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 Ain 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 Ain 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 Ain 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 can9t 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 Ain 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 Nfn Krorfathis 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.