The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness,

but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.

tawdry

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

maw

she was saved from prettiness by the intensity of her gaze.

on the contrary he actually was dissimulating the violence he felt. She did not say the withering things that were on the tip of her tongue.

was on a train that kept putting on speed.

archly:

might yet issue from their mouths.

Even though the street became constantly less urban, it seemed reluctant to give up;

sebkha

chechia

But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful.

thistles,

She declined to disrobe completely, but in her delicate gestures of refusal he discerned an ultimate yielding, to bring about which it would require only time.

lugubrious howling

Then, too, the turned ankle could be a thing to disregard in such cases,

atavism.

apathetically.

But no hide, no hair.

Port wilted.

“And who do you think’s going to pay for your caprices?”

imperturbably.

I’ve been mucking about here for the past five years.

Port interrupted him. “No, no. We couldn’t put you out to that extent. No, no.”

“I see. That’s a shame. We can scarcely take him along, with all the luggage there’d be, you know.”

She was not in a receptive mood when Port rapped loudly on the communicating door and opened it immediately afterward.

She looked toward the window. “Why is it so dark out still? What time is it?”

“Are you stark, raving mad?” she cried.

I’ve got to go now and find a beauty parlor, God forbid.” “What do you need of that?” protested Tunner. “Let well enough alone. You can’t improve on nature.”

Tunner was the sort of person to whom it would occur only with difficulty that he might be being used.

belvedere

trestle.

titter.

bounded

because a section of her consciousness annexed him as a buttress,

The fourth-class passengers, all native Berbers and Arabs, were milling about in the midst of a confusion of bundles and boxes, piled on the dirt platform under the faint light of a bare electric bulb.

burnous

It made her sad to realize that in spite of their so often having the same reactions, the same feelings, they never would reach the same conclusions, because their respective aims in life were almost diametrically opposed.

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. It was often on trips that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

effrontery

putrid

propitiatory

dream save the faceless voice that had whispered: “The soul is the weariest part of the body.”

yet he had wandered for hours in the oven-like streets and returned to eat heartily of the execrable food.

waddled

salient nose,

brilliantine