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.