THE CARGO SHIP 27

La, tout n'est qu'ordre et beaute.
Luxe, calme et voluptg.

One found it hard to believe at Dakar that
Baudelaire had never been to Africa, that the nearest
he had come to it was the body of Jeanne Duval, the
mulatto 'tart' from Le Theatre du Pantheon, for
Dakar was the Baudelaire of Ulnvitation au Voyage,
when it was not the Ren6 Clair of Le Million.

It was Rene Clair in its happy lyrical absurdity;
the two stately Mohammedans asleep on the gravel
path in the public gardens beside a black iron kettle;
the tiny Syrian children going to school in white
topees; the men's sewing parties on the pavements;
the old pock-marked driver who stopped his horses
and disappeared into the bushes to tell his beads;
the men laden with sacks moving rhythmically up
and down a ladder of sacks, building higher the
monkey-nut hill, like the tin toy figures sold in
Holborn at Christmas-time; in the lovely features
of the women in the market, young and old, lovely
less from sexual attractiveness than from a sharp
differentiated pictorial quality. In the restaurant, a
little drunk on iced Sauterne, one didn't trouble about
the Dakar one had heard about, the Dakar of endemic
plague and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the most un-
healthy town on the Coast. Mr. Gorer in his Africa
Dances tells how in Dakar the young negroes simply
die, not of tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever, but
apparently of inanition, of hopelessness. He stayed
too long, I suppose, and saw too much; that sudden
sense of happiness which came to one in Dakar
doesn't last, which came to one in Le Million, a