The Sheltering Sky

They started at dusk. Several times during the night they met processions of men and oxen, and they passed through two smaller villages where fires burned in the streets. The following day while they rested and slept there was a constant stream of traffic moving along the road. That evening they set out even before the sun had set. By the time the moon was well up in the sky they bad arrived at the top of a slight eminence from which they could see, spread out not far below, the fires and lights of a great flat city. She listened to the men’s conversation, hoping to discover its name, but without success.

An hour or so later they passed through the gate. The city was silent in the moonlight, and the wide streets were deserted. She realized that the fires she had seen from the distance had been outside the town, along the walls where the travelers encamped. But here within, all was still, everyone slept behind the high, fortress-like facades of the big houses. Yet when they turned into an alley and dismounted to the sound of the mehara growling in chorus, she also heard drums not far away.

A door was opened, Belqassim disappeared into the dark, and soon there was life stirring within the house. Servants arrived, each one carrying a carbide lamp which he set down among the packs being removed from the camels. Soon the entire alley had the familiar aspect of a camp in the desert. She leaned against the front of the house near the door and watched the activity. Suddenly she saw her valise among the sacks and rugs. She stepped over and took it. One of the men eyed her distrustfully and said something to her. She returned to her vantage point with the bag. Belqassim did not reappear from inside for a long time. When he came out he turned directly to her, took her arm, and led her into the house.

Later when she was alone in the dark she remembered a chaos of passageways, stairways and turnings, of black spaces beside her suddenly lighted for an instant by the lamp Belqassim carried, of wide roofs where goats wandered in the moonlight, of tiny courtyards, and of places where she had to stoop to pass through and even then felt the fringe of loose fibres hanging from the palmwood beams brushing the turban on her head. They had gone up and down, to the left and to the right, and, she thought, through i

XXVII

The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she felt, would allow her to catch up with time. But there was always the immaculate, vast clarity out there when she looked, unchanging and pitiless above the city.

By her mattress was a tiny square window with iron grillwork across the opening; a nearby wall of dried brown mud cut off all but a narrow glimpse of a fairly distant section of the city. The chaos of cubical buildings with their flat roofs seemed to go on to infinity, and with the dust and heat-haze it was hard to tell just where the sky began. In spite of the glare the landscape was gray—blinding in its brilliancy, but gray in color. In the early morning for a short while the steel-yellow sun glittered distantly in the sky, fixing her like a serpent’s eye as she sat propped up against the cushions staring out at the rectangle of impossible light. Then when she would look back at her hands, heavy with the massive rings and bracelets Belqassim had given her, she could hardly see them for the dark, and it would take a while for her eyes to grow used to the reduced interior light. Sometimes on a far-off roof she could distinguish minute human figures moving in silhouette against the sky, and she would lose herself in imagining what they saw as they looked out over the endless terraces of the city. Then a sound near at hand would rouse her; quickly she would pull off the silver bracelets and drop them into her valise, waiting for the footsteps to approach up the stairs, and for the key to be turned in the lock. An ancient Negro slave woman with a skin like an elephant’s hide brought her food four times a day. At each meal, before she arrived bearing the huge copper tray, Kit could hear her wide feet slapping the earthen roof and the silver bangles on her ankles jangling. When she came in, she would say solemnly: “Sbalkheir,” or “Msalkheir,” close the door, hand Kit the tray, and crouch in the corner staring at the floor while she ate. Kit never spoke to her, for the old woman, along with everyone else in the house with the exception of Belqassim, was under the impression that the guest was a young man; and Belqassim had portrayed for her in vivid pantomime the reactions of the feminine members of the household should they discover otherwise.

She had not yet learned his language; indeed, she did not consider making the effort. But she had grown used to the inflection of his speech and to the sound of certain words, so that with patience he could make her understand any idea that was not too complicated. She knew, for instance, that the house belonged to Belqassim’s father; that the family came from the north, from Mecheria, where they had another house; and that Belqassim and his brothers took turns conducting caravans back and forth between points in Algeria and the Soudan. She also knew that Belqassim, in spite of his youth, had a wife in Mecheria and three here in the house, and that with his own wives and those of his father and his brothers, there were twenty-two women living in the establishment, exclusive of the servants. And these must never suspect that Kit was anything but an unfortunate young traveler rescued by Belqassim as he was dying of thirst, and still not fully recovered from the effects of his ordeal.

Belqassim came to visit her at mid-afternoon each day and stayed until twilight; it would occur to her when he had left and she lay alone in the evening, remembering the intensity and insistence of his ardor, that the three wives must certainly be suffering considerable neglect, in which case they must already be both suspicious and jealous of this strange young man who for such a long time had been enjoying the hospitality of the house and the friendship of their husband. But since she lived now solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim, she could not bear to think of warning him to be less prodigal of his love with her in order to allay their suspicion. What she did not guess was that the three wives were not being neglected at all, and that even if such had been the case, and they had believed a boy to be the cause of it, it never would have occurred to them to be jealous of him. So that it was out of pure curiosity that they sent little Othman, a Negro urchin who often ran about the house without a stitch of clothing on him, to spy on the young stranger and report to them what he looked like.