The Sheltering Sky

The night went by slowly; yet to Port, watching the road was hypnotic rather than monotonous. If he had not been journeying into regions he did not know, he would have found it insufferable. The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.

Kit moved from time to time, lifted her head, and murmuring something unintelligible, let it fall back against him. Once she shifted and allowed it to fall in the other direction, against Tu

“Did they catch it?”

“No. They’re all afraid of lions.”

“I wonder what became of it.”

The driver shrugged his shoulders and lapsed into the silence he obviously preferred. Port was pleased to hear the beast had not been killed.

Just before dawn, at the coldest time of the night, they came to a bordj, bleak and austere in the windswept plain. Its single gate was opened, and more asleep than awake, the three staggered in, following the crowd of natives from the back of the bus. The vast courtyard was packed with horses, sheep and men. Several fires blazed; the red sparks flew wildly in the wind.

On a bench near the entrance of the room where the coffee was served there were five falcons, each with a black leather mask over its head, and each fastened to a peg in the bench by a delicate chain attached to its leg. They all perched in a row, quite unmoving, as if they had been mounted and ranged there by a taxidermist. Tu

Port snorted. “You mean nobody understood anything you said. What the hell would you want with them anyway?”

Tu

When they went out again, the first signs of light were pushing up from behind the plain. And now it was Port’s turn to sit by the door. By the time the bordj had become only a tiny white box far behind them, he was asleep. In this way he missed the night’s grand finale: the shifting colors that played on the sky from behind the earth before the rising of the sun.

XV

Even before Ain Krorfa was in sight, the flies had made their presence known. As the first straggling oases appeared and the road darted between the high mud walls of the outlying settlements, all at once the bus was mysteriously full of them—small, grayish and tenacious. Some of the Arabs remarked about them, and covered their heads; the rest seemed not to be conscious of them. The driver said: “Ah, les salauds! On voit bien que nous sommes Ain Krorfa!”

Kit and Tu

“We’re being attacked!” cried Kit.

Tu

“They stick when it’s cool,” said the driver. “Early in the morning you can’t get rid of them.”

“But where do they come from?” demanded Kit.

The outraged tone of her voice made him laugh.

“This is nothing,” he said, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. “You must see them in the town. Like black snow, over everything.”

“When will there be a bus leaving?” she said.

“You mean back to Boussif? I go back tomorrow.”

“No, no! I mean toward the south.”

“Ah, that! You must ask in Ain Krorfa. I know only about the Boussif service. I think they have a line that makes Bou Noura once a week, and you can always get a ride on a produce truck to Messad.”

“Oh, I don’t want to go there,” said Kit. She had heard Port say Messad was of no interest.

“Well, I do,” interrupted Tu

“Don’t get excited. You haven’t seen it yet. Maybe the driver’s just having us on, as Mr. Lyle would say. Besides, it probably wouldn’t be a week, the bus to Bou Noura. It might be leaving tomorrow. It could even be today, as far as that goes.”

“No,” Tu

“Yes, you’re a real American, I know.” She turned her head to look at him, and he felt she was making fun of him. His face grew red.

“You’re damned right.”

Port awoke. His first gesture was to drive away the flies from his face. He opened his eyes and stared out the window at the increasing vegetation. High palms shot up behind the walls; beneath them in a tangled mass were the oranges, figs and pomegranates. He opened the window and leaned out to sniff the air. It smelled of mint and woodsmoke. A wide river-bed lay ahead; there was even a meandering stream of water in the middle of it. And on each side of the road, and of all the roads that branched from it, were the deep seguias ru

Kit looked at Tu

Again they discussed the flies, Tu

This pleasant impression, however, was based wholly upon her appreciation of the verdure she could not help noticing behind the walls as the bus sped onward toward the town; the town itself, once they had arrived, seemed scarcely to exist. She was disappointed to see that it rather resembled Boussif, save that it appeared to be much smaller. What she could see of it was completely modern and geometrically laid out, and had it not been for the fact that the buildings were white instead of brown, and for the sidewalks bordering the principal street, which lay in the shadows of projecting arcades, she easily could have thought herself still in the other town. Her first view of the Grand Hotel’s interior quite u

“Good heavens, what a mess!” she exclaimed; actually her epithet fell far short of describing what she really felt about the patio they had just entered. The simple Tu