The Sheltering Sky

“Their faces are masks. They all look a thousand years old. What little energy they have is only the blind, mass desire to live, since no one of them eats enough to give him his own personal force. But what do they think of me? Probably nothing.”

Port contemplates the “natives” he encounters in North Africa with a set of stereotypes: They are ageless and inscrutable. This passage also dehumanizes the native by taking away individuality—they are all the same—and by reducing their aspirations to the mere animal instinct of self-preservation. They think of nothing, not even the central figure of the Western interloper, but the will to live.

“The voices went on as before, an uninterrupted flow of expressionless sounds.”

Again, this view of the native robs them of independent or coherent thought. They are not unique individuals but rather all the same. Only the Westerner can impart meaning to the native’s tongue.

“One reason she had such a strong dislike of hearing dreams recounted was that the telling of them brought straightaway her attention the struggle that raged in her—the war between reason and atavism.”

Kit’s character is revealed in this dichotomy: She sees herself as both reasonable and illogical, depending on the moment. On the one hand, she is intelligent and insightful. On the other hand, she is consumed with irrational fears, parsing events for signs and omens of what is to come.

“She was about to say: ‘Can’t you see that I didn’t want Tunner to know you hadn’t come back last night? Can’t you see he’d be interested to know that? Can’t you see that it would give him just the wedge he’s looking for.’”

Kit is more insightful than Port at moments. She can clearly see that Tunner is interested in an affair with her, driving a “wedge” between herself and her husband. Port, however, is too concerned with his internal thoughts and struggles that he fails to recognize Tunner’s motives.

“Doubtless the principal reason why he had been so eager to accompany Port and Kit on this trip was that with them as with no one else he felt a definite resistance to his unceasing attempts at moral domination, at which he was forced, when with them, to work much harder; thus unconsciously he was giving his personality the exercise it required.”

This gives the reader insight into Tunner’s character: He is accustomed to a dominant position, and what he sees as his unceasing good cheer gives him no advantage with Port and Kit. Indeed, Tunner does not possess the insightfulness of Kit or the discerning (if brooding) perspective of Port. He reacts to their cues, for the most part.

“She stood still an instant taking in the sight; for the first time she felt she was in a strange land. Someone was pushing her from behind, obliging her to go into the car.”

Kit is compelled into the fourth-class car on the train to Ain Krorfa, in which only “native Berbers” travel. Suddenly, she is forced to acknowledge that her presence here—in North Africa in general—marks her as a stranger, as someone out of place. In this passage, she also notes that the “Moslems” on the train probably disapprove of her use of alcohol and that the men do not even notice her. She is dislocated, a Westerner who does not belong.

“If I watch the end of a day—any day—I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything.”

Port contemplates finality and, by extension, death. This foreshadows his fate later in the book. The scene takes place at sunset, one of the liminal increments of time frequently invoked throughout the book, emphasizing the lack of purpose for which the Westerners (particularly Port) yearn. Each day and season ends without discovery.

“But now, here in this distant and unconnected part of the world, the longing for closer ties with her was proving stronger than the fear. To forge such a bond required they be alone together.”

Port determines to leave Tunner behind so that he can reconnect with Kit. Their potential rediscovery of each other takes place against the backdrop of the North African setting. This space exists to serve the needs of the Western traveler rather than as a vivid and realized landscape of its own.

“And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.”

Again, the landscape serves as a backdrop for the Westerner’s existential search for meaning and purpose. It also reveals the aimlessness with which Port and the other characters travel through both the land and time itself. It is another foreshadowing of Port’s death.

“The lieutenant was intelligent enough to insist on allowing himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population. His overt attitude toward the people of Bou Noura was that they were an accessible part of a great, mysterious tribe from whom the French could learn a great deal if they only would take the trouble.”

Lieutenant d’Armagnac further expresses stereotypes about the “inscrutable natives.” Not only are they unintelligible—at least to the Western interloper—but they also possess “mysterious” wisdom or “tribal” knowledge that would be of use to the colonial occupiers should they decide to mine it. However, this also reveals that certain colonial administrators like the lieutenant find value in respecting the local population rather than merely dismissing it.

“The landscape was there, and more than ever he felt he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him. He would have said that as he looked at them, the rocks and the sky ceased being themselves, that in the act of passing into his consciousness, they became impure.”

The foreign landscape is always out of reach, yet it contains the mystical ability to “absolve” Port of whatever he has done wrong. He personifies the rocks and the sky, endowing them with the notion of purity that is sullied by his presence. This connects to the myth of the “noble savage,” wherein the “uncivilized” natives of foreign lands are pure in their innocence, until subjected to the corrupting influences of civilization.

“The lieutenant looked pleased; one by one the inevitable anecdotes of the colonist came out, all having to do with the juxtaposition, sometimes tragic, but usually ludicrous, of the two incongruous and incompatible cultures.”

The clash of cultures is apparent throughout the book. Here, Port asks Lieutenant d’Armagnac about his position in the colony and his life and work there. From the colonist’s perspective, who possesses the power in this situation, the conversation can be reduced to “anecdotes.” It also highlights the idea that the colonist does not belong, that he is an outsider in this foreign—but conquered—land.

“Outside in the dust was the disorder of Africa, but for the first time without any visible sign of European influence, so that the scene had a purity which had been lacking in the other towns, an unexpected quality of being complete which dissipated the feeling of chaos.”

This represents an essentializing narrative of Africa, which suggests that, beneath the European influence, there is something true and pure that is elusive and mysterious—a common trope in colonial writing. It also suggests that Africa’s true nature engenders “disorder” and “chaos”; the Europeans’ role is to impose order, thus justifying the colonial control that proliferates throughout the continent.

“How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: ‘Your life is so simple.’ ‘Your life seems always to go in a straight line.’ Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain.”

Again, Port contemplates the purposelessness of his life: His wealth and privilege provide no obstacle against which Port can form resilience or shape his identity. He struggles with the fact that he is privileged; indeed, one can read his desire to go deeper and deeper into the Sahara—away from the comforts of civilization—as an explicit desire to create challenges from which he can develop a sense of meaning, a sense of self.

“Words were much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them.”

Illness renders Port unintelligible—like the natives. Ultimately, Port’s journey can be read as an attempt to find meaning—and purity, as he mentions concerning the sky and the rocks—in the Sahara, with the landscape, with the “noble savages.” It also suggests that his earlier forays to local prostitutes were attempts to merge with the mysterious knowledge and unsullied purity of the foreign and unknowable—albeit in violent and coercive ways.

“Whichever way she looked, the night’s landscape suggested only one thing to her: negation of movement, suspension of continuity. But as she stood there, momentarily a part of the void she had created, little by little a doubt slipped into her mind, the sensation came to her, first faint, then sure, that some part of this landscape was moving even as she looked at it. She glanced up and grimaced. The whole, monstrous star-filled sky was turning sideways before her eyes. It looked still as death, yet it moved.”

As Port is dying in the hospital, Kit climbs the roof to see around her. Instead of a “sheltering sky,” the sky has turned against her, signifying death. The landscape and sky are personified, moving of their own volition, seemingly with ill intent. Kit’s tendency to see omens returns in this moment of extremity.

“These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her.”

After Port’s death, caused in part by her neglect, Kit must come to terms with how to act, with who she is (or isn’t). His death allows her to disappear into the desert, where timelessness is a “natural” state. Not only is the desert a “strange land,” but she will also allow strangers to take her to even more alienating places.

“Softly she laid her cheek on the pillow and stroked his hair. No tears flowed; it was a silent leave-taking. A strangely intense buzzing in front of her made her open her eyes. She watched fascinated while two flies made their brief, frantic love on his lower lip.”

Kit reveals little emotion after the death of Port. She begins her slow disintegration, which starts with the symbolic baptism in the pool in the gardens at the edge of town—she will be reborn as someone new—and ends with her complete abnegation of self during her journey with Belqassim. The flies remind the reader that out of death comes new life, like Kit being reborn.

“Assuredly he was not in love with the poor girl. His overtures to her had been made out of pity (because she was a woman) and out of vanity (because he was a man), and the two feelings together had awakened the acquisitive desire of the trophy collector, nothing more.”

Tunner’s actions on the train, intoxicating and seducing Kit, constitute little other than an assuagement of vanity to him. Yet they set in motion the tragic turn of events that will lead to Port’s death and Kit’s disappearance—and violation. Tunner’s return at the conclusion of the book to collect Kit represents the ascendency of an amoral vision.

“And there were the sky, the sun, the sand, the slow monotonous motion of the mehari’s pace. Even if the moment came, she reflected at last, when she no longer could reply, the unanswered question would still be there before her, and she would know that she lived. The idea comforted her.”

Kit finds comfort in the landscape and the caravan, even though it is at the expense of her safety and well-being. She contemplates whether she is already dead but then observes the natural phenomena around her and knows that she is not. She is passive with the traveling men, being “content to […] see the soft unvaried landscape going by” (282). She is dissolving into the desert, disappearing into the landscape.

“The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she felt, would allow her to catch up with time.”

Again, the “sheltering sky” has turned against Kit, separating itself from her, just as she dissociates from herself. Her captivity in Belqassim’s compound separates not only from other people but also from the “power” of the sky, which, the reader presumes, might have sheltered her had she been able to access it. She is also enmeshed in the timelessness that is the province of the deep desert.

“Now that she had betrayed herself, established contact with the other side, every minute counted. They would spare no effort in seeking her out, they would pry open the wall she had built and force her to look at what she had buried there.”

When Kit escapes the compound and returns to the market, she begins to come back to herself. She realizes that people were most likely looking for her. She has metaphorically walled off her previous existence and the experience of Port’s death (and, one must presume, her treatment at the hands of Belqassim and others on her journey). She believes confronting these issues “would destroy her” (320).

“She did not reply because she did not believe in the trip. She intended to stay in the room lying next to Amar.”

Kit has undergone a series of traumatic events. Even when she has been delivered to the nuns who will turn her over to the American consul for transport home, she refuses to state her name or accept the reality of her situation. The church, usually a symbol of sanctuary, represents for Kit a return to herself and the truth that she feels she cannot face.