The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [105]
They continued until mid-morning, stopping at a place in the high dunes that had not a sign of vegetation, Again they slept through the afternoon, and again the double ritual of love was observed at a distance from the camping site when dark had fallen.
And so the days went by, each one imperceptibly hotter than the one before it, as they moved southward across the desert. Mornings-the painful journey under the unbearable sun; afternoons-the soft hours beside Belqassim (the short interlude with the other no longer bothered her, since Belqassim always stood by); and nights-the setting forth under the now waning moon, toward other dunes and other plains, each more distant than the last and yet indistinguishable from it.
But if the surroundings seemed always the same, there were certain changes appearing in the situation that existed among the three of them: the ease and lack of tension in their uncomplicated relationship began to be troubled by a noticeable want of good feeling on the part of the older man. He and Belqassim had endless argumentative discussions in the hot afternoons when the camel drivers were sleeping. She also would have liked to take advantage of the hour, but they kept her awake, and although she could not understand a word they said, it seemed to her that the older man was warning Belqassim against a course of action upon which the latter was stubbornly determined. In a perfect orgy of excitement he would go through a lengthy mimicry in which a group of people successively registered astonishment, indignant disapproval and rage. Belqassim would smile indulgently and shake his head with patient disagreement; there was something both intransigent and self-assured about his attitude in the matter that infuriated the other, who, each time it seemed that further expostulation would be useless, got up and took a few steps away, only to turn a moment later and renew the attack. But it was quite clear that Belqassim had made up his mind, that no threat or prophecy of which his companion was capable would succeed in altering the decision he had made. At the same time Belqassim was adopting an increasingly proprietary attitude toward Kit. Now he made it understood that he suffered the other to take his brief nightly pleasure with her only because he was being exceptionally generous. Each evening she expected that he finally would refuse to yield her up, fail to rise and walk over to lean against a tree when the other approached. And indeed, he had taken to grumbling objections when that moment arrived, but still he let his friend have her, and she supposed that it was a gentleman’s agreement, made for the duration of the voyage.
During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above-the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat. The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky. They took to traveling only at night, setting out shortly after twilight and halting at the first sign of the rising sun. The sand had been left far behind, and so had the great dead stony plains. Now there was a gray, insect-like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred. The ashen landscape as they moved through it was flat as a floor. Day by day the plants grew higher, and the thorns that sprouted from them stronger and more cruel. Now some reached the stature of trees, flat-topped and wide, and always defiant, but a puff of smoke would have afforded as much protection from the sun