Walking on aimlessly, like a drunken man, sinking ankle-deep in the sand of the deserted streets, Jean came to Guet n’dar, the negro town with its thousands of pointed huts. In the darkness he stumbled over men and women who lay sleeping on the ground rolled in pieces of white cotton, seeming to him like a population of phantoms. He walked on and on, feeling as if he had lost his senses.
Soon he found himself on the shore of the sombre sea. The breakers were roaring loudly. With a shudder of horror he distinguished swarms of crabs, fleeing before his footsteps, in solid masses. He remembered to have seen a corpse that had been washed up on the beach, torn and excarnated by them. He had no wish for such a death.
Nevertheless these breakers attracted him; he felt himself fascinated, as it were, by those great, glistening volutes, already gleaming silvery in the doubtful light of the morning, curling over all along the vast beaches, farther than the sight could reach.
It seemed to him that their coolness would be grateful to his burning head, and that in their kindly waters death would appear less cruel.
And then he remembered his mother and Jeanne, the little friend and sweetheart of his childhood. He no longer wished for death.
He threw himself on the sand and fell into a strange, heavy sleep.
XIV
For full two hours it had been daylight, and Jean’s sleep continued.
He was dreaming of his childhood and of the woods of the Cevennes. It was dark in these woods, dark with the mysterious obscurity of dreamland; his visions were clouded like far-off memories. He saw himself there, a child, with his mother in the shade of immemorial oaks: in a spot carpeted with moss and slender grasses he was plucking bluebells and heather.