Читать книгу The Sahara - Pierre Loti - Страница 18

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Poor Jean had soon fallen a victim to boredom. He suffered from a kind of vague, indefinable melancholy, such as he had never felt before, the beginning of home-sickness for his mountains, his village, for the cottage of the aged parents, so dear to him.

The spahis, his new companions, had already worn their big sabres in various Indian and Algerian garrisons. In the taverns of maritime towns, where they had spent their youth, they had caught the mocking and licentious turn of mind, peculiar to those who lead a roving life. They were masters of ready-made, cynical jests, in slang, in Sabir, and in Arabic, and with these jests they met every contingency. Good fellows at heart, gay companions as they were, they had none the less certain habits which Jean failed to understand, and certain pleasures that excited in him extreme repugnance.

Jean was a dreamer, like all mountaineers. Reverie is a thing unknown to the stupefied and corrupt faculties of the populace of great cities. But among those who have been brought up on the land, among sailors, among fishermen’s sons who have grown up in their father’s boat, amid the perils of the deep, there are men who really dream, true, but inarticulate poets, with a poet’s insight into all things. Only, they have not the faculty of putting their impression into form, and remain incapable of interpreting them.

Jean had plenty of leisure in barracks, and he spent it in observing and thinking.

Every evening he was wont to take a walk along the great stretch of beach, whose bluish sands were lighted up by sunsets of unimaginable beauty.

He would bathe in those great breakers of the African sea, amusing himself, like the child he still was, by letting himself be rolled over and over by these enormous waves, which covered him with sand.

Or he would take long walks, for the mere pleasure of movement, of breathing deeply the salt air that blew off the sea. At times this unending flatness vexed him, oppressed his imagination, accustomed to the contemplation of mountains. He felt, as it were, a need to go on and on forever, to widen his horizon, to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond.

At dusk, the beach was crowded with negroes returning to the villages, laden with sheaves of millet. Fishermen, too, were drawing in their nets, surrounded by clamorous swarms of women and children.

These hauls of fish in Senegal were always miraculous draughts; the nets would break under the weight of thousands of fish of every shape and form. The negresses carried away on their heads baskets full of them; the black babies returned home garlanded with big fish, still alive, strung together through the gills.

There were extraordinary-looking people, just-arrived from the interior; picturesque caravans of Moors and Peuhles, who had come down the Neck of Barbary; incredible scenes at every step, in the white glow of an unnatural radiance.

And then the blue summits of the sandhills turned pink; the last horizontal rays of light glided across this whole region of sand; the sun was quenched in blood-red vapour. And with one impulse all that black throng cast themselves face downwards on the ground to offer up the evening prayer.

It was Islam’s holy hour. From Mecca to the Sahara coast the name of Mahomet passed from mouth to mouth, wafted like a mysterious breath over Africa. Little by little it became fainter as it travelled over the Soudan, until it expired there on those black lips by the shore of the great, restless sea.

The old Yolof priests in their flowing robes, turned towards the sea, recited their prayers with their faces bowed upon the sand, and all the shores were covered with prostrate men. Then all was still, and night fell with the rapidity usual in those countries of the sun.

At nightfall, Jean returned to the spahi’s quarters in the south of St. Louis.

In the great white barrack room, open to the evening breeze, all was still and quiet. The numbered beds of the spahis were ranged in rows along the bare walls; the tepid wind from the sea swayed their muslin mosquito curtains. The spahis were out. Jean returned home at a time when the other men were scattered about the deserted streets, hastening to their pleasures, to their loves.

It was at such times that the isolated barracks seemed to him dreary, and that he thought most of his mother.