The strangeness of this land had in the first instance appealed strongly to his imagination and inexperience. Besides that, he had appreciated very keenly the joy of having a horse, of curling his rapidly growing moustache, of wearing an Arab fez, a red jacket, and a big sabre. He considered the ensemble very fine, and this gave him great pleasure.
IV
It was November—the fine weather season corresponding to our French winter; the heat was less violent, and the dry wind of the desert had taken the place of the great storms of the summer.
When the fine weather begins in Senegal, one may safely camp out in the open without a roof to one’s tent. For six months not a drop of water will fall on the land; every day without respite, without remorse, it will be scorched by the consuming sun.
It is the season in which the lizards delight—but the water fails in the cisterns; the marshes dry up; the grass dies; even the cactuses, the thorny nopals, no longer open their melancholy yellow flowers. Yet the evenings are chill. At sunset a strong sea-breeze invariably springs up, rousing the breakers off the African coast to their everlasting moaning, pitilessly shaking the last autumn leaves.
It is a dreary autumn, bringing with it neither the long evenings of France, nor the charm of the first frosts, nor harvest, nor golden fruit. Never a fruit in this land disinherited of God! Even the dates of the desert are denied to it, nothing ripens there, except the ground nut and the bitter pistachio.
The sensation of winter, experienced in the midst of heat which is still extreme, has a curious effect upon the spirit.
Here and there upon the vast, hot plains, forlorn and desolate, covered with dead grass, side by side with slender palms, tower huge baobabs, mastodons, as it were, of the vegetable kingdom; their bare boughs are inhabited by families of vultures, lizards, and bats.
V
Poor Jean had soon fallen a victim to boredom. He suffered from a kind of vague, indefinable melancholy, such as he had never felt before, the beginning of home-sickness for his mountains, his village, for the cottage of the aged parents, so dear to him.