But it is more comfortable to continue one’s voyage as far south as the mouth of the Senegal, where flat-bottomed boats take off the passengers and convey them smoothly by river to St Louis.
This isolation from the sea is one of the chief causes of the stagnation and dreariness of this country. St Louis cannot serve as a port of call to mail-steamers or merchantmen on their way to the southern hemisphere. One goes to St Louis if one must, and this gives one the feeling of being a prisoner cut off from the rest of the world.
II
In the northern quarter of St Louis, near the mosque, there stood a little solitary house belonging to one Samba-Hamet, trader on the upper river. It was a lime-washed house. The cracks of its brick walls, the crevices in its heat-shrunken wood-work harboured legions of white ants and blue lizards. Two marabout cranes haunted its roof, clacking their beaks in the sunshine, and solemnly stretching out their featherless necks when anyone chanced to pass along the straight, unfrequented street.
O the dreariness of this land of Africa!
The slight shadow of a frail thorn palm moved in its slow daily course along the whole length of the heated wall; the palm was the only tree in the quarter, where no green thing refreshed the eye. On its yellowed fronds flights of those tiny blue or pink birds, called in France bengalis, would often come and perch. But all around lay sand, sand, nothing but sand. Never a tuft of moss, never a fresh blade of grass grew on the soil, parched by the burning breath of the Sahara.
III
On the ground floor dwelt a horrible old negress called Coura n’diaye, once the favourite of a great negro monarch. There she had her collection of grotesque tatters, her little slave girls, decked with beads of blue glass, her goats, her big-horned sheep, her half-starved, yellow curs.
In the upper storey there was a large, lofty room, square in shape, to which an outside staircase of worm-eaten wood gave access.