The Garden of Allah | Page 5

breasts with their dirty, red hands.
To Domini there was something pitiful in the sight of all these lads,
uprooted from their homes in France, stumbling helplessly on board
this ship that was to convey them to Africa. They crowded together.
Their poor bundles and bags jostled one against the other. With their
clumsy boots they trod on each other's feet. And yet all were lonely
strangers. No two in the mob seemed to be acquaintances. And every

lad, each in his different way, was furtively on the defensive, uneasily
wondering whether some misfortune might not presently come to him
from one of these unknown neighbours.
A few of the recruits, as they came on board, looked up at Domini as
she leant over the rail; and in all the different coloured and shaped eyes
she thought she read a similar dread and nervous hope that things might
turn out pretty well for them in the new existence that had to be faced.
The Zouave, wholly careless or unconscious of the fact that he was an
incarnation of Africa to these raw peasants, who had never before
stirred beyond the provinces where they were born, went on taking the
tickets, and tossing the woollen rugs to the passing figures, and
pointing ferociously to the gangway. He got very tired of his task
towards the end, and showed his fatigue to the latest comers, shoving
their rugs into their arms with brusque violence. And when at length
the wharf was bare he spat on it, rubbed his short-fingered, sunburnt
hands down the sides of his blue jacket, and swaggered on board with
the air of a dutiful but injured man who longed to do harm in the world.
By this time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in
line along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence
towards Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of
masts, its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them
the whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up
menacingly. Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses and turbans
bound with cords of camel's hair, came running along the wharf. The
siren hooted again. The Arabs bounded over the gangway with grave
faces. All the recruits turned to examine them with a mixture of
superiority and deference, such as a schoolboy might display when
observing the agilities of a tiger. The ropes fell heavily from the posts
of the quay into the water, and were drawn up dripping by the sailors,
and /Le General Bertrand/ began to move out slowly among the
motionless ships.
Domini, looking towards the land with the vague and yet inquiring
glance of those who are going out to sea, noticed the church of Notre
dame de la Garde, perched on its high hill, and dominating the noisy
city, the harbour, the cold, grey squadrons of the rocks and Monte

Cristo's dungeon. At the time she hardly knew it, but now, as she lay in
bed in the silent inn, she remembered that, keeping her eyes upon the
church, she had murmured a confused prayer to the Blessed Virgin for
the recruits. What was the prayer? She could scarcely recall it. A
woman's petition, perhaps, against the temptations that beset men
shifting for themselves in far-off and dangerous countries; a woman's
cry to a woman to watch over all those who wander.
When the land faded, and the white sea rose, less romantic
considerations took possession of her. She wished to sleep, and drank a
dose of a drug. It did not act completely, but only numbed her senses.
Through the long hours she lay in the dark cabin, looking at the faint
radiance that penetrated through the glass shutters of the skylight. The
recruits, humanised and drawn together by misery, were becoming
acquainted. The incessant murmur of their voices dropped down to her,
with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking
shudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed
to her hoarse and pathetic, suggestive, too, of danger.
When they reached the African shore, and saw the lights of houses
twinkling upon the hills, the pale recruits were marshalled on the white
road by Zouaves, who met them from the barracks of Robertville.
Already they looked older than they had looked when they embarked.
Domini saw them march away up the hill. They still clung to their bags
and bundles. Some of them, lifting shaky voices, tried to sing in chorus.
One of the Zouaves angrily shouted to them to be quiet. They obeyed,
and disappeared heavily into the shadows, staring about them anxiously
at the feathery palms that clustered in this new and dark country, and at
the