I liked the particular kind of dilapidation which in Paraguay was the expression of an excess of wealth. But here, in Concordia, I was filled with wonder. Here everything was in a state of decay, but adorably so, like an old oak covered with moss and split in places with age, like a wooden bench on which generations of lovers had come to sit and which had grown sacred. The wainscoting was worn, the hinges rusted, the chairs rickety. And yet, though nothing had ever been repaired, everything had been scoured with zeal. Everything was clean, waxed, gleaming.
The drawing-room had about it something extraordinarily intense, like the face of a wrinkled old lady. The walls were cracked, the ceiling stripped; and most bewildering of all in this bewildering house was the floor: it had simply caved in. Waxed, varnished and polished though it was, it swayed like a ship's gangway. A strange house, evoking no neglect, no slackness, but rather an extraordinary respect. Each passing year had added something to its charm, to the complexity of its visage and its friendly atmosphere, as well as to the dangers encountered on the journey from the drawing-room to the dining-room.
"Careful!"
There was a hole in the floor; and I was warned that if I stepped into it I might easily break a leg. This was said as simply as "Don't stroke the dog, he bites." Nobody was responsible for the hole, it was the work of time. There was something lordly about this sovereign contempt for apologies.
Nobody said, "We could have these holes repaired; we are well enough off; but..." And neither did they say--which was true enough--"we have taken this house from the town under a thirty-year lease. They should look after the repairs. But they won't, and we won't, so..." They disdained explanation, and this superiority to circumstance enchanted me. The most that was said was:
"The house is a little run down, you see."
Even this was said with such an air of satisfaction that I suspected my friends of not being saddened by the fact. Do you see a crew of brick-layers, carpenters, cabinetworkers, plasterers intruding their sacrilegious tools into so vivid a past, turning this in a week into a house you would never recognize, in which the family would feel that they were visiting strangers? A house without secrets, without recesses, without mysteries, without traps beneath the feet, or dungeons, a sort of town-hall reception room?
In a house with so many secret passages it was natural that the daughters should vanish before one's eyes. What must the attics be, when the drawing-room already contained all the wealth of an attic? When one could guess already that, the least cupboard opened, there would pour out sheaves of yellowed letters, grandpapa's receipted bills, more keys than there were locks and not one of which of course would fit any lock. Marvelously useless keys that confounded the reason and made it muse upon subterranean chambers, buried chests, treasures.
"Shall we go in to dinner?"
We went in to dinner. Moving from one room to the next I inhaled in passing that incense of an old library which is worth all the perfumes of the world. And particularly I liked the lamps being carried with us. Real lamps, heavy lamps, transported from room to room as in the time of my earliest childhood; stirring into motion as they passed great wondrous shadows on the walls. To pick one up was to displace bouquets of light and great black palms. Then, the lamps finally set down, there was a settling into motionlessness of the beaches of clarity and the vast reserves of surrounding darkness in which the wainscoting went on creaking.
As mysteriously and as silently as they had vanished, the girls reappeared. Gravely they took their places. Doubtless they had fed their dogs, their birds; had opened their windows on the bright night and breathed in the smell of the woods brought by the night wind. Now, unfolding their napkins, they were inspecting me cautiously out of the corners of their eyes, wondering whether or not they were going to make place for me among their domestic animals. For among others they had an iguana, a mongoose, a fox, a monkey, and bees. All these lived promiscuously together without quarreling in this new earthly paradise. The girls reigned over all the animals of creation, charming them with their little hands, feeding them, watering them, and telling them tales to which all, from mongoose to bees, gave ear.
I firmly expected that these alert young girls would employ all their critical faculty, all their shrewdness, in a swift, secret, and irrevocable judgment upon the male who sat opposite them.
When I was a child my sisters had a way of giving marks to guests who were honoring our table for the first time. Conversation might languish for a moment, and then in the silence we would hear the sudden impact of "Sixty!"--a word that could tickle only the family, who knew that one hundred was par. Branded by this low mark, the guest would all unknowing continue to spend himself in little courtesies while we sat screaming inwardly with delight.
Remembering that little game, I was worried. And it upset me a bit more to feel my judges so keen. Judges who knew how to distinguish between candid animals and animals that cheated; who could tell from the tracks of the fox whether he was in a good temper or not; whose instinct for inner movements was so sure and deep.
I liked the sharp eyes of these straightforward little souls, but I should so much have preferred that they play some other game. And yet, in my cowardly fear of their "sixty" I passed them the salt, poured out their wine; though each time that I raised my eyes I saw in their faces the gentle gravity of judges who were not to be bought.
Flattery itself was useless: they knew no vanity. Although they knew not it, they knew a marvelous pride, and without any help from me they thought more good of themselves than I should have dared utter. It did not even occur to me to draw any prestige from my craft, for it is extremely dangerous to clamber up to the topmost branches of a plane-tree simply to see if the nestlings are doing well or to say good morning to one's friends.
My taciturn young friends continued their inspection so imperturbably, I met so often their fleeting glances, that soon I stopped talking. Silence fell, and in that silence I heard something hiss faintly under the floor, rustle under the table, and then stop. I raised a pair of puzzled eyes. Thereupon, satisfied with her examination but applying her last touchstone, as she bit with savage young teeth into her bread the younger daughter explained to me with a candor by which she hoped to slaughter the barbarian (if that was what I was):
"It's the snakes."
And content, she said no more, as if that explanation should have sufficed for anyone in whom there remained a last glimmer of intelligence. Her sister sent a lightning glance to spy out my immediate reflex, and both bent with the gentlest and most ingenuous faces in the world over their plates.
"Ah! Snakes, are they?"
Naturally the words escaped from me against my will. This that had been gliding between my legs, had been brushing my calves, was snakes!
Fortunately for me, I smiled. Effortlessly. They would have known if it had been otherwise. I smiled because my heart was light, because each moment this house was more and more to my liking. And also because I wanted to know more about the snakes. The elder daughter came to my rescue.
"They nest in a hole under the table."
And her sister added: "They go back into their nest at about ten o'clock. During the day they hunt."
Now it was my turn to look at them out of the corner of the eye. What shrewdness! what silent laughter behind those candid faces! And what sovereignty they exercised, these princesses guarded by snakes! Princesses for whom there existed no scorpion, no wasp, no serpent, but only little souls of animals!
***
As I write, I dream. All this is very far away. What has become of these two fairy princesses? Girls so fine-grained, so upright, have certainly attracted husbands. Have they changed, I wonder? What do they do in their new houses? Do they feel differently now about the jungle growth and the snakes? They had been fused with something universal, and then the day had come when the woman had awakened in the maiden, when there had surged in her a longing to find someone who deserved a "Ninety-five." The dream of a ninety-five is a
weight on the heart.
And then an imbecile had come along. For the first time those sharp eyes were mistaken and they dressed him in gay colors. If the imbecile recited verse he was thought a poet. Surely he must understand the holes in the floor, must love the mongoose! The trust one put in him, the swaying of the snakes between his legs under the table--surely this must flatter him! And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who loved only trim lawns. And the imbecile carried away the princess into slavery.
VII. Men of the Desert
These, then, were some of the treasures that passed us by when for weeks and months and years we, pilots of the Sahara line, were prisoners of the sands, navigating from one stockade to the next with never an excursion outside the zone of silence. Oases like these did not prosper in the desert; these memories it dismissed as belonging to the domain of legend. No doubt there did gleam in distant places scattered round the world-places to which we should return once our work was done--there did gleam lighted windows. No doubt somewhere there did sit young girls among their white lemurs or their books, patiently compounding souls as rich in delight as secret gardens. No doubt there did exist such creatures waxing in beauty. But solitude cultivates a strange mood.
I know that mood. Three years of the desert taught it to me. Something in one's heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one's youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing ... and other men will glean the harvest.
Many a night have I savored this taste of the irreparable, wandering in a circle round the fort, our prison, under the burden of the trade-winds. Sometimes, worn out by a day of flight, drenched in the humidity of the tropical climate, I have felt my heart beat in me like the wheels of an express train; and suddenly, more immediately than when flying, I have felt myself on a journey. A journey through time. Time was running through my fingers like the fine sand of the dunes; the poundings of my heart were bearing me onward towards an unknown future.
Ah, those fevers at night after a day of work in the silence! We seemed to ourselves to be burning up, like flares set out in the solitude.
And yet we knew joys we could not possibly have known elsewhere. I shall never be able to express clearly whence comes this pleasure men take from aridity, but always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than to any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust. And we, my comrades and I, we too have loved the desert to the point of feeling that it was there we had lived the best years of our lives. I shall describe for you our stations (Port Etienne, Villa Cisneros, Cape Juby, were some of their names) and shall narrate for you a few of our days.
I
I succumbed to the desert as soon as I saw it, and I saw it almost as soon as I had won my wings. As early as the year 1926 I was transferred out of Europe to the Dakar-Juby division, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic and where, only recently, the Arabs had murdered two of our pilots, Erable and Gourp. In those days our planes frequently fell apart in mid-air, and because of this the African divisions were always flown by two ships, one without the mails trailing and convoying the other, prepared to take over the sacks in the event the mail plane broke down.
Under orders, I flew an empty ship down to Agadir. From Agadir I was flown to Dakar as a passenger, and it was on that flight that the vast sandy void and the mystery with which my imagination could not but endow it first thrilled me. But the heat was so intense that despite my excitement I dozed off soon after we left Port Etienne. Riguelle, who was flying me down, moved out to sea a couple of miles in order to get away from the sizzling surface of sand. I woke up, saw in the distance the thin white line of the coast, and said to myself fearfully that if anything went wrong we should surely drown. Then I dozed off again.
I was startled out of my sleep by a crash, a sudden silence, and then the voice of Riguelle saying, "Damn! There goes a connecting rod!" As I half rose out of my seat to send a regretful look at that white coast-line, now more precious than ever, he shouted to me angrily to stay as I was. I knew Riguelle had been wrong to go out to sea; I had been on the point of mentioning it; and now I felt a complete and savage satisfaction in our predicament. "This," I said to myself, "will teach him a lesson."
But this gratifying sense of superiority could obviously not last very long. Riguelle sent the plane earthward in a long diagonal line that brought us within sixty feet of the sand--an altitude at which there was no question of picking out a landing-place. We lost both wheels against one sand-dune, a wing against another, and crashed with a sudden jerk into a third.
"You hurt?" Riguelle called out.
"Not a bit," I said.
"That's what I call piloting a ship!" he boasted cheerfully.
I who was busy on all fours extricating myself from what had once been a ship, was in no mood to feed his pride.
"Guillaumet will be along in a minute to pick us up," he added.
Guillaumet was flying our convoy, and very shortly we saw him come down on a stretch of smooth sand a few hundred yards away. He asked if we were all right, was told no damage had been done, and then proposed briskly that we give him a hand with the sacks. The mail transferred out of the wrecked plane, they explained to me that in this soft sand it would not be possible to lift Guillaumet's plane clear if I was in it. They would hop to the next outpost, drop the mail there, and come back for me.
Now this was my first day in Africa. I was so ignorant that I could not tell a zone of danger from a zone of safety, I mean by that, a zone where the tribes had submitted peacefully to European rule from a zone where the tribes were still in rebellion. The region in which we had landed happened to be considered safe, but I did not know that.
"You've got a gun, of course," Riguelle said.
I had no gun and said so.
"My dear chap, you'll have to have a gun," he said, and very kindly he gave me his. "And you'll want these extra clips of cartridges," he went on. "Just bear in mind that you shoot at anything and everything you see."
They had started to walk across to the other plane when Guillaumet, as if driven by his conscience, came back and handed me his cartridge clips, too. And with this they took off.
I was alone. They knew, though I did not, that I could have sat on one of these dunes for half a year without running the least danger. What they were doing was to implant in the imagination of a recruit a proper feeling of solitude and danger and respect with regard to their desert. What I was really feeling, however, was an immense pride. Sitting on the dune, I laid out beside me my gun and my five cartridge clips. For the first time since I was born it seemed to me that my life was my own and that I was responsible for it. Bear in mind that only two nights before I had been dining in a restaurant in Toulouse.
I walked to the top of a sand-hill and looked round the horizon like a captain on his bridge. This sea of sand bowled me over. Unquestionably it was filled with mystery and with danger. The silence that reigned over it was not the silence of emptiness but of plotting, of imminent enterprise. I sat still and stared into space. The end of the day was near. Something half revealed yet wholly unknown had bewitched me. The love of the Sahara, like love itself, is born of a face perceived and never really seen. Ever after this first sight of your new love, an indefinable bond is established between you and the veneer of gold on the sand in the late sun.
Guillaumet's perfect landing broke the charm of my musings.
"Anything turn up?" he wanted to know.
I had seen my first gazelle. Silently it had come into view. I felt that the sands had shown me the gazelle in confidence, so
I said nothing about it.
"You weren't frightened?"
I said no and thought, gazelles are not frightened.
The mails had been dropped at an outpost as isolated as an island in the Pacific. There, waiting for us, stood a colonial army sergeant. With his squad of fifteen black troops he stood guard on the threshold of the immense expanse. Every six months a caravan came up out of the desert and left him supplies.
Again and again he took our hands and looked into our eyes, ready to weep at the sight of us. "By God, I'm glad to see you! You don't know what it means to me to see you!" Only twice a year he saw a French face, and that was when, at the head of the camel corps, either the captain or the lieutenant came out of the inner desert.
We had to inspect his little fort--"built it with my own hands"--and swing his doors appreciatively--"as solid as they make 'em"--and drink a glass of wine with him.
"Another glass. Please! You don't know how glad I am to have some wine to offer you. Why, last time the captain came round I didn't have any for the captain. Think of that! I couldn't clink glasses with the captain and wish him luck! I was ashamed of myself. I asked to be relieved, I did!"
Clink glasses. Call out, "Here's luck!" to a man, running with sweat, who has just jumped down from the back of a camel. Wait six months for this great moment. Polish up your equipment. Scour the post from cellar to attic. Go up on the roof day after day and scan the horizon for that dust-cloud that serves as the envelope in which will be delivered to your door the Atar Camel Corps. And after all this, to have no wine in the house! To be unable to clink glasses. To see oneself dishonored.
"I keep waiting for the captain to come back," the sergeant said.
"Where is he, sergeant?"
And the sergeant, waving his arm in an arc that took in the whole horizon, said: "Nobody knows. Captain is everywhere at once."
We spent the night on the roof of the outpost, talking about the stars. There was nothing else in sight. All the stars were present, all accounted for, the way you see them from a plane, but fixed.