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During the night the
only noises are the dogs' barking, the donkeys braying, the recall of
camels. The dawn gives you a sleeping village in front of a beach extending
for kilometres to rise then in a gulf over the sea and becoming cliff,
along with the desert all the time. Sand, silence, loneliness. Saint-Exupery
was terrorized by all that, before being conquered.
Every eight days, the
airplanes of the airline from Toulose to Dakar stop off at Cap Juby.
Waiting for this appointment, every morning Saint-Exupery takes off
for a training flight. An airplane holds in average five travels, then
it breaks down, the statistics about accidents show a value of 1 out
of three.
If the human company
lacks, you cannot complain the animals' one. There's a monkey, Kiko,
the cat Paf, a jackal kept out of the door because it smells too bad,
chameleons, desert foxes, and gazelles. Antoine grows fond of them and
tries to tame them. The fox of Cap Juby will become the one, big-eared
of the Little Prince: "What does tame means?" "A very delicate matter.
It means rising binds...". "Rising binds?". "Sure- said the fox - You,
till now, are nothing but a boy equal to a then hundred boys... But
if you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique in the world,
and I will be the unique in the world ".
The gazelle that grazes
in his hands, will dictate him that memorable page of the Earth of the
men.
In a year, "the most
remote hole all over Africa" will turn for him in the "lost paradise
" from which he will condemned to leave. He will never be able to be
so happy again as he was then. Flying over the desert, landing there
for need, and living there sometimes as a prisoner, he is conquered
by its vertiginous spell. 'Citadel', the unfinished work of over 600
pages going with him till the day of his death, would not be possible
without Cap Juby. The Sir of the Sands could have been its real title,
and it is not a chance that its first lines say: "I was a Berber sir
and I was going back home".
Meditation about the
grandeur of the civil and military servitude, about the meaning to give
his life, about the fraternity that can come only from a purpose outside
us, and lies on an incessant wondering about the good and the bad, about
individual and its finiteness, about the mystery of living and the illusions
of faith.
"Wind, sand and stars.
The hard Trappist rules. But over that bad illuminated tablecloth, six
or seven men that did not own other than their memories, shared invisible
riches ".
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