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journey took a month. He died in Agadir on November 30, 1930.
    Actual cause of death: dysentery.
    Real cause of death: romanticism.

To Laghouat
39
    ‘The more light the desert receives, the darker it seems to become,’ writes Eugène Fromentin.
    Desert romanticism exists in that kind of paradox. Otherwise one must ask what a romantic is doing in the desert at all. The desert has no leafy groves, fragrant meadows, deep-soughing forests, or anything else which usually evokes in the romantic the right emotions. Desert romanticism already appears incomprehensible at a distance. Up close, it becomes absurd. What is romantic about an endless gravel pit?
    Eugène Fromentin can tell you what. He wrote the classic desert book
A Summer in the Sahara
(1857). He is the first of a long line of writers and artists to experience the desert with an aesthetic eye.
    Fromentin loves the desert because it has no appeal, because it is never lovely. He loves the expansiveness of its lines, the emptiness of its space, the barrenness of its ground. At last a sea which does not swell, but consists of a firm, immovable body. At last a silence which is never broken in a desolate country where no one comes and no one goes.
    Eugène Fromentin,
Arab Horseman
. (
Musée des Beaux-Arts de La Rochelle
)

    Eugène Fromentin,
Interior of Arab tailor’s workshop
. (
Private collection, descendants of Eugène Fromentin
)
    Strangely, that same silence seems so threatening in the town, lying there dark and mute under the sun.
    The people appear to have lost their power of speech. They surround him with an immeasurable gravity, as mute and scorched as the landscape they inhabit.
    Why this silence? Is it the sun? The heat makes the air vibrate with a faint but entirely audible note. The ground itself seems to gasp. Day and night change places. The midday sun annihilates and kills, the midnight darkness revives and gives life.
    Fromentin sets off on nightly wanderings in town. But the inhabitants are just as hostile in the dark hours. They do not greet him. They pretend not to see him.
    So that is what the Arab is – a man unwilling to show you his house, unwilling to say his name or say what he is doing or tell you where he is going. ‘All curiosity is unwelcome to him.’
    It must be the sun which has made the Arab like that. Fromentin feels himself being influenced. The sun persecutes him right into the night. ‘I dream light,’ he complains.
    He stands all day out in the desert, painting, bathing in the sun. In the evening he is feverish from all the light his body has absorbed. Even when he closes his eyes he sees sparks, flames and circles of light in the darkness. ‘I have no night, so to speak.’
    People of the desert have lived under that sun since they were children. The terrible desert sun has marked them with its lack of emotion ‘which has fallen from the sky onto objects and from objects has transferred to their faces’.
    Hence the silence.
40
    I’ve come from Algiers. I have rented a small Renault 4, buckled at all four corners and with the driver’s seat sagging so much that it hits the floor. They did not want to let any other car go out into the desert. ‘A single sandstorm takes off the paintwork in a few hours,’ they said. So I put a couple of books and a rolled-up towel behind me and steered the little wreck out into the traffic of Algiers.
    Algiers is a climbing town, all the streets on their way upwards or downwards, the traffic heavy and eternally at a standstill, until it suddenly hurtles forward with the roar of atiger. I have seldom come across such a constant need to demonstrate the potency of your automobile and your driver’s daring as I have here.
    In a R4, there is nothing to do but calmly allow yourself to be passed on both sides, often so closely that your crumpled shirt gets a pressing into the bargain. So I cope with the latest passer’s stinking exhaust fumes, perhaps muttering something about the fact that he is