On the banks larger groups of people came running to see the ship. Moorish women, beautiful, copper-coloured creatures, half dressed, with frontlets of coral, trotted up, sitting astride their small, hump-backed cows; and often there were children scampering along behind them on tiny frisky calves; naked children, their heads shaven, except for great tufts of flowing mane, their bodies tawny and muscular as those of young satyrs.
XIV
Podor is an important French post on the southern bank of the Senegal, and is one of the hottest places in the world.
It is a strong fortress, fissured by the heat of the sun. A street, tolerably shady, runs alongside the river; it consists of a few houses that are old already and sombre of aspect. You may see there some French farmers of revenue, yellow with fever and anæmia; Moorish or negro pedlars squatting on the sand; all the costumes and amulets known to Africa; sacks of ground nuts, bales of ostrich feathers, and elsewhere ivory and gold dust.
Behind this semi-European street lies a large negro town built of thatch. The town is divided into sections like honeycomb, by wide straight streets. Each of its quarters is bounded by thick wooden palisades, and fortified like a citadel.
In the evening Jean wandered about the town, with his friend Nyaor for companion. The mournful songs that floated to his ears from behind those walls, those strange voices, that unfamiliar aspect of things, that hot wind, ceasing neither day nor night, inspired him with a kind of vague terror, an inexplicable anguish, compounded of home sickness and loneliness and hopelessness all in one.
Never, not even in the distant outposts of Diakhallémé had he felt so completely alone, so utterly forsaken.
Podor was surrounded by fields of millet; a few stunted trees grew there, some brushwood, some scanty grass.
On the Moorish bank opposite lay absolute desert. Yet at the entrance to a road, of which scarcely the beginnings existed, and which soon lost its identity in the sands to the north, stood a signpost with this prophetic inscription: “To Algiers.”