IV
The stars were coming out in the sky; the coolness of the night was already in the air. The old Arab had long ago departed; the kif-smoking youth were gone. I was alone under the vine trellis, with the dark lines of the palm grove before me in the falling night. The proprietor, a mild-faced and gentle-mannered old Arab, came, as I rose to go, with a few pleasant words, and gave me a small branch of orange-flowers and a spray of the white flower of the palm. “C’est le mâle,” he said with a smile. And as I rode home over the silent desert, and, crossing the bed of the oued, looked back on the mountain wall and swept with my gaze the great, dark waste under the stars, I found myself repeating his words—“C’est le mâle.”
DJERBA
VII
DJERBA
I
IT was a coast-line hardly raised above the sea. On that low horizon only a few rare palms silhouetted the far verge above the surf. The pale-blue flood of the sea, lifting measurelessly on and on in the shining levels of fair weather; the thin, white, uneasy line wrinkling down the league-long spits of sand; the slender jets of the tufted palms etching the vacant azure vague—there was nothing more, hour after hour. And “in the afternoon we came unto a land”—but that would be to anticipate. As a matter of fact, we did not come to any land at all. We hove to, some three or four miles out in the offing, and a few weather-wise boats bobbed about like corks on the rollers, with many a careening sweep hither and thither. I climbed down into one of them, and when I had recovered my balance found myself and my luggage in the possession of a Berber boatman and his “sailor-lad”; but this was an entirely new edition of the sailor lad, bound in an earth-brown burnoose—an earnest-faced small boy, with an unfathomable seriousness, and devout in every motion, like a young acolyte, a fresh and unique incarnation of Cupid in bonds, naïve, with a sweet smile, eyes très douce, and such a mastery of his tasks in years still short of the glorious teens! What a hand he had for a rope! and how he got about with his clothes! The other was a life-worn man, très triste in the face and in motion. Father and son, and of the old race of the sea they were, a strange new type, and with I know not what added of life sadness, of dour reality.
We were soon under way, a leaning boat on broad-bosomed waters, and with that palm-set orange strip of sky to lead us on. I had not enjoyed for years such a glorious sail. Under a crisp west wind we rode the ridged waves with spurts of spray; the sun was sinking in the splendid reach and magnificent arch of that world of the void; and we drove through the purple-black sea furrows shot with dying lights. The steamer was already melting with the horizon behind. I seemed to have dropped out of the world, as if I had been marooned. I was free of it; it had all lapsed away; it had gone down. The stretch of the sea was immense. The bracing wind was as heady as wine. “Fresh fields and pastures new,” I bethought myself, looking to the low rim of land that hardly divided sea from sky, and wondered if I should find fields of the yellow lotus there. That margin was still distant, and I lay back in the stern half dreaming, enjoying the wet tingle of the spray on my face, as we made landward by long tacks, and the worn old man and the demure boy with their eyes on wind and wave sat silent. The boat grated against the pier. After a short walk I was in a small hotel, with a few rooms round an inner court, a veranda overlooking it from above, climbing roses, a pleasant French hostess, and no other guests.
It was the isle of Djerba. I had been drawn here because tradition places on the island the home of the lotus-eaters, of whom Ulysses long ago told a sea tale. This voyage was to be a hunting of the lotus. I have had an appetite for it since boyhood. It is my predestined food; but destiny has a remarkable way of escaping me. I have observed the fact on several occasions. No “branches of that enchanted stem” had met me on the pier, nor was there any “mild-eyed, melancholy” person about, whom the most fatuous could ever mistake for a strayed reveller. Things often turn out in an unexpected way; but I had to admit there was an uncommon disparity between my youthful vision of the lotus land and what I saw. Where were the “three mountain-peaks,” and the slender, high cascades of “downward smoke,” and the “gleaming river,” to say nothing of its Eden background? There was not a mountain anywhere in sight, not a hill, not a rise of ground. “A land of streams”—there was not a brook, let alone a river, not a single stream of any sort on the whole island, which had the appearance of a flat mainland. From the housetop I looked on an Arab town of no great extent, with a French core, scantily embowered with straggling trees, and the view was unbroken, landward or seaward, the horizon round. I suspect I shall find that mistily draped Tennysonian valley, with its long-drawn scene, in the Pyrenees some day, near a castle in Spain. It was not here. My French hostess had never heard of the lotus.