sonorous hour of noon, in that feverish half-sleep of the siesta, how plaintive are the vibrations of such a song, the vague, unconsidered result of circumstances, a musical paraphrase of silence, heat, solitude, exile.
Jean and Fatou have made peace. As usual, Jean has forgiven her. The trouble about thekhâlissand the earrings of Galam gold is all over.
The money has been procured elsewhere and sent to France. It was Nyaor who lent it, in large silver coins with very ancient effigies, which he had kept locked up with many others in a copper chest. The debt will be paid as soon as possible. True, it is another weight on Jean’s mind, but at least his dear old parents, who had counted on him, will not lack. Their minds will be at ease. The rest is not so important.
Sleeping on histarawith his slave lying at his feet, Jean has a certain superb nonchalance, a certain counterfeit air of Arab prince. There is no trace remaining of the little mountaineer from the Cevennes. He has acquired something of the beggarly majesty of those men who dwell in tents.
These three years in Senegal, which have already thinned the ranks of the spahis, have spared him. His face is bronzed; his strength has developed; his features are more refined, and their original delicacy and beauty still more accentuated.
A certain lack of moral tone, periods of indifference and oblivion, a kind of insensibility of the heart, alternating suddenly with painful awakenings—such are the sole effects that these three years have succeeded in producing upon him. The climate of Senegal has gained no further hold upon his powerful nature.
He has by degrees developed into a model soldier, punctual, vigilant, brave. And yet he still wears only humble, woollen stripes on his sleeve. The gold stripes of quartermaster, which have often been dangled before his eyes, have always been refusedhim. To begin with, he has no influence, and then, above all, there is the scandal of living with a black woman.... To get drunk, to go on the racket, to be brought back with a broken head, to commit drunken assaults by night with one’s sabre on passers-by, to roam from tavern to tavern, to stoop to all kinds of degradation—that sort of thing is all very well.
But to have turned from the path of virtue—simply for one’s own private pleasure—a small captive living in a respectable house, and provided with the sacrament of baptism—such a thing cannot be tolerated....
Formerly Jean used to receive very violent reproofs on this subject from his superior officers, combined with terrible threats and insults. He had uncovered his proud head to the storm, and then he had listened with the stoicism demanded by discipline, concealing under a certain semblance of contrition a wild desire to avail himself of his riding whip.
Yet, for all that, he did not alter his course of conduct by a hair’s breadth....
A little more dissimulation was practised, perhaps, for a few days. But he kept Fatou.
His feelings on the subject of that little creature were so complicated that wiser men than he would have wasted their energy trying to analyse them. As for Jean, he surrendered himself without understanding, as if to the beguiling charm of a love-philtre. He had not the strength to part from her. The veil that lay upon his past and his memories grew gradually denser; now he followed unresisting thedictates of the perturbed, irresolute heart that separation and exile had led astray....
And day after day, day after day, always that same sun! To see it rising every morning at the same hour with relentless regularity, bare of clouds, with none of the freshness of dawn—this sun, yellow or red, which the flatness of the landscape rendered visible, as at sea, from its first appearance above the horizon, and which, scarcely risen, began to convey to head and temples a painful, impressive sensation of burning heat.
For two years now Jean and Fatou had lived together in Samba-Hamet’s house. In the spahis’ quarters, the authorities, tired of opposition, had finally acquiesced in an evil they were powerless to abolish. After all, Jean Peyral was a model spahi; only it was an understood thing that he would always remain wedded to his modest woollen stripes, and that he would never attain higher rank.
Fatou had been a captive, not a slave, in Cora’s house—a fundamental distinction laid down by the regulations of the colony, and of which she had grasped the meaning at a very early day. As a captive she had the right to go away, although her mistress had not the right to turn her out. Once she had gone away of her own choice she was free—and she had availed herself of this right.
Moreover, she had been baptized, and this gave her still greater freedom of action. Her small head, as cunning as a young monkey’s, had realised thisfact, and had fully grasped the situation. For any woman, who has not renounced the religion of Maghreb, to give herself to a white man is an ignominious act, punished by all the execrations of the mob. But in Fatou’s case this fatal barrier of public opinion no longer existed.
It is true that her comrades sometimes called her “Kaffir!” and this hurt her feelings, curious child that she was. When she saw bands of Khassonkés arriving from the interior, recognising them from afar by their high headdress, she would run to them, shy and moved, hovering about these tall men with their manes of hair, anxious to talk to them in the beloved language of their common country. (Negroes have the love of their village, of their tribe, of the corner of the earth where they were born.) And sometimes at a word from a spiteful little comrade, the black men from the Khassonké country would turn away their heads with contempt, throwing at her with an indescribable smile and curl of the lips the word “Kaffir” (infidel), which is the equivalent of the Algerianroumiand the Orientalgiaour. Then little Fatou would go away, ashamed, and with a swelling heart....
But, nonetheless, she preferred to be a Kaffir, and to possess Jean....
... Poor Jean, sleep long on your light tara; draw out this noonday hour of rest, this heavy dreamless sleep, for the moment of waking is full of gloom....
Oh that awakening from the torpor of the midday sleep! Whence came that strange lucidity ofmind which made this moment so terrifying?... His ideas began to waken, mournful, confused, incomplete—at first mere inconsequent shadowy conceptions, full of mystery, like traces of a previous existence. Then suddenly dawned conceptions of greater and agonising clearness. Radiant memories of old days, impressions of childhood, came back to him, rising from the depths of his irrevocable past, memories of thatched cottages, of the Cevennes on summer evenings, mingled with stridulation of African crickets; the agony of separations, of lost happiness, a swift and harrowing survey of his whole past, the events of life seen from beneath, like things beyond the tomb—the other side of existence, the obverse of this world.
... In these moments, especially, he seemed to be conscious of the rapid and inexorable flight of time, which the tonelessness of his spirit did not usually permit him to grasp. He woke up, hearing against the resonanttarathe faint throbbing of the arteries in his forehead, and he seemed to be listening to the pulsations of time, the vibrations of a great mysterious time-piece of eternity. He had the sensation that the moments were gliding by, passing, passing with the speed of objects falling into empty space, while the stream of his life bore him ever onwards, and he was powerless to stem it....
He rose abruptly, now wide awake, with a wild longing to be gone, in an agony of despair at the thought of the years that still lay between him and his return.
Fatou-gaye had a vague instinct that this instant of awakening was a dangerous and critical time when the white man evaded her influence. So she was on the watch for this moment, and when she saw Jean open his mournful eyes, and then suddenly start up with a bewildered look, she would quickly come and kneel beside him to minister to him, or she would put her supple arms round his neck and say,
“What is the matter, my white man?” in a voice which she rendered as soft and languishing as the sound of a griot’s guitar.
... But these fancies of Jean did not last long. When he was wide awake his usual indifference possessed him once more, and he saw things again in their normal aspect.
... The operation of dressing Fatou’s hair was a very important and complicated one. It took place once a week, and on this occasion the whole day was given up to it. In the early morning Fatou set out for Guet n’dar, the negro village, where in a hut with peaked roof, built of thatch and dry reeds, dwelt the hairdresser of most repute among the Nubian ladies.
Fatou remained there for several hours, crouched on the sand, surrendering herself into the hands of this patient, painstaking artist.
The hairdresser began by pulling down Fatou’s previous arrangement of hair, unthreading the beads one by one, loosening and disentangling the thicklocks. Then she reconstructed that amazing edifice, introducing coral, gold coins, copper spangles, balls of green jade and balls of amber—balls of amber as big as apples, Fatou’s maternal inheritance of precious family jewels, brought secretly into the land of captivity.
The most complicated part to dress was the back of the head, the nape of the neck. There Fatou’s woolly masses had to be divided into hundreds of little corkscrew curls, starched and rigid, carefully ordered, resembling rows of black fringes.
Each of these corkscrew curls was rolled separately round a long straw and covered with a thick layer of gum. To give this coating time to dry, the straws had to remain in place until the next day. Fatou stayed at home with all these straws sticking out of her hair. She looked that evening as if she had put her head into a porcupine’s skin.
But what a splendid effect the next day, when the straws were removed!...
Over this erection was thrown, in Khassonké fashion, a piece of a very transparent kind of gauze made by the natives, covering it like a blue spider’s web, and this headdress remained firmly fixed day and night for a whole week.
Fatou-gaye wore dainty little sandals of leather, like the cothurnus of the ancients, with thongs passing between the first and second toes.
Her dress consisted of the scanty, tight-fittingpagne, which the Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs bequeathed to Nubia. Above this she wore abou-bou, a great square of muslin with a holefor the head, and falling like a peplus below the knees.
For ornaments she had heavy silver rings, riveted on wrists and ankles, and besides these, scented necklets of soumaré, for Jean’s slender means did not suffice for the purchase of necklets of amber or gold.
Soumarés are plaits, consisting of several rows of threaded little brown seeds. These seeds that ripen on the banks of the Gambia have a penetrating, aromatic odour, an odour peculiar to themselves, one of the most characteristic odours of Senegal.
Fatou-gaye was very pretty with this towering, barbaric headdress, which gave her the appearance of a Hindu deity, decked out for a religious festival. Her face had none of the characteristics, the flat nose, the thick lips, of certain African tribes, which in France are taken for the generic type of the entire black race. She was of a very pure Khassonké type, with a little, straight, delicate nose, with thin, rather narrow, very sensitive nostrils, a well-shaped, charming mouth, splendid teeth, and above all, great, lustrous, blue-black eyes, expressing, according to the mood of the moment, a curious gaiety or a mysterious malice.
Fatou never did any work. Jean had presented himself with a perfect odalisque.
She knew how to wash and mend herbou-bousandpagnes. She was always as spotless as a blackcat, dressed in white, partly from an instinct of cleanliness, partly because she realised that Jean would not tolerate her otherwise. But apart from this care of her person, she was incapable of any work.
Since the poor old Peyrals were no longer able to send their son the small sums that little by little they had saved for him, since “nothing had gone well with them,” as old Françoise had written, so that they had even been obliged to have recourse to the spahi’s slender purse, Fatou’s budget was becoming very difficult to balance.
Fortunately, Fatou was a steady little person, whose mode of life was not extravagant.
Throughout the Soudan, woman is in a position of great inferiority as compared to man.
Several times in the course of her life she is bought and sold like a head of cattle, and at a price which is estimated at inverse ratio to her ugliness, defects, and increasing age.
One day Jean asked his friend Nyaor,
“What have you done with your wife Nokhoudounkhotillé, the one who was so good-looking?”
And Nyaor replied, with a quiet smile,
“Nokhoudounkhotillé talked too much, so I sold her. With the money I got for her I bought thirty sheep who never talk at all.”
The hardest work done by the negroes, the task of pounding millet for the kouss-kouss, devolves upon the women.
From morning till night, throughout Nubia, from Timbuctoo to the coast of Guinea, in all the thatched huts, under the burning sun, the negresses’ woodenpestles are noisily pounding in the mortars of khaya wood. Thousands of braceletted arms weary themselves at this task, and the chattering, quarrelsome workers mingle with this monotonous sound their chorus of shrill voices, which seem to come from the throats of monkeys.
The result is a very characteristic hubbub, audible from afar in the thickets and desert tracts leading to these African villages.
The result of this eternal pounding, which has been practised by the women for generations, is a coarse flour of millet, which is made into a flavourless kind of gruel calledkouss-kouss.
Kouss-koussis the basis of the nourishment of the black races.
Fatou evaded this traditional labour of the women of her race. Every evening she paid a visit to Coura n’diaye, the woman griot, the ancient poetess of King El Hadj.
In return for a small monthly payment Fatou had the right to sit among the little slaves of the old favourite around great calabashes, smoking with hot kouss-kouss, and to satisfy the appetite of her sixteen years.
From her raised position on hertara, where she lay upon fine mats of complicated design, the old cast-off favourite presided with imperturbable dignity.
Yet these repasts were uproarious scenes well worth witnessing. These small, naked creatures crouched on the ground around huge calabashes, all dipping their fingers at the same time into the Spartanbrew. There were cries, wry faces, grimaces, tricks that would have made an ouistiti jealous, untimely invasions of great horned sheep; cats stealthily stretching their paws out and then slily dipping them in the gruel; intruding yellow dogs pushing their pointed noses into the dish, and then bursts of laughter, incredibly comic, displaying magnificent white teeth set in gums as red as peonies.
Jean had always to be back in barracks at four o’clock, but by the time he returned to his lodging after retreat had been sounded, Fatou was always dressed again, and her hands were clean. Beneath her towering headdress, which resembled that of an idol, she had assumed once more a serious, almost melancholy, expression. She was no longer the same person.
It was dreary at eventide in this desolate quarter, in this isolated corner of the dead-alive town.
Jean would often remain leaning on his elbow at the big window of his bare, white room.
The sea breeze fluttered the scraps of priests’ parchments which Fatou had hung by long threads from the ceiling, as a protection to them during their sleep.
Before him lay the wide landscape of Senegal—the Point of Barbary, an immense plain, with the heavy vapours of twilight brooding above it in the distance, the deep gateway to the desert.
Or else he would sit in the doorway of Samba-Hamet’s house, facing that characterless rectangle of ground, surrounded by old brick buildings in ruins, a kind of square, in the middle of which grew thatmeagre, yellow palm, of the thorny species, the only tree in the quarter.
Here he would sit smoking the cigarettes which he had taught Fatou to make for him.
Alas! even this form of distraction he would soon have to think of relinquishing for lack of funds.
He followed with his large, brown, lustreless eyes the coming and going of two or three little negro girls, who were chasing one another, gambolling wildly in the evening air, like moths in the dim half light.
Sunset in December almost invariably brought to St Louis fresh breezes and great curtains of clouds that suddenly darkened the sky, but never burst. They passed over, high above, and glided away. Never a drop of rain, never the slightest sensation of humidity; it was the dry season, and in all nature not one drop of water vapour could have been found. Still, it was possible to breathe on these December evenings; the penetrating coolness brought respite and a sensation of physical relief, but at the same time created an indefinable impression of deeper melancholy.
And when Jean was seated at nightfall in front of his lonely threshold, his thoughts travelled far afield.
These flights which his eyes, darting hither and thither like a bird, would make each day on the big geographical maps that hung on the walls of the spahi’s barracks, he would often resume again in spirit, especially of an evening, traversing a sort of panorama of the world, as it presented itself to his imagination.
First he must cross the great sombre desert, which began just behind his house.
It was this first part of the journey that his imagination was most slow in accomplishing. It would be delayed in an infinity of mysterious solitudes, where that interminable waste of sand impeded his progress.
Then he had to cross Algiers and the Mediterranean, reach the coast of France and ascend the valley of the Rhône, to arrive at last at that spot, marked on the map with little black shadings, which he envisaged as blue-tinged peaks, seen among the clouds: the Cevennes.
Mountains! His eyes had been so long accustomed to the lonely plains; it was so long since he had seen any mountains that he had almost forgotten what they were like.
And forests! The great chestnut woods of his country, moist and shadowy, where real streams of living water ran, where the soil was earth, carpeted with moss and delicate grasses.... He felt that it would be a relief merely to see a small clod of damp, mossy earth—instead of the dry sand blown about by the desert wind.
And his beloved village, which in his imaginary journey he beheld at first from above, as if he were hovering over it, the old church, which he pictured under snow, with its bell doubtless ringing the Angelus (it was seven in the evening), and close by, his cottage—the whole scene enveloped in a bluish haze, on a cold December evening, with rays of pale moonlight glancing upon it.
Was it possible? Somewhere all this actually existed; it was not a mere memory, a vision of the past; it existed; it was not even so very far away; actually at this moment people were living in that very spot, and it was possible to go there.
What were they doing, his poor old parents, at this very moment when he was thinking of them? Seated in a corner by the fire, no doubt, in front of the wide fireplace, by the cheerful blaze of branches gathered in the forest. He saw again all the objects familiar to him from childhood, the little lamp lighted on winter evenings, the pieces of old furniture; the cat curled up asleep on a stool. Among all these friendly things he sought to place the well-beloved owners of the cottage.
Nearly seven o’clock! He had the very picture before him. The evening meal was over; his parents were seated in a corner by the fire, grown older, no doubt; his aged father in his usual attitude, leaning on his hand his fine grey head—the head of an old cuirassier turned mountaineer again—and his mother probably knitting, moving her long needles very rapidly in her capable, quick, hard-working hands, or spinning, with her distaff of hemp held very upright.
And Jeanne—she was with them perhaps. His mother had written that she would often come and keep them company on winter evenings. What was she like now? “Changed and grown still prettier,” he had been told. What was that facelike now, that face of the grown-up girl he had never seen?
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 floatingbou-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.
A pedantic digression concerning music and a class of people called Griots.
In the Soudan the art of music is confined to a special hereditary caste of men called griots, who are wandering musicians and composers of heroic songs.
It is the griots upon whom devolves the duty of beating the tom-tom for thebamboulas, and of singing at festivals the praises of persons of quality.
When a chief feels a craving to hear the praises of his own glory, he summons his griots, who seat themselves before him on the sand and extemporise in his honour a long series of special couplets, accompanyingtheir strident voices with the sounds of a small, very primitive guitar, whose strings are strung over serpent skin.
The griots are at once the laziest and the most philosophical people on earth. They lead a roaming life, and take no thought for the morrow. From village to village they wander, either alone or in the train of the great warrior chiefs, receiving alms here and there, treated everywhere as pariahs, like the gipsies in Europe—sometimes loaded with gold and favours, like courtesans in our country—excluded during their lifetime from religious ceremonies, and after death from burial grounds.
They know plaintive romances with vague mysterious words, heroic songs which hold a suggestion of melody in their monotony and something of the warlike march in their well-marked vigorous rhythm; dance music full of frenzy; love songs like transports of amorous fury, or the roaring of maddened beasts.
But in all this negro music, as in that of all primitive races, the melody varies little; it consists of short, mournful phrases, scales of more or less unequal intervals, beginning with the highest notes within the compass of the human voice and descending abruptly to the very lowest, in a dragging, plaintive wail.
The negro women often sing at their work, or during that listless half-sleep, which constitutes their siesta. In that intense stillness of noon, a stillness more impressive out there than that in our fields of France, this singing of Nubian women, with theeternal stridulation of grasshoppers for its accompaniment, has a charm of its own. But it would be impossible to transport this singing from its exotic environment of sun and sand. Heard in other surroundings it would no longer be itself.
The more primitive, the more elusive the melody appears by reason of its monotony, the more difficult and complicated is the rhythm. As the long wedding processions one meets at night meander over the sands, they sing, under the leadership of the griots, concerted choral music, weird in character, and the persistent, syncopated accompaniment seems, as if of its own sweet will, to bristle with rhythmic difficulties and eccentricities.
A very simple instrument, reserved for the women, plays an important part in this ensemble; it is merely a long-shaped gourd, with an opening at one end; this gourd is beaten with the hand, now on the side, now on the opening, and two different tones are thus produced, one sharp, one dull. It yields no other sound, but the result obtained in this manner is nonetheless surprising.
It is difficult to describe the sinister, almost diabolical effect, of a distant clamour of negro voices, half-drowned by hundreds of these instruments.
The persistent counter-rhythm of the accompaniment and the startling syncopations, perfectly understood and observed by the performers, are the chief characteristics of this form of music—inferior perhaps to our own, certainly very different from it, and such as our European tradition does not enable us wholly to appreciate.
A passing griot raps out a tattoo on his tom-tom. This is the summons, and a crowd gathers around him.
Women come running; they form themselves into a close circle, and begin to intone one of those obscene songs which rouse them to passionate excitement. One of them, the first arrival, breaks away from the crowd and hurls herself into the unoccupied centre of the circle, where the tambour is sounding. She dances, jingling hergrigrisand beads; her steps, which are slow at the beginning, are accompanied by gestures appallingly licentious. Soon the pace is accelerated until a state of frenzy is reached, which might be likened to the antics of an insane monkey, the contortions of one possessed.
When she comes to the end of her strength, she retires breathless and exhausted, her black skin gleaming with sweat. Her companions receive her with applause or derision. Then another takes her place, and so on, until all have had their turn.
The old women are distinguished by a more cynical and reckless effrontery of indecency. The child that is frequently carried on their backs is tossed about in a terrible way, and utters piercing shrieks, but on these occasions the negresses have lost even their maternal instinct, and no consideration restrains them.
In all the districts of Senegal the rising of the fullmoon is the time especially dedicated to the bamboula, to the evenings of the great negro festivals, and above that vast expanse of sand, in the infinite depths of these shimmering horizons, a moon rises that seems larger and ruddier than elsewhere.
At the close of day the people gather together in groups. On these occasions the women wear bright-colouredpagnes, 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 ofgrigrisand 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. This announces the festival.
At certain seasons of the year the square in front of Samba-Hamet’s house became the scene of fantasticbamboulas.
On these occasions, Coura n’diaye would lend Fatou some of her precious jewels to wear at the festival.
Sometimes she herself graced it with her presence as in old days.
And then there would be a general murmur of admiration when the ancient griot stepped forward, decked with gold, her head held high, with a strange light rekindled in her dim eyes. Her body was shamelessly exposed; her bosom, wrinkled like that of a black mummy, and her breasts, which hung down like pouches of skin, empty and withered, displayedthe wonderful gifts of El Hadj, the conqueror; necklets of jade of the pale green of water, and besides these, rows upon rows of great beads of fine gold of rare and inimitable workmanship. Her arms and ankles were covered with gold; she wore gold rings upon all her toes, and upon her head an antique erection of gold.
The old bedizened image set herself to sing. By degrees she became more and more excited, waving her skeleton arms, which could scarcely support the weight of the bracelets. Her hoarse, cavernous voice seemed at first to issue from the depths of a lifeless corpse, but presently its vibrations gained a shuddering intensity.
One listened, as it were, to a posthumous echo of the voice of the poetess of El Hadj; and her dilated eyes, shining with an inner light, seemed to reveal like a mirror glimpses of the great legendary wars waged in the interior of the land, and of the great days of old; the armies of El Hadj swooping down on the desert; the terrible massacres, when entire tribes were given to the vultures; the assault on Ségou-Koro, all the villages of Massina, covering hundreds of miles of country between Medina and Timbuctoo, going up in flames in the sunshine, like grass in a prairie fire.
Coura n’diaye was very weary when her songs were done. She returned home trembling in every limb, and lay down on her couch. When her little slaves had stripped her of her jewels, and had gentlymassaged her to soothe her to sleep, she was left there motionless as a corpse, and she continued prostrate for two days.
Guet n’dar, the negro town, was built of grey straw on yellow sand—thousands and thousands of little round huts half hidden behind palisades of dry reeds, and all capped with roofs of thatch. All the peaks of these thousands of roofs affected pointedness in all its extravagance. Some stood upright, menacing heaven; others leaned sideways and menaced their neighbours; others again were tun-bellied, collapsing, seemingly weary of their long drying in the sun, and anxious to shrivel and to roll themselves up like the trunks of old elephants. And all these roofs stretched away out of sight, printing grotesque silhouettes of horned objects upon the monotonous blue sky.
North and south through the middle of Guet n’dar, dividing the town into two parts, runs a long sandy street, very straight and regular, widening out in the distance, until it is lost in the desert. The desert does double duty as landscape and horizon.
On either side of this vast opening lies a maze of tortuous alleys, twisted like the paths of a labyrinth.
To this quarter Fatou has guided Jean, leading him, in negro fashion, by one of his fingers, which she clasps in her firm, little black hand, adorned with copper rings.
It is seven o’clock on a January morning, and thesun scarcely risen. At this hour, even in Senegal, the air is pleasant and fresh.
Jean walks along with his proud, sedate bearing, smiling inwardly at the absurdity of the expedition he has undertaken at Fatou’s desire, and of the personage whom he is going to visit.
Good-humouredly he allows himself to be led along; the walk interests and amuses him.
The weather is fine. The pure air of the morning, the sense of physical well-being produced by this unusual coolness, has a soothing influence upon him. And at this moment, Fatou seems to him very charming, and he is almost in love with her.
This is one of those fugitive and singular moments when memory slumbers, and this land of Africa seems to smile upon him; when the spahi surrenders himself without gloomy afterthought to the life which for three years has soothed and lulled him into a heavy, dangerous sleep, haunted by sinister dreams.
The morning air is fresh and pure. Behind the grey palisades of reeds, which border the narrow streets of Guet n’dar, are heard the first sounds of thekouss-kousspounders, mingled with the sudden clamour of voices of just awakened negroes, and the noise of jingling beads. At each street corner are skulls of horned sheep (for the benefit of those versed in negro customs, the heads of victims of thetabaski) set up on tall poles, watching all the passers-by, and seemingly stretching out their wooden necks for the sake of a better view.
And settled everywhere are great fetish lizards with sky-blue bodies, swaying perpetually from sideto side, with the curious twitching peculiar to their species; their heads, which are of a beautiful yellow, as if made of orange peel.
The air is full of the odours of negroes, of leather amulets, ofkouss-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!”