The Sheltering Sky

“It depends on your conception of propriety, baby.”

“It certainly does,” she said acidly. “You notice I haven’t mentioned what you did last night.”

Port smiled and said smoothly: “You couldn’t very well, since you don’t know.”

“And I don’t want to.” She was letting her anger show in spite of herself. “You can think whatever you want to think. I don’t give a damn.” She glanced over at the other table and noticed that the large bright eyed woman was following what she could of their conversation with acute interest. When that lady saw that Kit was aware of her attention, she turned back to the youth and began a loud monologue of her own.

“This hotel has the most extraordinary plumbing system; the water taps do nothing but sigh and gurgle constantly, no matter how tightly one shuts them off. The stupidity of the French! It’s unbelievable! They’re all mental defectives. Madame Gautier herself told me they have the lowest national intelligence quotient in the world. Of course, their blood is thin; they’ve gone to seed. They’re all part Jewish or Negro. Look at them!” She made a wide gesture which included the whole room.

“Oh, here, perhaps,” said the young man, holding his g lass of water up to the light and studying it carefully.

“In France!” the woman cried excitedly. “Madame Gautier told me herself, and I’ve read it in ever so many books and papers.”

“What revolting water,” he murmured. He set the glass on the table. “I don’t think I shall drink it.”

“What a fearful sissy you are! Stop complaining! I don’t want to hear about it! I can’t bear to hear any more of your talk about dirt and worms. Don’t drink it. No one cares whether you do or not. It’s frightful for you, anyway, washing everything down with liquids the way you do. Try to grow up. Have you got the paraffin for the Primus, or did you forget that as well as the Vittel?”

The young man smiled with poisonous mock benevolence, and spoke slowly, as if to a backward child: “No, I did not forget the paraffin as well as the Vittel. The tin is in the back of the car. Now, if I may, I think I shall take a little walk.” He rose, still smiling most unpleasantly, and moved away from the table.

“Why, you rude puppy! I’ll box your ears!” the woman called after him. He did not turn around.

“Aren’t they something?” whispered Port.

“Very amusing,” said Kit. She was still angry. “Why don’t you ask them to join us on our great trek? It’s all we’d need.”

They ate their fruit,in silence.

After di

The unpleasant tension inside him was lessening; he felt very much awake. The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. “Since the day the first drink was served at this bar,” he thought, “how many moments of happiness have been lived through, here?” The happiness, if there still was any, existed elsewhere: In sequestered rooms that looked onto bright alleys where the cats gnawed fish-heads; in shaded cafés hung with reed matting, where the hashish smoke mingled with the fumes of mint from the hot tea; down on the docks, out at the edge of the sebkha in the tents (he passed over the white image of Marhnia, the placid face); beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions that were all of Africa. But not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room.

As he sat regularly swallowing small mouthfuls of warm whiskey, he heard footsteps approaching in the corridor. The young Englishman came into the room, and without looking in Port’s direction sat down at one of the small tables. Port watched him order a liqueur, and when the barman was back behind the bar, he walked over to the table. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said. “Vous parlezfranvais?” “Oui, oui,” the young man answered, looking startled. “But you also speak English?” pursued Port quickly. “I do,” he replied, setting his glass down and staring at his interlocutor in a ma

The young man smiled weakly. “If it’s about Africa, I daresay I can. I’ve been mucking about here for the past five years. Fascinating place, of course.”

“Wonderful, yes.”

“You know it?” He looked a bit worried; he wanted so much to be the only traveler.

“Only certain parts,” Port reassured him. “I’ve traveled a good deal in the north and west. Roughly Tripoli to Dakar.”

“Dakar’s a filthy hole.”

“But so are ports all over the world, What I wanted advice about is the exchange. What bank do you think it’s best to use? I have dollars.”

The Englishman smiled. “I think I’m rather a good person to give you such information. I’m actually Australian myself, but my mother and I live mostly on American dollars.” He proceeded to offer Port a complete exposition of the French banking system in North Africa. His voice took on the inflections of an old-fashioned professor; his ma

Port allowed him to continue his discourse, which presently left banking behind and went into personal experiences. This terrain was more fertile; it obviously was where the young man had been heading from the start. Port offered no comments, save for an occasional polite exclamation which helped to give the monologue the semblance of a conversation. He learned that prior to their arrival in Mombasa the young man and his mother, who wrote travel books and illustrated them with her own photographs, had lived for three years in India, where an elder son had died; that the five African years, spent in every part of the continent, had managed to give them both an astonishing list of diseases, and they still suffered intermittently from most of them. It was difficult, however, to know what to believe and what to discount, since the report was decorated with such remarks as: “At that time I was manager of a large import-export firm in Durban,” “The government put me in charge of three thousand Zulus,” “In Lagos I bought a command car and drove it through to Casamance,” “We were the only whites ever to have penetrated into the region,” “They wanted me to be cameraman for the expedition, but there was no one in Cape Town I could trust to keep the studios ru