VIII
Jean hastened to the barracks and threw the packet entrusted to him to the first person he met. Then he turned away and set off haphazard for a rapid, aimless walk—it was his own method of stifling his sorrow.
He passed the bridge leading to Guet n’dar and turned southwards in the direction of the Point of Barbary, just as he had done that night four years ago when he had fled from Cora’s house in despair....
But this time his despair was the deep, supreme despair of a man... and his life was wrecked....
For a long time he went southwards, losing sight of St Louis and the negro villages. He sat down exhausted at the foot of a sandy mound overlooking the sea....
His ideas had no sequence. The day’s excessive sunshine had disordered his mind....
He noticed that he had never been in this place before, and he began to glance absently about him.
The whole mound bristled with tall posts of a grotesque appearance, bearing inscriptions in the language of the priests of Mahgreb. Bleached bones lay strewn pell-mell upon the ground, unearthed long ago by jackals. There were likewise a few sprays of greenery, lost, as it were, in the midst of absolute aridity. These were garlands of convolvulus, exquisitely fresh, opening here and there their large pink calyces, trailing among old skulls, old arm and leg bones.
At intervals other funereal mounds of grim aspect rose above the level plain.
Great flocks of pelicans, their white feathers tinged with pink, were stalking about the beaches. Seen in the distance through the evening mirage, their forms assumed weird and unnatural proportions....
Evening had come. The sun had sunk down into the ocean, and a cooler breeze had set in from the sea.
Jean took out his mother’s letter and began to read it again....
“Now, my son, a thought struck Peyral yesterday which has alarmed us. It is that you may not wish to come back again now, but to remain in Africa.
“We are both very old. My good Jean, my dear son, your poor mother begs you on her knees not to let this prevent you from being sensible and from coming back to us soon, as we had expected. Otherwise I would rather die at once, and Peyral too.”
Then poor Jean felt his heart break—sobs rent his bosom, and his spirit of revolt dissolved in tears.