XXVI
The month of May had come. The spahis were gaily packing up their kit. With enthusiasm they struck their tents and put together their equipment. They were going back to St Louis to take possession again of their great white barracks, newly repaired and lime-washed, and to pick up again all their old pleasures—mulatto women and absinthe.
The month of May! In our land of France, the lovely month of flowers and greenery! But in the dismal plains of Dialamban May had brought no verdure.
Trees and herbage, every plant not rooted in the yellow water of the swamps, remained blighted, withered, lifeless. For six months not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky, and the land was stricken with dreadful thirst.
And all the time the temperature continued to rise; the strong breezes that used to spring up each evening had ceased; the rainy season was at hand, the season of sultry heat and torrential rain; the season to which each year the Europeans in Senegal look forward with apprehension, as bringing them fever, anæmia, and often death.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to have lived in “the land of thirst” in order to appreciate the delights of this first shower of rain, the joy experienced in exposing oneself to the big drops of this first burst of storm.
O the first tornado!... In a leaden, impassive sky like a gloomy vault, a strange weather sign appears, rising above the horizon.
It rises and rises, assuming unusual and terrifying shapes. At first one might imagine it to be the eruption of a gigantic volcano, the explosion of an entire world. It forms itself into great arches across the sky, ever rising higher, one above the other, with sharply outlined contours, in opaque, heavy masses. One might imagine them vaults of stone about to precipitate themselves upon the world, and the whole is lighted on the under side with metallic gleams, livid, greenish or copper-coloured. And it continues to rise without a check.
The artists who have painted the deluge, the cataclysms of the primeval world, have never conceived scenes so fantastic, skies so terrifying.
And still there is not a breath of air. Nature lies prostrate, without a tremor.
Suddenly a terrific onslaught of wind, like the crack of a heavy whip, beats to the ground trees, herbage, birds. It whirls the maddened vultures round and round, upsetting everything in its track.
It is the tornado, bursting its chains. All things tremble and reel; nature is convulsed under the terrible might of the hurricane passing on its way.
For perhaps twenty minutes all the sluices of heaven are opened upon the earth. Rain, as of the great flood, refreshes the thirsty soil of Africa, and the wind blows furiously, strewing the earth with leaves, branches, and débris.
Then suddenly all is peace. It is over. The final gusts of wind put to flight the last copper-coloured clouds, and sweep away the tattered shreds of the cataclysm. The hurricane is over, and the sky is once more clear, impassive, blue.
The first tornado took the spahis by surprise, while they were on the march. There was a laughing, noisy stampede. The village of Touroukambé lay in the way, and they made for it, helter-skelter.
Women who had been pounding millet, children playing in the brush, hens pecking up food, dogs sleeping in the sun, all of them had hurried home, and were herded together beneath the narrow, peaked roofs.
Then the huts, already overcrowded, are invaded by the spahis, who step into calebashes and upset the kouss-kouss. Some kiss the little girls; others peep out-of-doors, like big children, for the pleasure of getting wet and of feeling the rain from heaven trickling down upon their heated, harum-scarum heads. The horses, tethered haphazard, are neighing, pawing the ground, kicking out in terror. Dogs, goats, sheep, all the cattle of the village, are huddled against the doors, yelping, bleating, leaping, thrusting with heads or horns to force an entry—all demanding their share of protection and shelter.
There is a discordant uproar—a mingling of shouts, bursts of laughter from the negresses, the whistling of the storm wind, and the thunder drowning all other sounds with its mighty artillery. Wild confusion prevails beneath the black sky—darkness at midday, pierced by sudden flashes of green lightning; rain in torrents, the deluge pouring down at its pleasure, trickling in through all the chinks in the dried up thatch—here and there administering an unexpected shower-bath to the back of a curled-up cat, or to a startled chicken, or a spahi’s head.
When the tornado was over, and order re-established, the spahis took the road again, marching along flooded paths. Across the sky flitted the last little curious wisps of cloud, like little parcels of rags and scraps of brown cloth, torn and twisted like curl papers.
Strong, unwonted odours rose from the parched earth, at its contact with these first drops of water. Nature was preparing for new births.