42
PARTISAN REVIEW
to town. He got to his feet and looked over the edge of the precipice.
In the moonlight the bottom seemed miles away. And there was
nothing to give it scale; not a tree, not a house, not a person.... He
listened for the flute, and heard only the wind going by his ears. A
sudden violent desire to run back to the road seized him, and he
turned and looked in the direction the caouadji had taken. At the
same time he felt softly of his wallet in his bre.ast pocket. Then he
spat over the edge of the cliff. Then he made water over it, and
listened intently, like a child. This gave him the impetus to start down
the path into the abyss. Curiously enough, he was not dizzy. But
prudently he kept from peering to his right, over the edge. It was a
steady and steep downward climb. The monotony of it put him into
a frame of mind not unlike that which had been induced by the bus–
ride. He was murmuring "Hassan Ramani" again, repeatedly and in
rhythm. He stopped, furious with himself for the sinister overtones
the name now suggested to him. He decided he was exhausted from
the trip. "And the walk," he added.
He was now well down the gigantic cliff, but the moon, being
directly overhead, gave .as much light as ever. Only the wind was
left behind, above, to wander among the trees, to blow through the
dusty streets of Ai:n Tadouirt, into the hall of the Grand Hotel
Saharien, and under the door of his little room.
It occurred to
him
that he ought to ask himself why he was
doing this irrational thing, but he was intelligent enough to know
that since he was doing it, it was not so important to probe for
explanations at that moment.
Suddenly the earth was flat beneath his feet. He had reached
the bottom sooner than he had expected. He stepped ahead distrust–
fully still, as if he expected another treacherous drop. It was so hard
to know in this uniform, dim brightness. Before he knew what had
happened the dog was upon him, a heavy mass of fur trying to push
him backwards, a sharp nail rubbing down his chest, a straining of
muscles against him to get the teeth into his neck. The Professor
thought: "I refuse to die this way." The dog fell back; it looked
like an Eskimo dog.
As
it sprang again, he called out, very loud:
"Ay
!"
It fell against him, there was a confusion of sensations and a
pain somewhere. There was also the sound of voices very near to him,
and he could not understand what they were saying. Something cold
and metallic was pushed brutally against his spine as the dog still
hung for a second by his teeth from a mass of clothing and perhaps
