Chapter III: Part I: I (2)

Out of the pink sand rise the tall, bluish euphorbiæ, casting a short, hard shadow. The moon outlines the smallest shadows of the plants with a set and frozen precision, intense in its immobility and mystery.

Here and there are clumps of brushwood, blurred obscurities, forming great gloomy patches on the luminous, pink background of the sands; then sheets of stagnant water, with vapour floating above them like white smoke, feverish miasma, more noxious and subtle than that of the day time. There is a penetrating sensation of chilliness, strange after the heat of the day; the moist air is all impregnated with the odour of great swamps.

Here and there by the roadside lie large skeletons, contorted with pain, carcases of camels, swimming in a black, fetid fluid. There they lie, grinning at the moon, shamelessly displaying their flanks, torn by vultures, their bodies hideously disembowelled.

* * * * *

From time to time the cry of a swamp bird breaks the immense silence.

* * * * *

At long intervals a baobab stretches its massive branches into the still air, like a great dead madrepore, a tree of stone, and the moon defines with surprising sharpness the contours of its structure, rigid like a mastodon’s, conveying to the imagination the impression of a thing inert, petrified and cold.

In the midst of its polished branches perch black masses: the inevitable vultures. Whole families of them roost there confidingly, sleeping heavily; they suffer Jean to approach, with the indifference of fetish birds, and the moon casts blue reflections and metallic gleams on their great folded wings.

And Jean is full of wonder at this first revelation at dead of night of all the intimate details of this land.

* * * * *

At two o’clock there bursts forth a chorus of yells, as of dogs baying the moon, but more savage, more grating, more weirdly sinister. Sometimes at night at St Louis, when the wind blew from the direction of the cemetery, Jean had fancied he heard in the far distance similar lamentations. But to-night this lugubrious music was close at hand, there, in the brush. The dismal yelping of jackals mingled with piercing strident caterwaulings of hyenas. A battle was in progress between two wandering packs on the prowl in search of dead camels.

“What is it?” Jean asked the black spahi.

It was, perhaps, a presentiment: a kind of horror seized him. The thing was undoubtedly there, quite near him, in the brush, and the sound of these voices made his flesh creep and his hair stand on end.

“Those who are lying dead,” replied Nyaor-fall with expressive pantomime, “those who are lying dead on the ground, these beasts find them and eat them.”

And when he said “eat them,” he made as if to bite his black arm with his magnificent white teeth.

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.

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.

XXV

The land surrounding the camp of Dialamban is desolate—never-ending swamps of stagnant water, alternating with plains of arid sand, yielding a growth of stunted mimosas.

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; great waterlilies, white or rose-coloured, unfolded their beauty to the tropic sun, to delight the eyes of alligators and fish-eagles.

* * * * *

Jean Peyral came near falling in love with this country.

XXVI

The month of May had come. The spahis were gaily packing up their kit. With enthusiasm they struck their tents and put together their equipment. They were going back to St Louis to take possession again of their great white barracks, newly repaired and lime-washed, and to pick up again all their old pleasures—mulatto women and absinthe.

The month of May! In our land of France, the lovely month of flowers and greenery! But in the dismal plains of Dialamban May had brought no verdure.

Trees and herbage, every plant not rooted in the yellow water of the swamps, remained blighted, withered, lifeless. For six months not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky, and the land was stricken with dreadful thirst.

And all the time the temperature continued to rise; the strong breezes that used to spring up each evening had ceased; the rainy season was at hand, the season of sultry heat and torrential rain; the season to which each year the Europeans in Senegal look forward with apprehension, as bringing them fever, anæmia, and often death.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to have lived in “the land of thirst” in order to appreciate the delights of this first shower of rain, the joy experienced in exposing oneself to the big drops of this first burst of storm.

O the first tornado!... In a leaden, impassive sky like a gloomy vault, a strange weather sign appears, rising above the horizon.

It rises and rises, assuming unusual and terrifying shapes. At first one might imagine it to be the eruption of a gigantic volcano, the explosion of an entire world. It forms itself into great arches across the sky, ever rising higher, one above the other, with sharply outlined contours, in opaque, heavy masses. One might imagine them vaults of stone about to precipitate themselves upon the world, and the whole is lighted on the under side with metallic gleams, livid, greenish or copper-coloured. And it continues to rise without a check.

The artists who have painted the deluge, the cataclysms of the primeval world, have never conceived scenes so fantastic, skies so terrifying.

And still there is not a breath of air. Nature lies prostrate, without a tremor.

* * * * *

Suddenly a terrific onslaught of wind, like the crack of a heavy whip, beats to the ground trees, herbage, birds. It whirls the maddened vultures round and round, upsetting everything in its track.

It is the tornado, bursting its chains. All things tremble and reel; nature is convulsed under the terrible might of the hurricane passing on its way.

For perhaps twenty minutes all the sluices of heaven are opened upon the earth. Rain, as of the great flood, refreshes the thirsty soil of Africa, and the wind blows furiously, strewing the earth with leaves, branches, and _débris_.

* * * * *

Then suddenly all is peace. It is over. The final gusts of wind put to flight the last copper-coloured clouds, and sweep away the tattered shreds of the cataclysm. The hurricane is over, and the sky is once more clear, impassive, blue.

The first tornado took the spahis by surprise, while they were on the march. There was a laughing, noisy stampede. The village of Touroukambé lay in the way, and they made for it, helter-skelter.

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. The horses, tethered haphazard, are neighing, pawing the ground, kicking out in terror. Dogs, goats, sheep, all the cattle of the village, are huddled against the doors, yelping, bleating, leaping, thrusting with heads or horns to force an entry—all demanding their share of protection and shelter.

There is a discordant uproar—a mingling of shouts, bursts of laughter from the negresses, the whistling of the storm wind, and the thunder drowning all other sounds with its mighty artillery. Wild confusion prevails beneath the black sky—darkness at midday, pierced by sudden flashes of green lightning; rain in torrents, the deluge pouring down at its pleasure, trickling in through all the chinks in the dried up thatch—here and there administering an unexpected shower-bath to the back of a curled-up cat, or to a startled chicken, or a spahi’s head.

* * * * *

When the tornado was over, and order re-established, the spahis took the road again, marching along flooded paths. Across the sky flitted the last little curious wisps of cloud, like little parcels of rags and scraps of brown cloth, torn and twisted like curl papers.

Strong, unwonted odours rose from the parched earth, at its contact with these first drops of water. Nature was preparing for new births.

XXVII

Fatou-gaye had posted herself since morning at the entrance to St Louis, so that she might not miss the arrival of the column.

When she saw Jean pass by, she welcomed him with a discreet _kéou_, accompanied by a very correct little bow. She did not wish to embarrass him further while he was in the ranks, and she had the good taste to wait two long hours before she came to pay her respects to him in barracks.

Fatou had changed greatly. In three months she had grown and developed a swift maturity like the plants of her native country.

She no longer asked for coppers. She had actually a certain graceful timidity, proper to a young girl.

A bou-bou of white muslin now covered her rounded breasts, as is the custom with young girls who have come to marriageable age. A strong scent of musk and soumaré hung about her.

Her head no longer displayed its five stiff little tails. She was letting her hair grow, and would presently put herself into the skilful hands of the hairdressers, who would pile up her locks into the complicated erection which is proper to the head of an African woman.

At present her hair was still too short, and it stood out in a dishevelled woolly mass, which gave an entirely new character to her face. Formerly pleasing but comical, it had now become attractive and quaint, almost charming.

She was a mixture of young girl, child, and little black devil—a very odd little person.

“The child is pretty, Peyral, you know,” said the spahis smiling.

Jean had noticed, certainly, that she was pretty, but at present this fact interested him very little. He tried to resume quietly his former mode of life, his walks on the beach, and his long expeditions into the country.

The quiet, contemplative months spent in camp had done him good. He had almost regained his moral equilibrium. His memories of his aged parents and of his young betrothed, trustfully waiting for him at home in their village, held him once more with their wholesome charm and influence.

He had done with childish folly and bravado, and now he could not understand how it was that Dame Virginie had come to number him among her clients. He had vowed not only to give up absinthe, but likewise to remain faithful to his betrothed until the blissful day of their marriage.

XXVIII

The air was charged with sluggish exhalations, seething with the vital odours and scents of young, growing things. Nature was hastening to carry out her vast plans of procreation.

Formerly, on his first arrival, Jean had cast a general look of repulsion on this black population. In his eyes they all seemed alike; they all wore for him the same simian mask, and under that polished surface of oiled ebony he could not have distinguished one individual from another.

Little by little, however, he had grown accustomed to these faces. Now he could distinguish among them. When he saw the silver-braceletted, black girls go by, he would compare them; one he considered plain, another pretty, one refined, another degraded.

In the end the negresses had for him individual faces, just like white women, and he found them less repulsive than before.

XXIX

June! It was spring time indeed, but a tropical spring time—fleeting, feverish, full of enervating odours and the air heavy with thunder.

Butterflies and birds returned, life was renewed; the humming birds had cast off their grey dress, and arrayed themselves in their brilliant summer colours. The whole country turned green as if by enchantment; the leafy trees now cast a little shade, warm and soft, upon the moist soil; the mimosas, in full flower, looked like enormous bouquets, with pink or orange sprays, where the humming birds sang in tiny little soft voices, like the muted twittering of swallows. Even the clumsy baobabs had put on for a few days fresh leaves of pale, delicate green....

The plains were carpeted with strange flowers, wild grasses, daturas with large, scent-laden calyces. And the showers that watered all things were warm and fragrant, and at evening, above the tall grasses sprung up overnight, the ephemeral fire-flies danced their rounds, like sparks of phosphorus.

Nature had been so impatient to bring forth all this abundance that in a single week she had exhausted all her gifts.

XXX

In his evening walks, Jean invariably came upon little Fatou, Fatou with a head like a woolly, black lamb. Her hair grew quickly—like the grasses—and soon the skilful hairdressers would be able to make something of it.

XXXI

Marriages were frequent during this spring time. Often at evening, during those enervating June nights, Jean would meet these marriage processions meandering across the sands in long fantastic trains. Every one was singing, and the chorus of all these falsetto, monkey-like voices had a syncopated accompaniment of handclapping and tom-toms. There was something ponderously voluptuous, brutishly sensual in these songs and this negro gaiety.

Jean used often to visit his friend Nyaor at Guet n’dar, and the scenes of Yolof family life and domesticity disturbed him.... How lonely he felt, cut off from his own people in this accursed country!... He thought of Jeanne Méry, the girl whom he loved with the pure affection of childhood.... Alas! he had only been six months in Africa.... More than four years to wait until he saw her again!... He began to say to himself that perhaps the courage to endure his solitary existence might fail him, that soon at all costs he might need someone to help him to pass his term of exile.... But whom?...

Fatou-gaye perhaps?... Oh come!... what profanation of himself!... Was he to resemble his comrades, old Virginie’s customers?... To maltreat like them little black girls?... He had a kind of self-respect, instinctive modesty, which had hitherto preserved him from such degradation; he could never stoop so low.

XXXII

He took a walk every evening. He took a great many walks.... Thunder showers still fell.... The immense, evil-smelling swamps, the stagnant waters saturated with feverish miasma covered a wider area every day. This country of sand was now overgrown with tall, grassy vegetation....

The evening sun was pale as if exhausted by excessive heat and noxious emanations....

At the setting of that yellow sun, when Jean found himself alone in the midst of these desolate marshes, where so many strange new things worked upon his imagination, he was possessed by inexplicable sadness.... He cast his eyes all around the wide, flat landscape, overhung with motionless vapours; he could not understand what there was in the aspect of things, so mournful and so abnormal, thus to oppress his heart.

Above the damp grass floated clouds of dragon flies, with great black-spotted wings, while birds whose song was strange to him called plaintively to one another among the tall grasses.... And the eternal melancholy of this land of Ham brooded over everything.

In these twilight hours of spring time these African marshes are steeped in a melancholy that no human tongue could express....

* * * * *

XXXIII

_Anamalis fobil!_ shrieked the _griots_, as, with eyes inflamed, muscles taut, bodies dripping with sweat, they beat their tom-toms.

And the whole assembly, frenziedly clapping their hands, repeated _Anamalis 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 spring _bamboulas_....

_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 spring _bamboulas_, 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!_ ...

XXXIV

_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-twenty years, 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....

XXXV

_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.

* * * * *

XXXVI

_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 the shadows; 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 brushed them 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!_ ...