XXXI
Marriages were frequent during this spring time. Often at evening, during those enervating June nights, Jean would meet these marriage processions meandering across the sands in long fantastic trains. Every one was singing, and the chorus of all these falsetto, monkey-like voices had a syncopated accompaniment of handclapping and tom-toms. There was something ponderously voluptuous, brutishly sensual in these songs and this negro gaiety.
Jean used often to visit his friend Nyaor at Guet n’dar, and the scenes of Yolof family life and domesticity disturbed him.... How lonely he felt, cut off from his own people in this accursed country!... He thought of Jeanne Méry, the girl whom he loved with the pure affection of childhood.... Alas! he had only been six months in Africa.... More than four years to wait until he saw her again!... He began to say to himself that perhaps the courage to endure his solitary existence might fail him, that soon at all costs he might need someone to help him to pass his term of exile.... But whom?...
Fatou-gaye perhaps?... Oh come!... what profanation of himself!... Was he to resemble his comrades, old Virginie’s customers?... To maltreat like them little black girls?... He had a kind of self-respect, instinctive modesty, which had hitherto preserved him from such degradation; he could never stoop so low.
XXXII
He took a walk every evening. He took a great many walks.... Thunder showers still fell.... The immense, evil-smelling swamps, the stagnant waters saturated with feverish miasma covered a wider area every day. This country of sand was now overgrown with tall, grassy vegetation....
The evening sun was pale as if exhausted by excessive heat and noxious emanations....
At the setting of that yellow sun, when Jean found himself alone in the midst of these desolate marshes, where so many strange new things worked upon his imagination, he was possessed by inexplicable sadness.... He cast his eyes all around the wide, flat landscape, overhung with motionless vapours; he could not understand what there was in the aspect of things, so mournful and so abnormal, thus to oppress his heart.
Above the damp grass floated clouds of dragon flies, with great black-spotted wings, while birds whose song was strange to him called plaintively to one another among the tall grasses.... And the eternal melancholy of this land of Ham brooded over everything.
In these twilight hours of spring time these African marshes are steeped in a melancholy that no human tongue could express....