The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

The terrain now was a sandy wasteland, strewn with occasional tortured bushlike tress that crouched low in the virulent sunlight. Ahead, the blue of the firmament was turning white with a more fierce glare than she had thought possible: it was the air over the city. Before she knew it, they were riding along beside the gray mud walls. The children cried out as the bus went past, their voices like bright needles. Port’s eyes were still shut; she decided not to disturb him until they had arrived. They turned sharply to the left, making a cloud of dust, and went through a big gate into an enormous open square—a sort of antechamber to the city, at the end of which was another gate, even larger. Beyond that the people and animals disappeared into darkness. The bus stopped with a jolt and the driver got out abruptly and walked

away with the air of wishing to have nothing further to do with it. Passengers still slept, or yawned and began looking about for their belongings, most of which were no longer in th...

Outside in the dust was the disorder of Africa, but for the first time without any visible sign of European influence, so that the scene had a purity which had been lacking in the other towns, an unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos. Even Port, as they helped him out, noticed the unified aspect of the place. “It’s wonderful here,” he said, “what I can see of it, anyway.”

journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning—namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated.

But then when he had got settled in the hotel, and they had started their little pattern of café life at the Eckmühl-Noiseux, there had been nothing to write about—he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper.

He leaned against the counter above her, and it seemed to her that his dark eyes glowed with sympathy. Even this faint impression, unconfirmed as it was, made her aware for the first time of how cruelly lacking in that sentiment was the human landscape here, and of how acutely she had been missing it without realizing she was missing it. And so she talked on and on, even going into her feeling about omens. She stopped abruptly, looked at him a little fearfully, and laughed. But he was very serious; he seemed to understand her very well. “Yes, yes,” he said, stroking his beardless chin meditatively. “You are right about all that.” Logically she should not have found such a statement reassuring, but the fact that he agreed with her she found deliciously comforting. However, he continued: “The mistake you make is in being afraid. That is the great mistake. The signs are given us for our good, not for our harm. But when you are afraid you read them wrong and make bad things where good ones were meant to be.” “But I am afraid,” protested Kit. “How can I change that? It’s impossible.” He looked at her and shook his head. “That is not the way to live,” he said. “I know,” she said sadly.

An Arab entered the shop, bade her good evening, and purchased a pack of cigarettes. As he went out the door, he turned and spat just inside it on the floor. Then he gave a disdainful toss of his burnous over his shoulder and strode away. Kit looked at Daoud Zozeph. “Did he spit on purpose?” she asked him. He laughed. “Yes. No. Who knows? I have been spat upon so many thousand times that I do not see it when it happens. You see! You should be a Jew in Sbâ, and you would learn not to be afraid! At least you would learn not to be afraid of God. You would see that even when God is most terrible, he is never cruel, the way men are.”

Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary. It was the ultimate taboo stretched out there beside her, helpless and terrifying beyond all reason. She choked back a wave of nausea that threatened her for an instant.

“Please stay here,” he repeated, moving his hand uncertainly along the sheet. She knew it was searching for hers, but she could not make herself reach out and let it take hold. At the same moment she became aware of her refusal, and the tears came into her eyes—tears of pity for Port. Still she did not move.

was not a whole life whose loss she was mourning there in his arms, but it was a great part of one; above all it was a part whose limits she knew precisely, and her knowledge augmented the bitterness. And presently within her, deeper than the weeping for the wasted years, she found a ghastly dread all formed and growing. She raised her head and looked up at him with tenderness and terror. His head had dropped to one side; his eyes were closed. She put her arms around his neck and kissed his forehead many times. Then, half-pulling and half-coaxing, she got him back down into bed and covered him. She gave him his pill, undressed silently and lay down facing him, leaving the lamp burning so she could see him as she fell asleep. The wind at the window celebrated her dark sensation of having attained a new depth of solitude.

“MORE WOOD!” shouted the lieutenant, looking into the fire-place where the flames were dying down. But Ahmed refused to be prodigal with the wood, and brought in another small armful of the meager, gnarled branches. He remembered the early mornings of bitter cold when his mother and sister had got up long before dawn to set out across the high dunes toward Hassi Mokhtar; he remembered their return when the sun would be setting, and their faces, seamed with fatigue, as they came into the courtyard bent over double beneath their loads. The lieutenant would often throw on the fire as much wood as his sister had used to gather in the entire day, but he would not do it; he always brought in a scant amount. The lieutenant was quite aware that this was sheer recalcitrance on Ahmed’s part. He considered it a senseless but unalterable eccentricity.

Slowly, pitilessly, the number of dimensions was lessening. There were fewer directions in which to move. It was not a clear process, there was nothing definite about it so that he could say: “Now up is gone.” Yet he had witnessed occasions when two different dimensions had deliberately, spitefully, merged their identities, as if to say to him: “Try and tell which is which.” His reaction was always the same: a sensation in which the outer parts of his being rushed inward for protection, the same movement one sometimes sees in a kaleidoscope on turning it very slowly, when the parts of the design fall headlong into the center. But the center! Sometimes it was gigantic, painful, raw and false, it extended from one side of creation to the other, there was no telling where it was; it was everywhere. And sometimes it would disappear, and the other center, the true one, the tiny burning black point, would be there in its place, unmoving and impossibly sharp, hard and distant. And each center he called “That.” He knew one from the other, and which was the true, because when for a few minutes sometimes he actually came back to the room and saw it, and saw Kit, and said to himself: “I am in Sbâ,” he could remember the two centers and distinguish between them, even though he hated them both, and he knew that the one which was only there was the true one, while the other was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Kit obeyed, took the glass from the proffered tray. The taste of the wine pleased her, but she did not want to be pleased, she did not want to be ripped from her apathy. Besides, she was still conscious of the peculiar light of suspicion in the captain’s eyes when he looked at her. He sat studying her face as he sipped his drink: he had about come to the decision that she was not exactly what he had taken her for at first, that perhaps she really was the sick man’s wife after all.

her mind, the sensation came to her, first faint, then sure, that some part of this landscape was moving even as she looked at it. She glanced up and grimaced. The whole, monstrous star-filled sky was turning sideways before her eyes. It looked still as death, yet it moved. Every second an invisible star edged above

the earth’s line on that side, and another fell below on the opposite side. She coughed self-consciously, and started to walk again, trying to remember how much she disliked Captain Broussard. He had not even offered her a pack of cigarettes, in spite of her overt remark. “Oh, God,” she said aloud, wishing she had not finished her last Players in Bou Noura.

HE OPENED HIS EYES. The room was malignant. It was empty. “Now, at last, I must fight against this room.” But later he had a moment of vertiginous clarity. He was at the edge of a realm where each thought, each image, had an arbitrary existence, where the connection between each thing and the next had been cut. As he labored to seize the essence of that kind of consciousness, he began to slip back into its precinct without suspecting that he was no longer wholly outside in the open, no longer able to consider the idea at a distance. It seemed to him that here was an untried variety of thinking, in which there was no necessity for a relationship with life. “The thought in itself,” he said—a gratuitous fact, like a painting of pure design. They were coming again, they began to flash by. He tried to hold one, believed he had it. “But a thought of what? What is it?” Even then it was pushed out of the way by the ot...

watchfulness was on all sides made him distrust it. Outside himself, it was all there was. He looked at the line made by the joining of the wall and the floor, endeavored to fix it in his mind, that he might have something to hang on to when his eyes should shut. There was a terrible disparity between the speed at which he was moving and the quiet immobility of that line, but he insisted. So as not to go. To stay behind. To overflow, take root in what would stay he...

HIS CRY WENT ON through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.

These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her. The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden surfeit of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an element become too rich and too plentiful to be consumed, and thereby made meaningless, non-existent.

And Port had said: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really.

“Habit,” she

thought. “Whenever I’m about to be happy I hang on instead of letting go.” She kicked off her sandals and stood naked in the shadows. She felt a strange intensity being born within her. As she looked about the quiet garden she had the impression that for the first time since her childhood she was seeing objects clearly. Life was suddenly there, she was in it, not looking through the window at it. The dignity that came from feeling a part of its power and grandeur, that was a familiar sensation, but it was years ago that she had last known it.

Since Port’s death and Kit’s disappearance he hated the desert: in an obscure fashion he felt that it had deprived him of his friends. It was too powerful an entity not to lend itself to personification. The desert—its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored.

His overtures to her had been made out of pity (because she was a woman) and out of vanity (because he was a man), and the two feelings together had awakened the acquisitive desire of the trophy collector, nothing more.

Because each of her gestures was authoritative, an outward expression of utter conviction, betraying no slightest sign of hesitation, it did not occur to the masters of the caravan to interfere as she passed the valise to one of the men on foot and motioned to him to tie it atop the sacks on the nearest pack camel. The man glanced back at his masters, saw no expression on their faces indicating opposition to her

command, and made the complaining animal kneel and receive the extra burden. The other camel drivers looked on in silence as she walked back to the riders and stretching her arms up toward the younger of the two, said to him in English: “Is there room for me?”

And when these sensations came to her they started an ever so slight stirring of thought. “Am I dead?” she said to herself, but without anguish, for she knew she was not. As long as she could ask herself the question: “Is there anything?” and answer: “Yes,” she could not be dead. And there were the sky, the sun, the sand, the slow

monotonous motion of the mehari’s pace. Even if the moment came, she reflected at last, when she no longer could reply, the unanswered question would still be there before her, she would know that she lived. The idea comforted her.

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 ...

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’s attack. The nights were moonless and much warmer. Sometimes as they advanced across the dark countryside there was the startled sound of beasts fleeing from their path. She wondered what she would have seen if it had been daylight, but she did not feel any real danger. At this point, ap...

Belqassim came to visit her at mid-afternoon each day and stayed until twilight; it would occur to her when he had left and she lay alone in the evening, remembering the intensity and insistence of his ardor, that the three wives must certainly be suffering considerable neglect, in which case they must already be both suspicious and jealous of this strange young man who for such a long time had been enjoying the hospitality of the house and the friendship of their husband. But since she lived now solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim, she could not bear to think of warning him to be less prodigal of his love with her in order to allay their suspicion. What she did not guess was that the three

wives were not being neglected at all, and that even if such had been the case, and they had believed a boy to be the cause of it, it never would have occurred to them to be jealous of him. So that it was out of pure curiosity that they sent little Othman, a Negro urchin who often ran about the house without a stitch of clothing on him, to spy on the young stranger and report to them what he looked like.

Always she remained inside the windowless room, and usually in the bed itself, lying among the disordered piles of white pillows, her mind empty of everything save the memory or anticipation of Belqassim’s presence. When he climbed the steps of the bed, parted the curtains, entered and reclined beside her to begin the slow ritual of removing her garments, the hours she had spent doing nothing took on their full meaning. And when he went away the delicious state of exhaustion and fulfilment persisted for a long time afterward; she lay half awake, bathing in an aura of mindless contentment, a state which she quickly grew to take for granted, and then, like a drug, to find indispensable.

Then he would tease her endlessly until she screamed and beat him with her fists. But between times she waited for these unbearable interludes with a gnawing excitement that drove every other sensation from her consciousness.

The sound of such a sentence coming from her own lips struck her as unbelievably ridiculous, and she began to laugh. She saw no reason to stop laughing: it felt good. There was an irresistible twitching and tickling in the center of her that made her body double up, and the laughs rolled out. It took them a long time to quiet her, because the idea of their trying to stop her from doing something so natural and delightful seemed even funnier than what she had said.

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 lay. 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.