My interrogation went on. Sali was shouting at the civil servants in the room nearby. The gossip intensifies from the high speakers, the crowd stirs as it is the case before a prominent departure. The sound from the runways indicates the movement of an aircraft. Flight 435 for Paris was moving towards the end of runway number 1.

I could feel no bitterness at all. The perspective of sleeping beside Sali made me forget the nonsense of the situation.

We suddenly heard an infernal noise. The walls of the terminal vibrated like if there was a sudden earthquake. The overcomed crowd rushes everywhere. An immense ball of fire crosses the runway from one end to the other, illuminating the whole terminal with an intense light. Flight 435 abruptly broke off at the end of the runway, under an immense sheaf of fire.

After the first shock of surprise, an indescribable panic seized the visitors, the civil servants, and the guards. The crowd rushed, trampled. Glass panes fly in brightness. The militaries brandish their weapons in position of combat. My dazed guardians disappeared in disorder. They left me without any surveillance. Sali was there, imperturbable, leaning on to the door, left alone without any surveillance, she stretches out for my hands. Indifferent to what was happening, she pulls me out of the terminal, avoiding with address, the crowd and the soldiery in panic.

We went outside, Sali pulled my hand, unmoved but voluntary. Then we mounted her small Honda motorcycle parked there close by, and we lost ourselves in the African night through the disordered movements of vehicles, panic and the irrationality of the inferno that consumes the aircraft far away, very far away on the runway. She said nothing. I roll up my arms around her waist to better tie myself to her body. She pressed herself on me, and for a moment, I felt safe, my soul was in peace.

We by-passed the airport installations taking an anachronistic route; I was disturbed but conforted in the same time, being under the complete control of Sali. Sirens, disrupt the night in the distance. The waste lands and the earth paths where filled up with overexcited people, unconscious of what had happen. Sali seem to be the only one in control of herself, handling her feverish motorcycle through the obstacles that strewed the street, she was the only one who knows where she was going.

She steps on to the non-paved streets of the suburbs surrounding the airport, then on a narrow and sinuous path of "laterite", she slips through the puny groves, avoid the splits of water, the burned skeletons of automobiles, heaps of garbage, chasing away the stray dogs, she reaches the end of the path, there, at a short distance of the burning shell of flight 435 of Air Inter.

We remain there for a moment, immovable, looking at the intense fire that enlightens the night with a reddish light, the muddled movements of vehicles and of human shadows on the tarmac; this is Hell, I said to myself. Then Sali went away rashly, I saw her disappear behind a grove and I stayed there, taken aback in front of this irrational spectacle, trying to understand why I was here and not over there, as I should have been, in this fire that slowly consumes the cabin of the Airbus and all its prisoners' passengers.

In front of me, a black shadow suddenly appeared, that seems to have broken loose from the fire; it was like a bare body, that of an animal or of a dark color being and that frays at the same rhythm as the projections of the flames from the fire, as if it was part of it and got loose from it; a disturbing shadow that was moving towards me. It was Sali, her body was of a gleaming black color, slashed by red flying sparks, it appears to me in all its nudity.







She came close to me, in moderate but voluntary steps, waving her threadlike body like a venomous snake; she was there, imperial and unreal, staging the flames stirring in rhythm with her body, as if she was part of the act, a bewitched and perverse image of Hell. She approached and got bigger and she invaded me; heat surrounded me bit by bit, tortured my body as if I was myself part of the flames or that I was myself integrated with Hell. I could feel like if my clothes ignited, my body wasting away, and my flesh sizzling like wax in fusion; then the shadow of Sali, like a gluttonous and insatiable Fancy, surrounds me with her flesh, dark, bare and warm as Hell; she sprawled out over my body in a carnal embrace over-exciting my senses. She invades me as an octopus of her sticky flesh and she caresses me and kisses me and tortures me; my senses stired at the contact of that flesh, flexible like leather, sliding and engraving into my fragile flesh; she imprisons me and I imprison her with my arms and my legs and we plunge that way, one into the other, falling over and rolling on the irregular ground of the path, crushing the nettles, pinching the garbage, indifferent to the bites hurting our flesh, mutually raping and biting ourselves as if we were going to devour one an other, penetrating one into the other, copulating like over-excited wildcats and sacrificing one an other through a diabolical ritual, in an unlimited orgasm, an eternal pleasure, that last, that last still, that continue and that last still and still and never stopped since.

Marco Polo or the imaginary journey (Contes et légendes, translated from french, décembre 1999) © 1999 Jean-Pierre Lapointe
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