The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

The young Arab spoke just enough French to be undaunted by the patent impossibility of his engaging in an actual conversation with Kit. It appeared that in his eyes a noun alone or a verb uttered with feeling was sufficient, and she seemed to be of the same mind. He told her, with the usual Arab talent for making a legend out of a mere recounting of facts, about El Ga’a and its high walls with their gates that shut at sunset, its quiet dark streets and its great market where men sold many things that came from the Soudan and from even farther away: salt bars, ostrich plumes, gold dust, leopard skins—he enumerated them in a long list, unconcernedly using the Arabic term for a thing when he did not know the French. She listened with complete attention, hypnotized by the extraordinary charm of his face and his voice, and fascinated as well by the strangeness of what he was talking about, the odd way he was saying it.