The Sheltering Sky Read online

  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 Tunner who gave no sign of being awake. Firmly Port grasped her arm and pulled her around so that she leaned once more upon his shoulder. About once every hour he and the chauffeur had a cigarette together, but otherwise they engaged in no words. At one point, waving his hands toward the dark, the chauffeur said: “Last year they say they saw a lion around here. The first time in years. They say it ate a lot of sheep. It was probably a panther, though.”

  “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. Tunner became quite excited about them and rushed around inquiring if the birds were for sale. His questions were answered by polite stares. Finally he returned to the table looking somewhat confused, and sat down saying: “No one seems to know who they belong to.”

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

  Tunner reflected a second. Then he laughed and said: “I don’t know. I liked them, that’s all.”

  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 Aïn 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 à Aïn Krorfa!”

  Kit and Tunner went into a frenzy of activity, waving their arms about, fanning their faces, and blowing sideways frantically to drive the insects off their cheeks and noses, all of which was next to useless. They clung with surprising determination, and had practically to be lifted off, at the last instant they would rise swiftly, and then descend almost simultaneously to the same spot.

  “We’re being attacked!” cried Kit.

  Tunner set about fanning her with a piece of newspaper. Port was still asleep by the door; the corners of his mouth bristled with flies.

  “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 Aïn 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 Tunner in English with some force. “Wait a week in a place like this? My God, I’d be dead!”

  “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,” Tunner said obstinately. “One thing I can’t stand is filth.”

  “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 running with water that is the pride of Aïn Krorfa. He withdrew his head and said good morning to his companions. Mechanically he kept brushing away the insistent flies. It was not until several minutes later that he noticed Kit and Tunner doing the same thing. “What are all these flies?” he demanded.

  Kit looked at Tunner and laughed. Port felt that they had a secret between them. “I was wondering how long it would be before you discovered them,” she said.

  Again they discussed the flies, Tunner calling upon the driver to attest to their number in Aïn Krorfa—this for Port’s benefit, because he hoped to gain a recruit for his projected exodus to Messad—and Kit repeating that it would be only logical to examine the town before making any decisions. So far she found it the only visually attractive place she had seen since arriving in Africa.

  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 unnerved her, but Tunner was present and she felt impelled to sustain her position as one who had the right to twit him about his fastidiousness.

  “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 Tunner was horrified. He merely looked, taking in each detail as it reached his gaze. As for Port, he was too sleepy to see much of anything, and he stood in the entrance, waving his arms around like a windmill in an attempt to keep the flies away from his face.

  Originally having been built to shelter an administrative office of the colonial government, the building since had fallen on evil days. The fountain which at one time had risen from the basin in the center of the patio was gone, but the basin remained. In it reposed a small mountain of reeking
garbage, and reclining on the sides of the mountain were three screaming, naked infants, their soft formless bodies troubled with bursting sores. They looked human there in their helpless misery, but somehow not quite so human as the two pink dogs lying on the tiles nearby—pink because long ago they had lost all their hair, and their raw, aged skin lay indecently exposed to the kisses of the flies and sun. One of them feebly raised its head an inch or so off the floor and looked at the newcomers vacantly through its pale yellow eyes; the other did not move. Behind the columns which formed an arcade at one side were a few amorphous and useless pieces of furniture piled on top of each other. A huge blue and white agateware pitcher stood near the central basin. In spite of the quantity of garbage in the patio, the predominating odor was of the latrine. Above the crying of the babies there was the shrill sound of women’s voices in dispute, and the thick noise of a radio boomed in the background. For a brief instant a woman appeared in a doorway. Then she shrieked and immediately disappeared again. In the interior there were screams and giggles; one woman began to cry out: “Yah, Mohammed!” Tunner swung about and went into the street, where he joined the porters who had been told to wait outside with the luggage. Port and Kit stood quietly until the man called Mohammed appeared: he was wrapping a long scarlet sash around and around his waist; the end still trailed along the floor. In the course of the conversation about rooms, he kept insisting that they take one room with three beds—it would be cheaper for them and less work for the maids.

  “If I could only get out of here,” Kit thought, “before Port arranges something with him!” But her sense of guilt expressed itself in allegiance; she could not go out into the street because Tunner was there and she would appear to be choosing sides. Suddenly she, too, wished Tunner were not with them. She would feel much freer in expressing her own preferences. As she had feared, Port went upstairs with the man, returning presently to announce that the rooms were not really bad at all.

  They engaged three smelly rooms, all giving onto a small court whose walls were bright blue. In the center of the court was a dead fig tree with masses of barbed wire looped from its branches. As Kit peered from the window a hungry-looking cat with a tiny head and huge ears walked carefully across the court. She sat down on the great brass bed, which, besides the jackal skin on the floor by it, was the only furnishing in the room. She could scarcely blame Tunner for having refused at first even to look at the rooms. But as Port said, one always ends by getting used to anything, and although at the moment Tunner was inclined to be a little unpleasant about it, by night he would probably have grown accustomed to the whole gamut of incredible odors.

  At lunch they sat in a bare, well-like room without windows, where the temptation was to whisper, since the spoken word was attended by distorting echoes. The only light came from the door into the main patio. Port clicked the switch of the overhead electric bulb: nothing happened. The barefoot waitress giggled. “No light,” she said, setting their soup on the table.

  “All right,” said Tunner, “we’ll eat in the patio.”

  The waitress rushed out of the room and returned with Mohammed, who frowned but set about helping them move the table and chairs out under the arcade.

  “Thank heavens they’re Arabs, and not French,” said Kit. “Otherwise it would have been against the rules to eat out here.”

  “If they were French we could eat inside,” said Tunner.

  They lighted cigarettes in the hope of counteracting some of the stench that occasionally was wafted toward them from the basin. The babies were gone; their screams came from an inner room now.

  Tunner stopped eating his soup and stared at it. Then he pushed his chair back and threw his napkin onto the table. “Well, by God in heaven, this may be the only hotel in town, but I can find better food than this in the market. Look at the soup! It’s full of corpses.”

  Port examined his bowl. “They’ve weevils. They must have been in the noodles.”

  “Well, they’re in the soup now. It’s thick with ’em. You all can eat here at Carrion Towers if you like. I’m going to dig up a native restaurant.”

  “So long,” said Port. Tunner went out.

  He returned an hour later, less belligerent and slightly crest-fallen. Port and Kit were still in the patio, sitting over coffee and waving away flies.

  “How was it? Did you find anything?” they asked.

  “The food? Damned good.” He sat down. “But I can’t get any information on how to get out of this place.”

  Port, whose opinion of his friend’s mastery of the French language had never been high, said: “Oh.” A few minutes later he got up and went out into the town to collect by himself whatever bits of knowledge he could relating to the transportation facilities of the region. The heat was oppressive, and he had not eaten well. In spite of these things he whistled as he walked along under the deserted arcades, because the idea of getting rid of Tunner made him unaccountably lively. Already he was noticing the flies less.

  Late in the afternoon a large automobile drew up in front of the hotel entrance. It was the Lyles’ Mercedes.

  “Of all the utterly idiotic things to have done! To try to find some lost village no one ever heard of!” Mrs. Lyle was saying. “You nearly made me miss tea. I suppose you’d have thought that amusing. Now drive away these wretched brats and come in here. Mosh! Mosh!” she cried, suddenly charging at a group of native youngsters who had approached the car. “Mosh! Imshi!” She raised her handbag in a menacing gesture; the bewildered children slowly backed away from her.

  “I must find the right term to get rid of them with here,” said Eric, jumping out and slamming the door. “It’s no use saying you’ll get the police. They don’t know what that is.”

  “What nonsense! Police, indeed! Never threaten natives with the local authorities. Remember, we don’t recognize French sovereignty here.”

  “Oh, that’s in the Rif, Mother, and it’s Spanish sovereignty.”

  “Eric! Will you be quiet? Don’t you think I know what Madame Gautier told me? What do you mean?” She stopped as she saw the table under the arcade, still laden with the dirty dishes and glasses left by Port and Kit. “Hello! Someone else has arrived,” she said in a tone that denoted the greatest interest. She turned accusingly to Eric. “And they’ve eaten outside! I told you we could have eaten outside, if you’d only insisted a bit. The tea’s in your room. Will you bring it down? I must see about that putrid fire in the kitchen. And get out the sugar and open a new tin of biscuits.”

  As Eric returned through the patio with the box of tea, Port came in the door from the street.

  “Mr. Moresby!” he cried. “What a pleasant surprise!”

  Port tried to keep his face from falling. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought I’d recognized your car outside.”

  “Just one second. I’ve got to deliver this tea to Mother. She’s in the kitchen waiting for it.” He rushed through the side door, stepping on one of the obscene dogs that lay exhausted just inside in the dark. It yelped lengthily. Port hurried upstairs to Kit and imparted the latest bad news to her. A minute later Eric pounded on the door. “I say, do have tea with us in ten minutes in room eleven. How nice to see you, Mrs. Moresby.”

  Room eleven was Mrs. Lyle’s, longer but no less bare than the others, and directly over the entrance. While she drank her tea, she kept rising from the bed where everyone was sitting for lack of chairs, going to the window and crying “Mosh! Mosh!” into the street.

  Presently Port could no longer contain his curiosity. “What is that strange word you’re calling out the window, Mrs. Lyle?”

  “I’m driving those thieving little niggers away from my car.”

  “But what are you saying to them? Is it Arabic?”

  “It’s French,” she said, “and it means get out.”

  “I see. Do they understand it?”

  “They’d jolly well better. More tea, Mrs. Moresby!”

  Tunner had
begged off, having heard enough about the Lyles from Kit’s description of Eric. According to Mrs. Lyle, Aïn Krorfa was a charming town, especially the camel market, where there was a baby camel they must photograph. She had taken several shots of it that morning. “It’s too sweet,” she said. Eric sat devouring Port with his eyes. “He wants more money,” Port thought. Kit noticed his extraordinary expression, too, but she put a different interpretation on it.

  When tea was over, and they were taking their leave, since they seemed to have exhausted all the possible subjects for conversation, Eric turned to Port. “If I don’t see you at dinner, I’ll drop in on you tonight afterward. What time do you go to bed?”

  Port was vague. “Oh, any time, more or less. We’ll probably be out fairly late looking around the town.”

  “Righto,” said Eric, patting his shoulder affectionately as he shut the door.

  When they got back to Kit’s room she stood gazing out the window at the skeletal fig tree. “I wish we’d gone to Italy,” she said. Port looked up quickly. “Why do you say that? Is it because of them, because of the hotel?”

  “Because of everything.” She turned toward him, smiling. “But I don’t really mean it. This is just the right hour to go out. Let’s.”

  Aïn Krorfa was beginning to awaken from its daily sun-drugged stupor. Behind the fort, which stood near the mosque on a high rocky hill that rose in the very middle of the town, the streets became informal, there were vestiges of the original haphazard design of the native quarter. In the stalls, whose angry lamps had already begun to gutter and flare, in the open cafés where the hashish smoke hung in the air, even in the dust of the hidden palm-bordered lanes, men squatted, fanning little fires, bringing their tin vessels of water to a boil, making their tea, drinking it.

  “Teatime! They’re really Englishmen dressed for a masquerade,” said Kit. She and Port walked very slowly, hand in hand, perfectly in tune with the soft twilight. It was an evening that suggested languor rather than mystery.