Chapter IV: Part II: I (1)

... 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 his _tara_ in 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 of little 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 the _khâliss_ and 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 his _tara_ with 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 refused him. 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 the dictates 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 this fact, 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 Algerian _roumi_ and the Oriental _giaour_. 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 of mind 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 resonant _tara_ the 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.

II

... 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 thick locks. 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-fitting _pagne_, which the Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs bequeathed to Nubia. Above this she wore a _bou-bou_, a great square of muslin with a hole for 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.

III

Fatou never did any work. Jean had presented himself with a perfect odalisque.

She knew how to wash and mend her _bou-bous_ and _pagnes_. She was always as spotless as a black cat, 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’ wooden pestles 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 called _kouss-kouss_.

_Kouss-kouss_ is 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 her _tara_, 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 Spartan brew. 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 that meagre, 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 face like 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 floating _bou-bous_.

The cold wind incited them to run; they were like kittens in our country, who feel an impulse to gambol wildly when the dry east wind is blowing, which brings us frost.

IV

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 the _bamboulas_, 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, accompanying their 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 the eternal 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.

V

BAMBOULA

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 her _grigris_ and 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 full moon 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-coloured _pagnes_, and bedeck themselves with ornaments of fine Galam gold. Their arms are covered with heavy bracelets of silver, and their necks with an astonishing profusion of _grigris_ and beads of amber and coral.

And when the red disk of the moon appears, ever magnified and distorted by mirage, casting up the horizon broad, blood-red streaks of light, a frantic clamour bursts from the whole assembly. This announces the festival.

At certain seasons of the year the square in front of Samba-Hamet’s house became the scene of fantastic _bamboulas_.

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, displayed the 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 gently massaged her to soothe her to sleep, she was left there motionless as a corpse, and she continued prostrate for two days.

VI

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 the sun 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 the _kouss-kouss_ pounders, 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 the _tabaski_) 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 side to 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, of _kouss-kouss_, and of soumaré.

Small negro children begin to show themselves at the doors; their round bellies with projecting navels are adorned with a row of blue beads; they smile from ear to ear, and their pear-shaped heads are shaven, except for three little tails.

They all stretch themselves, gazing at Jean with a look of astonishment in their great, shining eyes, and sometimes the most daring of them say, “Toubab! toubab! toubab! good-morning!”

* * * * *

All this savours of the country of exile and of remoteness from home; the smallest details of the smallest things are strange. But there is such magic in these tropical sunrises, such limpidity in the air this morning, such a sense of well-being produced by this unusual coolness, that Jean replies gaily to the good mornings of the negro babies, smiles at Fatou’s remarks, surrenders himself, and forgets.

The person whom Jean and Fatou were going to visit was a tall, old man with sly, crafty eyes, called Samba-Latir.

When they were both seated on mats on the ground in their host’s hut, Fatou began to speak, and expounded her case, which was, as will be seen, a serious and complicated one.

For several days she had been meeting, always at the same hour, a certain very ugly old woman, who looked at her in a curious way out of the corner of her eye, without turning her head.... At last yesterday evening, she had returned home in tears, assuring Jean that she felt that she had been bewitched.

And all night long she had been obliged to hold her head in water to counteract the immediate effects of the spell.

In the collection of amulets that she possessed, there were charms against all kinds of ills or accidents; against bad dreams and vegetable poisons; against dangerous falls and the venom of insects; against the wanderings of Jean’s affections and damage by white ants; against colic and alligators. But there were as yet no amulet against the evil eye and the spells that people cast upon you in the street.

Now amulets of this kind were known to be a specialty of Samba-Latir, and it was for this reason that Fatou had had recourse to him.

Samba-Latir had the very thing. He drew from an old mysterious coffer a small red sachet, attached to a leather cord; he hung it round Fatou-gaye’s neck, pronouncing sacramental words—and the evil spirit was exorcised.

It only cost two silver _khâliss_ (ten francs). And the spahi, who did not know how to bargain, not even for an amulet, paid without a murmur. Nevertheless he felt the blood rising in his temples as he saw the two coins vanish, not that he cared about the money—for he had never learnt to appreciate the value of money—but just now two _khâliss_ was a heavy tax upon his slender spahi’s purse. And above all, he said to himself with a remorseful pang, his old parents no doubt denied themselves many things which cost less than two _khâliss_, and were certainly more useful than Fatou’s amulets.

VII

Letter from Jeanne Méry to her cousin Jean.

My dear Jean,—It is almost three years now since your
departure, and I am always expecting you to talk to me about
your return; I myself have faith in you, you see, and I know
that you would never deceive me. But that does not prevent the
time from seeming very long. There are nights when I feel very
unhappy, and all kinds of ideas come into my head. Besides
this, my parents say that if you had really wanted to do so,
you could have taken leave and paid us a visit. I am pretty
sure, too, that there are people here in the village who stir
them up, but it is true, all the same, that our cousin Pierre
came home twice while he was doing his term of soldiering.

There are people who spread a report that I am going to marry
that big gaby Suirot. What an idea! How odd it would be to
marry that great booby who plays the gentleman. I let them
talk, because I know that no one in the world can be the same
to me as my dear Jean.

You can be quite easy; there is no fear of their persuading me
to go to balls; I do not mind their saying that I give myself
airs. To dance with Suirot or that great blockhead Toinon
or others like him—no, thank you. In the evening I sit very
quietly on the bench in front of Rose’s door, and there I think
and think of my dear Jean, who is worth all the others put
together, and you may be sure I am never weary of thinking of
him.

Thank you for your portrait; it is just like you, although they
say here that you are greatly changed. I myself think that your
face is still exactly the same—only you do not look at people
in quite the same way. I have put it on the big mantelpiece and
arranged my branch of palms all round it, so that when I enter
the room it is the first thing I see.

My dear Jean, I have not yet ventured to wear that beautiful
bracelet made by the negroes which you sent me, for fear of
Olivette and Rose. They think already that I play at being a
lady, and that would make it worse. When you are here and we
are married, it will be different, and then I shall also wear
Aunt Tounelle’s beautiful necklace of little links, and her
chain for scissors.

If only you would come! For you see I am wearying for the sight
of you. I seem gay sometimes when I am with the others, but
afterwards my sorrow grows heavier and heavier, and I hide
myself and weep.

Good-bye, my dear Jean. I embrace you with all my heart.

JEANNE MÉRY.

VIII

Fatou’s hands, the backs of which were deep black, had pink palms.

For a long time this discovery dismayed the spahi; he disliked seeing the palms of Fatou’s hands, which in spite of himself made upon him an unpleasant impression like the cold paws of a monkey.

Nevertheless these hands were small and well-modelled, and joined to the rounded arm with a very delicate wrist.

But this discolouration of the palms; these parti-coloured fingers had something not human about them, and inspired him with horror.

That and certain strange, falsetto intonations which escaped her sometimes when she was highly animated, together with certain restless movements, recalled mysterious resemblances which troubled the imagination.

In the end, however, Jean had grown accustomed to these things, and no longer troubled his head about them. At times when Fatou seemed to him charming, and he was still in love with her, he would call her laughingly by a curious Yolof name, which signified “little monkey-girl.”

Fatou herself was very much mortified by this pet name, and would assume staid airs and a serious expression which amused the spahi.

One day (it was exceptionally fine that day; the weather almost cool, the sky very clear)—one day Fritz Muller, who was going to pay Jean a visit, had noiselessly climbed the staircase and halted on the threshold.

There he was very much entertained by the following scene, which he witnessed from the door.

Jean, smiling the good-tempered smile of a child who is enjoying himself, appeared to be examining Fatou with great attention—stretching out her arms, turning her round, inspecting her from all points of view without uttering a word—and then suddenly, with an air of conviction, he thus expressed the conclusions at which he had arrived,

“You’re exactly the same as a monkey.”

And Fatou, deeply injured,

“Ah, Tjean! You not say that, my white man. First a monkey not knowing how to talk—and I knowing very well.”

Thereupon Fritz Muller burst out laughing—and then Jean followed his example, especially when he saw the dignified, ceremonious manner that Fatou endeavoured to assume by way of protest against these uncomplimentary conclusions.

“In any case, a very pretty little monkey,” said Muller, who had a great admiration for Fatou’s good looks.

(He had lived a long time in the negro realm, and was a good judge of the pretty girls of the Soudan.)

“A very pretty little monkey! If all those in the woods of Galam were like her, one might grow accustomed to this accursed country, which assuredly has never been visited by the good God.”

IX

A white hall, all open to the evening wind, two hanging lamps around which flutter large ephemerae dazzled by the flame; an uproarious company of men in red uniforms—coal-black kitchen wenches bustling around—a great supper party of spahis.

It has been a day of festivities—military festivities—a review at the barracks, races on desert-bred horses, camel races, races of oxen with riders, pirogue races—all the usual programme of a festal day in a little provincial town, with the addition of strange Nubian local colour.

All the fit men of the garrison, sailors, spahis, riflemen, were to be seen parading the streets in uniform; mulattos, men and women in gala dress; the ancient Signard ladies of Senegal—the half-bred aristocracy, erect and dignified with their high headdresses of cotton foulard, and their two corkscrew curls in the mode of 1820—and the young Signard ladies in dresses of the fashion of to-day, yet in spite of this, odd, faded, suggestive, somehow of the coast of Africa. Besides these, there were two or three white women in dainty gowns, and behind them, as if to serve as a foil, a crowd of negroes, decked with grigris and barbaric ornaments—all Guet n’dar in holiday dress.

All the animation and life that St Louis could produce; all the population the old colony could muster in its dead-alive streets—all were out-of-doors for a single day—ready to return on the morrow to their listless existence in those silent houses, each in its coat of white limewash, like a corpse in a winding sheet.

And the spahis who have paraded by order all day long on the Place du Gouvernement are roused to a high state of excitement by this unusual stir.

This evening they are celebrating the award of promotions and decorations brought by the last mail from France; and Jean, who as a rule holds himself a little aloof, is present at this supper party, which is a regimental affair.

The black kitchen wenches are kept very busy waiting on the spahis, not because the spahis have eaten a great deal, but because they have had a prodigious quantity to drink, and are all intoxicated.

A great many toasts have been proposed; much conversation has passed, extravagantly simple, or extravagantly cynical—much wit has flashed—spahis’ wit, smacking strongly of its origin, a medley of disillusionment and innocence. Many remarkable songs have been sung—appallingly suggestive, originating no one knows where, in Algiers, India, or some other spot—the solos comically discreet—the choruses terrible, and accompanied by the crashing of glasses and the thumping of fists enough to break down the tables. Old jokes have been made, ingenuous and well-worn, exciting bursts of youthful, joyous laughter, and words uttered capable of bringing a blush to the cheek of the devil himself.

Suddenly a spahi in the midst of this crazy uproar lifts his glass of champagne, and proposes this startling toast,

“To those who fell at Mecké and Bobdiarah.”

A very strange toast this—not originating in the brain of the author of this story! Quite unforeseen this health that has been proposed! Is it a tribute to the memory of the dead, or a sacrilegious jest. He was very drunk the spahi who proposed this funereal toast, and there was gloom in his irresolute eyes.

* * * * *

Alas! in a few years’ time who will remember those who fell in the defeat at Bobdiarah and at Mecké, those whose bones lie blanched already on the sand of the desert?

The people of St Louis who saw them march away may remember their names. But in a few years’ time, who will be able to call them to mind and to say them again?

* * * * *

So the glasses were drained to the memory of those who fell at Mecké and Bobdiarah. But this strange toast was followed by a moment of intense silence and astonishment, and it cast a gloomy veil upon the spahis’ banquet.

Jean, especially—whose eyes had been sparkling with animation at the infectious gaiety of his comrades, and who, as it happened, had been laughing heartily all this evening, Jean relapsed again into his dreamy, serious mood, hardly knowing why.

“Fallen there in the desert!” ...

Without grasping the full meaning of it, the idea of it chilled him, like the sound of a jackal’s voice; it made his flesh creep....

He was still very much of a child, poor Jean, not yet inured to war, not yet a seasoned soldier. Nevertheless he was very brave; he was not afraid, not in the least afraid, of fighting. When there was talk of Boubakar-Ségou, who was prowling with his army through Cayor, almost up to the gates of St Louis, he felt his heart leap. Sometimes he dreamt about it. It seemed to him that it would do him good, that it would rouse him to see shots fired at last, even it they were directed only against a negro chief. There were times when he was dying of impatience....

It was solely with the idea of fighting that he had become a spahi—not in order that he might pass a languid, monotonous existence in a little white house, held spell-bound by a Khassonké girl....

Poor fellows, drinking to the memory of the dead, laugh, sing, be very merry and foolish, and snatch the fleeting moment of joy.... But song and uproar ring false in this land of Senegal, and yonder in the desert there are assuredly places already marked out for some of you.

X

“In Galam” ... who can divine what mysterious echoes these words may awaken deep in the soul of an exiled negro?

The first time Jean has asked Fatou (this was long ago, in the house of his mistress),

“Where do you come from, child?”

Fatou had replied in a voice full of emotion,

“From the country of Galam” ...

Poor negroes of the Soudan, dwelling in exile, driven forth from their native village by great wars, or great famines, those vast catastrophes that come upon these primitive countries—sold, carried away into slavery, they have sometimes traversed on foot, under the lash of their master, stretches of country more extensive than the whole of Europe. But the picture of their native land has remained graven ineffaceably in the depths of their black hearts....

Sometimes it is far-away Timbuctoo or Ségou-Koro, with its great palaces of white clay mirrored in the waters of the Niger, or merely a humble village of straw, lost somewhere in the desert, or hidden away in an obscure cranny of the mountains of the south, and left in the wake of the conqueror a heap of ashes and a charnel house for the vulture....

“In Galam!” ... the words are repeated musingly, mysteriously.

“Galam!” Fatou would say,

“Tjean, one day I shall take you to Galam with me.” ...

That ancient, sacred land of Galam, which Fatou had only to close her eyes to see again—the land of Galam, a country of gold and ivory, a country in whose tepid waters grey alligators lie asleep in the shade of tall mangrove trees, where the elephant roams through the deep forest, trampling heavily upon the soil in his rapid stride.

Once Jean used to dream of this land of Galam. Fatou had told him very remarkable tales about it, which had excited his imagination, sensitive to the fascination of new and unknown things. That was over now. His curiosity concerning all this land of Africa had abated and worn itself out. He preferred to continue his monotonous existence at St Louis, and to hold himself there in readiness for the blissful moment of his return to the Cevennes.

Besides, to go away over there to that country of Fatou’s—so far from the sea—the one cool thing in Africa, the source of refreshing breezes, and above all, the means of communication with the rest of the world—to go away into that land of Galam, where the air must be hotter and heavier—to plunge into that stifling atmosphere of the interior—

No. He no longer desired it. At present he would have refused, had a proposal been made to him to go and see what was happening in Galam. He dreamed of his own country, of its mountains and its cool rivers. The mere thought of Fatou’s country made him feel hotter, and gave him a headache....

XI

Fatou could never catch sight of a n’gabou (hippopotamus) without running the risk of falling down stone dead. This was a kind of spell cast upon her family by a sorcerer from the country of Galam, and all methods of breaking it had been tried in vain. There were numerous instances among her ancestry of persons who had thus fallen down stone dead at the mere sight of these great beasts, and this curse had pursued the family relentlessly for several generations.

For this is a kind of spell that is fairly common in the Soudan. Some families cannot endure the sight of a lion; others that of a sea-cow; others—these are the most unfortunate—that of an alligator. And it is an additional affliction that in these cases even amulets are of no avail.

One can imagine the precautions that Fatou’s ancestors were obliged to take in the land of Galam—they had to refrain from country walks at times when the hippopotamuses chose to be abroad, and especially to keep away from the great grassy swamps where these monsters delighted to sport.

As for Fatou, when she heard that there was a young tame hippopotamus living in a house in St Louis, she always went far out of her way to avoid passing through this quarter of the town, for fear of succumbing to a terrible, consuming curiosity to look upon the countenance of this beast, which she persuaded her friends to describe to her in minute detail each day—a curiosity which, as will be readily divined, was likewise connected with the spell.

XII