...

But a shot rang out, the young seal gave one look of amazement, and threw his last leap. We watched him for some seconds, beating his little fins on the water, as it reddened with his blood; then he was nothing more than a poor soft thing, rocking on the swell.

"A murmur of anger rose from the crew, quickly stifled, for the happy sportsman who had made such a lucky shot was a midshipman. Not wanting a row, I waited till I was alone with my shipmate before telling him what I thought of him; and we had an explanation then that came very near to ending in fisticuffs."

Did Loti ever read the Ancient Mariner' It is not likely that he did, for he avoided everything English; and the close resemblance of the young seal's murder to the murder of the albatross only proves how frequently nature and man repeat their mutual tragedies.

As the frigate left the icy waters and death-like skies of Cape Horn, making her way northwards in October, which is the April of the South, spring softened the air, and brought numberless birds in her track, all the birds of the Southern Seas apparently, the great albatrosses, the gulls, and the grey petrels following in a cloud and darting in wild circles round the ship.

Here should follow, speaking biographically, Loti's cruise to Tahiti, but that episode was extracted from the Diary by its author, and published as a

story, 'Le Mariage de Loti.' In 1873 we find him on the coast of Senegambia under a tropical sun, and at the most torrid hour of the day writing a letter to his sister.

"It is just one hour past noon, and the whole town of Dakar is plunged in its sweet siesta. I am the only person awake, and writing to you because the mail-boat may arrive at any moment. I am sitting on my balcony in an easychair, and having no roof opposite to interrupt my view, I can command the entire bay, which is smooth as a mirror. Imagine this scene, now grown familiar to me: in the foreground the Pétrel motionless, some sharks playing round her, and far off on the other side of the bay great plains of desert sands; not one breath in the air, but vultures pass and return noiselessly; there is a terrible heat, and a complete silence.

"All this is not without its charm, but it is all 'triste,' and the prospect of passing two whole years in the presence of these same things is hard at times. When you last wrote to me it was fair weather in Saintonge; perhaps to-day you have one of those sweet October Sundays, with a slightly paler sun, like the days that always brought back to such happy childish memories. Here, in Dakar, the leaves are turning yellow and beginning to fall, but winter is the fine season in Senegambia, and in November, when the great heats are over, we shall be making

He stayed out the two years, and survived the heats, and damps, and fevers of Senegambia, its exhausting pains, and poisonous pleasures. Those were the days before there was any understanding of the causes of malaria, when men slept on low levels, and drank what they pleased, and the mosquitoes raged among them. The wonder is not that so many died, but that some survived.

Loti, with all his sensitive organisation, was a hardy fellow, and had the sailor's power of adapting himself to surroundings and finding pleasure in trifles; he had also the sailor's love of pets and the artist's determination

a

arrange his surroundings harmoniously. The house which he shared with two friends at Dakar must have been a cheerful and very striking domicile; they became greatly attached to it. It was built of old lime-washed boards, starting asunder from heat, and admitting sky-blue lizards with orange heads, which darted everywhere and disturbed nobody. But there were also large flat spiders, which gave Loti shudders. Their sleepingroom was at the back, and looked on the garden; but the living-room had a veranda, and was carpeted with the finest white native mats. It had a curtain of native texture and vivid colours hanging before the inner doorway, gazelles' horns and the jaws of sword

the skull of a hippopotamus, and a giraffe's skin brought from Podor. What room could be more beautiful? It contained a piano too, one which came, strangely enough, from the yacht of the Emperor Napoleon III.; and Loti halfruined himself buying it. That was no matter, because it was necessary to him, as soon as he discovered that it had an exquisitely deep tone, very sweet, giving a curious distant effect. With this he beguiled his hours of home-sickness, and the strange native pets-the marabout bird, the black-eyed parrot, and the harmful unnecessary monkey-pervaded the matted floors, the veranda, and the garden, lived in perpetual enmity, and enlivened their owners. Loti describes the animals with real humour; but in human affairs he apparently saw no humour whatever, least of all in his own. If a man is born without that saving sense, he is very unlikely to develop it under a tropical sun in the overwhelming oppression of those midday heats.

He generally took his siesta in the garden, "on an old bench sheltered by two tall bay-trees, in which green humming-birds hid, and sang with tiny sweet voices through the noon-hour of exhaustion. All around, in the heat and calm, grasshoppers kept up their eternal chirping. From time to time I would hear far off a Nubian woman singing a song that was shrill and sad, that

fitted this exotic scene of sun and sand."

He often listened to the African music, and tried to reproduce it.

"I remember how one evening alone in our house I was at the piano, trying to recall a melancholy negro air in a minor key, when I heard be hind me a very light rustling, like the sound made by some smooth but fairly heavy object cautiously dragged over the mats. An instinctive movement of fear made me turn my head suddenly, and there I saw a large sand-snake just slipping away through a hole in the floor. My music had attracted him, and I succeeded in inducing him to return several times afterwards. To do this I had to keep the room absolutely quiet, and to go on a long time without stopping, playing plaintive airs on the high notes,"

When winter came, the naval officers were engaged in a tour of inspection, visiting the mouths of rivers along the coast, and interviewing native chiefs sometimes. A typical village on the Minez River is described with touches like the sweep of a paint-brush.

"Hafandi is a village of round huts, finished with pointed thatched roofs, and surmounted by curious outside ornaments, which usually serve as perches for enormous vultures. Some immense leafless trees, of abnormal structure, and out of all proportion with their surroundings, rise in naked grey outlines above the huts.

Round about the village is a plain, covered with long dry grass, and then on all sides to the very horizon stretches the equatorial forest, intensely green, with its tangle of palmtrees shaped like great ferns, thick tufted tufted trees, trailing creepers, and here and there rising above all the confusion some tall slender palms, as straight as pillars.

"We had come to do business with Babou Maguil, the chief of the neighbourhood, and we were conducted to his quarters, which consist of a kind of small fort, surrounded by a mud wall, pierced with loopholes. This personage has been warned of our arrival beforehand, and has prepared a semiofficial reception for us. We find the black crowd thick round his door already, and Babou Maguil himself comes to meet us. The fête in our honour begins with choruses sung to an accompaniment of tom-toms, and a kind of wooden clapper instrument which acquires sonority from several calabashes fixed below the sounding-board. When struck, it gives out a correct note, according to the African scale, and resounds quite pleasantly. Next appears a troop of little children three and four years old, all a pretty reddish-brown, very round and very shiny; to the sound of the tom-tom they execute a most complicated dance, with studied attitudes, and all the gravity of grown-up people.

"The reception over, we have to talk business with Babou

Maguil, and decide on the price of our purchases, which here consist of fine native mats, to be paid for in good silver money. The bargaining is lengthy, but conducted with courtesy; the women take a hand in it, and the public is all ears. At the end of half an hour the price has fallen by half, and the business is over."

Loti was a wanderer by instinct as well as by profession. He was attracted by strange countries, adventure, and hot sunshine. But even he was defeated by the suns and the swamps of French Guinea, and more particularly by its dense and dreadful forests.

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We pierce our way through these forests of Guinea by hardly perceptible trails, infested with snakes. Along these paths nothing is ever fresh, nothing is wholesome. Whether it be evening, or dark night, or daybreak, the air is always humid and suffocating; the mingled scent of all the plants is sickly, and every breath one draws is feverish. A good half of the country consists of perfectly inaccessible swamps, choked with decaying wood, and nourishing deadly miasmas in their warm sleeping depths. This country will undoubtedly remain a land of exile indefinitely, closed to all civilisation; and Europeans will never come here except as fugitives, seeking their fortune at the risk of health and life."

Though the mortal depression of the African Gold Coast was creeping over him, there was

VOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCCI.

nothing supine about Loti; he did not readily submit to it. For long he continued to ramble about the country round Dakar, even under a burning sun, with his feet sinking at every step in the sandy paths; coming back at night under transparent starry skies, the darkness full of warm scents, cicale deafening the air, and fireflies spinning through the bamboos like sparks let loose. On the quay he would find two negroes, Samba Fall and Damba Taco, waiting to take him on board in their you-you, which left a long train of phosphorescence in her wake.

He did not

return with an appetite, and neither did anybody else. Ice and soda-water were all they asked for.

In December of 1873 he had a strange experience. Having planned an expedition up the river, in a boat manned by eight black oarsmen, who rowed her as far as Pop. N'Kior, Loti left the yellow waters of the river and this place with its mysterious stimulating name to wander farther through a land of which he knew nothing. It grew late in the woods; the sun sank calmly behind soft clouds; the day reminded him of some autumn day in France, fresh and fair. He came to a place that was like a garden in some home country; the shrubs were not like tropical shrubs, and the reeds in the pond were like reeds he had known growing near his home. The illusion of being in France took possession of

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him, and he was not even surprised when he came upon a quiet country house, closely resembling his childhood's home of "la Limoise." Here he sat down to rest under a little arbour, which was actually overgrown with fading honeysuckle, and seemed a copy of the arbour he had always known at "la Limoise." Out of the quiet house came an old French gentleman, who started when he heard his name. An early friend of his own father, who belonged to the same countryside, he had been deeply in love with Loti's mother in his youth.

When she refused him he left France, and burying himself in this African solitude, he constructed a house and garden resembling as nearly as possible that old French home that his memory cherished. And into that very garden walked Loti, nearly twenty-five years later.

The "long arm of coincidence never reaches as far in the boldest fiction as it does in actual life, and the events of fiction are hardly ever as conventional or as romantic as the things that really happen. Loti stayed a night with his father's old friend. Before he left next day he gathered some of the reeds from the pond that reminded him of his home; and in the boat on his journey back to Dakar he made some sapient reflections under the light of the moon.

being so entirely different from our own. That was the age of Romance, when an unhappy love-affair could break a whole life. In our day such feelings are really scarcely comprehensible; they seem indeed just a trifle ridiculous, for we are too sceptical and too blasés for them now."

Such shocking sentiments naturally draw down vengeance upon their own presumptuous head. While at Dakar, Loti fell a victim to somebody or to something which caused him to take violent to take violent exercise, to lose his sleep, and to tear out interesting pages from his Diary. The experience, however often repeated in the ensuing years, is always treated by him as a matter of the last importance; and so indeed it was-to the Diary, which suffered constant mutilations. It is a curious question in psychology why the old man's lifelong faithfulness should have appeared to Loti a little absurd, and his own successive philanderings over half the surface of the globe as matters of desperate meaning and intense pathos ! But we cannot take accurate measure of the egoism of genius.

The same acute sensibility that enabled Loti to reproduce in words the whistling cold and fog-bound terror of the "blind Horn's hate " made him able to infect the inmost sense of his readers with the heavy malaise, the smothering hotscented oppression of an African night. It is a dubious gift. The spirit of delight is too closely allied to the capacity