Airman's Odyssey by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Page A

that silence I heard something hiss faintly under the floor,
rustle under the table, and then stop. I raised a pair of puzzled eyes. Thereupon, satisfied with her examination but applying her last touchstone, as she bit with savage young teeth into her bread the younger daughter explained to me with a candor by which she hoped to slaughter the barbarian (if that was what I was):
    â€œIt’s the snakes.”
    And content, she said no more, as if that explanation should have sufficed for anyone in whom there remained a last glimmer of intelligence. Her sister sent a lightning glance to spy out my immediate reflex, and both bent with the gentlest and most ingenuous faces in the world over their plates.
    â€œAh! Snakes, are they?”
    Naturally the words escaped from me against my will. This that had been gliding between my legs, had been brushing my calves, was snakes!
    Fortunately for me, I smiled. Effortlessly. They would have known if it had been otherwise. I smiled because my heart was light, because each moment this house was more and more to my liking. And also because I wanted to know more about the snakes. The elder daughter came to my rescue.
    â€œThey nest in a hole under the table.”
    And her sister added: “They go back into their nest at about ten o’clock. During the day they hunt.”
    Now it was my turn to look at them out of the corner of the eye. What shrewdness! what silent laughter behind those candid faces! And what sovereignty they exercised, these princesses guarded by snakes! Princesses for whom there existed no scorpion, no wasp, no serpent, but only little souls of animals!
    ***
    As I write, I dream. All this is very far away. What has become of these two fairy princesses? Girls so fine-grained, so upright, have certainly attracted husbands. Have they changed, I wonder? What do they do in their new houses? Do they feel differently now about the jungle growth and the snakes? They had been fused with something universal, and then the day had come when the woman had awakened in the maiden, when there had surged in her a longing to find someone who deserved a “Ninety-five.” The dream of a ninety-five is a weight on the heart.
    And then an imbecile had come along. For the first time those sharp eyes were mistaken and they dressed him in gay colors. If the imbecile recited verse he was thought a poet. Surely he must understand the holes in the floor, must love the mongoose! The trust one put in him, the swaying of the snakes between his legs under the table—surely this must flatter him! And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who loved only trim lawns. And the imbecile carried away the princess into slavery.

VII. Men of the Desert
    These, then, were some of the treasures that passed us by when for weeks and months and years we, pilots of the Sahara line, were prisoners of the sands, navigating from one stockade to the next with never an excursion outside the zone of silence. Oases like these did not prosper in the desert; these memories it dismissed as belonging to the domain of legend. No doubt there did gleam in distant places scattered round the world-places to which we should return once our work was done—there did gleam lighted windows. No doubt somewhere there did sit young girls among their white lemurs or their books, patiently compounding souls as rich in delight as secret gardens. No doubt there did exist such creatures waxing in beauty. But solitude cultivates a strange mood.
    I know that mood. Three years of the desert taught it to me. Something in one’s heart takes fright, not at the
thought of growing old, not at feeling one’s youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is