The Sheltering Sky

The landscape of the desert, as much as its heat, confounds Western travelers. On Port’s first solo venture beyond the colonial hotel, he encounters a host of foreign markers:

The wind, straight from the south, blew across the barren mountains that were invisible ahead of him, over the vast flat sebkha [plain] to the edges of town, raising curtains of dust that climbed to the crest of the hill and lost themselves in the air above the harbor (17-18).

The dust sweeps away intelligibility, obscuring landmarks that would allow the Westerner to get his bearings. As the Americans will also think, further on in their journey, “by day, unless the traveler is accustomed to such quantities of dust, he is supremely conscious of its presence, and is likely to magnify the discomfort it causes him” (104). Like the foreign landscape itself, the ubiquitous dust functions to make the travelers uncomfortable—again, almost as if it had malicious intent, personified agency.

These tropes are often accompanied by frequent mentions of disease and filth, with the unpleasant odors and fears of contamination inherently associated with them: Not only does the reader witness Port’s death from disease, but also encounters the ravaged man on the train with his “diseased face” (82) and the suffering infants “troubled with bursting sores” (115) in Ain Krorfa. On Port’s initial journey beyond the hotel, he encounters not only the dust but also the “stench” of “chicken feathers and decayed melon rinds” (18) while Kit experiences the “stench of coal smoke” (74) on the train. Essentially, the Other place and its people are rendered uninhabitable (too hot, too dry, too much dust), dangerous (contagion and illness), and disgusting to “rational” observers (all that filth).

Not only are Port and Kit doomed by their persistent and erroneous sense that there will always be more time—”they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent” (137)—but the colonized, foreign places where they travel exist, for the Westerners, in a state of suspended development, a kind of timelessness that defies the teleological arc of Western civilization. When Port bribes the ticket seller at the bus depot, Kit protests that they will be displacing the natives who would have to wait another week to catch the bus: Port justifies this by saying, “What’s a week to them? Time doesn’t exist for them” (183). Earlier, when Kit is trapped among the fourth-class passengers on the train, she experiences a “terror” that “[time] had stopped, that she had become a static thing suspended in a vacuum” (83). Later, after Port’s death—significantly, when she knows that she will flee into the desert—Kit thinks, “[t]hese were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her” (247). Progress and the promise of a future are not the province of the colonials in their colonized lands; they have only the past and the stasis of the unchanging desert to keep them preserved—until the Western traveler, or commander, or conqueror, comes along to inscribe their histories and psychologies onto this “timeless” land.

This state of suspension is also emphasized throughout the book by the frequent use of liminal increments of time: Dawn, twilight, midnight, and other “in-between” times are invoked to symbolize the aimlessness of the Western travelers and the mystical timelessness of the colonized spaces of the world. The reader first encounters Port as he awakes. Instead of getting up, he stays in bed as the twilight descends—he is “paralyzed” by the mysterious passage of time (4). On the train, Kit cannot read “in the indistinct mixture of fading daylight” (73), so she looks at pictures of the French cinema—before her drunken tryst with Tunner and the confusion that follows. When she is lost in the desert, she thinks that “[t]he coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day has fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned again” (280). Time does not exist in the desert, as the natives carry on with their endless caravans and unintelligible patterns, while the Westerner gets helplessly swept along.