As the voyage drew to a close, however, Stephen was no
longer able to resist an attraction which he felt like a compelling
magnetism. His excuse was that he wanted to know Miss Ray's first
impressions of the place she had constantly seen in her thoughts during
ten years.
"Is it like what you expected?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, "it's like, because I have photographs. And I've read
every book I could get hold of, old and new, in French as well as
English. I always kept up my French, you know, for the same reason that
I studied Arabic. I think I could tell the names of some of the
buildings, without making mistakes. Yet it looks different, as the
living face of a person is different from a portrait in black and white.
And I never imagined such a sky. I didn't know skies could be of such a
colour. It's as if pale fire were burning behind a thin veil of blue."
It was as she said. Stephen had seen vivid skies on the Riviera, but
there the blue was more opaque, like the blue of the turquoise. Here it
was ethereal and quivering, like the violet fire that hovers over
burning ship-logs. He was glad the sky of Africa was unlike any other
sky he had known. It intensified the thrill of enchantment he had begun
to feel. It seemed to him that it might be possible for a man to forget
things in a country where even the sky was of another blue.
Sometimes, when Stephen had read in books of travel (at which he seldom
even glanced), or in novels, about "the mystery of the East," he had
smiled in a superior way.
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