Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

“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.

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.