Happy Death (Vintage International) by Albert Camus

Author:Albert Camus [Camus, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307827845
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

4

Early in the morning, the fog lights of Mersault’s car were gleaming along the coast road. Leaving Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the morning’s freshness. It was still dark. A last star dissolved slowly in the sky, and on the pale road he could hear only the motor’s contented purr and occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the clatter of milk cans, until, out of the dark, his lights flashed on the shining iron of the horseshoes. Then everything vanished in the sound of speed. He was driving faster now, and the night swiftly veered to day.

Out of the darkness still retained between the hills, the car climbed an empty road overlooking the sea, where the morning declared itself. Mersault stepped on the gas. The tiny sucking sound of the wheels grew louder on the dewy pavement. At each of the many turns, Mersault’s brakes made the tires squeal, and as the road straightened, the sound of the motor gaining speed momentarily drowned out the soft voices of the sea rising from the beaches below. Only an airplane permits man a more apparent solitude than the kind he discovers in an automobile. Utterly confident of his own presence, satisfied with the precision of his gestures, Mersault could at the same time return to himself and to what concerned him. The day lay open, now, at the end of the road. The sun rose over the sea, awakening the fields on either side of the road, still deserted a moment before, filling them with the red fluttering of birds and insects. Sometimes a farmer would cross one of these fields, and Mersault, rushing past, retained no more than the image of a figure with a sack bending over the moist, clinging soil. Again and again the car brought him to the edge of slopes overlooking the sea; they grew steeper and their outline, barely suggested in the light of dawn, grew more distinct now, suddenly revealing prospects of olive trees, pines, and whitewashed cottages. Then another turn hurled the car toward the sea, which tipped up toward Mersault like an offering glowing with salt and sleep. Then the car hissed on the pavement and turned back toward other hillsides and the unchanging sea.

A month before, Mersault had announced his departure to the House above the World. He would travel again, then settle down somewhere around Algiers. Several weeks later he was back, convinced that travel now meant an alien way of life to him: wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man. And deep inside himself he felt a dim exhaustion. He was eager to carry out his plan of buying a little house somewhere in the Chenoua, between the sea and the mountains, a few kilometers from the ruins of Tipasa. When he arrived in Algiers, he had envisioned the setting of his life. He had made a large investment in German

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