The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [121]
Each minute she was coming nearer to the pain; there would be many minutes before she would actually have reached it, but that was no consolation. The approach could be long or short—the end would be the same. For an instant she struggled to break free.
“Raoul! Ici!” cried the man with her. Someone seized her other arm. Still she fought, sliding almost down to the ground between them. She scraped her spine on the tin molding of the packing case where they sat.
“Elie est costaude, cette garce!”
She gave up, and was lifted again to a sitting position, where she remained, her head thrown far backward. The sudden roar of the plane’s motor behind her smashed the walls of the chamber where she Jay. Before her eyes was the violent blue sky-nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.
“Allez! En marche!”
She was in a standing position, she was turned about and led toward the quivering old Junkers. When she was in the co-pilot’s seat in the cockpit, tight bands were fastened across her chest and arms. It took a long time; she watched dispassionately.
The plane was slow. That evening they landed at Tessalit, spending the night in quarters at the aerodrome. She would not eat.
The following day they made Adrar by mid-afternoon; the wind was against them. They landed. She had become quite docile, and ate whatever was fed her, but the men took no chances. They kept her arms bound. The hotel proprietor’s wife was annoyed at having to look after her. She had soiled her clothes.
The third day they left at dawn and made the Mediterranean before sunset.
Chapter 30
Miss Ferry was not pleased with the errand on which she had been sent. The airport was a good way out of town and the taxi ride there was hot and bumpy. Mr. Clarke had said: “Got a little job for you tomorrow afternoon. That crackpot who was stuck down in the Soudan. Transafricaine’s bringing her up. I’m trying to get her on the American Trader Monday. She’s sick or had a collapse or something. Better take her to the Majestic.” Mr. Evans at Algiers had finally reached the family in Baltimore that very morning; everything was all right. The sun was dropping behind the bastions of Santa Cruz on the mountain when the cab left town, but it would be another hour before it set.
“Damned old idiot!” she said to herself. This was not the first time she had been sent to be officially kind to a sick or stranded female compatriot, About once a year the task fell to her, and she disliked it intensely. “There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket,” she had said to Mr. Clarke. She asked herself what possible attraction the parched interior of Africa could have for any civilized person. She herself had once passed a weekend at Bou Saada, and had nearly fainted from the heat.
As she approached the airport the mountains were turning red in the sunset. She fumbled in her handbag for the slip of paper Mr. Clarke had given her, found it. Mrs. Katherine Moresby. She dropped it back into the bag. The plane had already come in; it lay alone out there in the field. She got out of the cab, told the driver to wait, and hurried through a door marked: Salle d’Attente. Immediately she caught sight of the woman, sitting dejectedly on a bench, with one of the Transafricaine mechanics holding her arm. She wore a formless blue and white checked dress, the sort of thing a partially Europeanized servant would wear; Aziza, her own cleaning woman, bought better looking ones in the Jewish quarter.
“She’s really hit bottom,” thought Miss Ferry. At the same time she noted that the woman was a great deal younger than she had expected.