its arrogant heart. When you have got so far
down you have had time to discover what that is which has put you so
low. The day may be radiant, the sky just what you had hoped to find in
Africa, and the people in the market-place a lively and chromatic
jangle; but the shadow of what we call inhumanity (when we are trying
to persuade ourselves that humanity is something very different) chills
and darkens the heart.

Yet the common sky of North Africa might be the heaven of the first
morning, innocent of knowledge that night is to come. It is not a hard
blue roof; your sight is lost in the atmosphere which is azure. The sun
more than shines; his beams ring on the rocks, and glance in colours
from the hills. From a distance the flowers on a hill slope will pour
down to the sea in such a torrent of hues that you might think the arch
of the rainbow you saw there had collapsed in the sun and was now rills
and cascades. The grove of palms holding their plumes above a white
village might be delicate pencillings on the yellow sheet of desert.
The heat is a balm. The shadows are stains of indigo on the roads and
pale walls.

IV

One day we found Sfax. I went ashore at Sfax, interested in a name
quite new to me. The guide-book did not even mention it; perhaps it was
not worth while; no ruins, mummies, trams or hotels there, of course.
Maybe it was only the name of a man, or a grass, or a sort of
phosphate. Sfax! Well, anyhow, I had long wished for Africa, anywhere
in Africa, and here I was, not eager to get home again, but not
disinclined. What I had seen of it so far was a rather too frequented
highway opposite the coast of Europe--a complementary establishment.
Progress had macadamised it. Commerce and its wars had graded and
uniformed and drilled its life. Its silent people marched in ranks, as
it were, along mapped roads foredoomed, and its mills went round. Its
life was expressed for export. It was on the way to Manchester and
success. Of all the infernal uses to which a country can be put there
is none like development. Let every good savage make incantation
against it, or, if to some extent he has been developed, cross himself
against the fructification of the evil. As for us whites, we are
eternally damned, for we cannot escape the consequences of our past
cleverness. The Devil has us on a complexity of strings, and some day
will pull the whole lot tight. But Sfax! Had I escaped? Was there a
chance?

I found a city