XXXII
He took a walk every evening. He took a great many walks.... Thunder showers still fell.... The immense, evil-smelling swamps, the stagnant waters saturated with feverish miasma covered a wider area every day. This country of sand was now overgrown with tall, grassy vegetation....
The evening sun was pale as if exhausted by excessive heat and noxious emanations....
At the setting of that yellow sun, when Jean found himself alone in the midst of these desolate marshes, where so many strange new things worked upon his imagination, he was possessed by inexplicable sadness.... He cast his eyes all around the wide, flat landscape, overhung with motionless vapours; he could not understand what there was in the aspect of things, so mournful and so abnormal, thus to oppress his heart.
Above the damp grass floated clouds of dragon flies, with great black-spotted wings, while birds whose song was strange to him called plaintively to one another among the tall grasses.... And the eternal melancholy of this land of Ham brooded over everything.
In these twilight hours of spring time these African marshes are steeped in a melancholy that no human tongue could express....