The Sheltering Sky

The corporal brings the American to the lieutenant’s home—he is too indisposed to travel to the station—and Port initially will not be dissuaded from his belief that Abdelkader has stolen his passport. Of course, this is “the sort of thing that would naturally turn out to have been done by a native” (162), Port reasons. The lieutenant cajoles him, implying that passports fetch a lot of money; anyone could have been motivated to take it. He also observes that Port seems unusually self-involved, confirmed by his pronouncement that “ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive” (164). Nevertheless, the lieutenant prevails, promising an investigation to locate the passport, and Port withdraws his accusation. However, when Port apologies to the proprietor, Abdelkader is unmoved, knowing that the lieutenant’s intervention—not Port’s good faith—is credited with the apology.

Port finds Kit in her room, having emptied all her belongings from the luggage onto the bed. She says she only wants to look at her things, having not seen them for so long through so much travel. Port pours her a drink at her request and confesses that he knows that Eric Lyle is to blame for the missing passport. He expects the lieutenant to find it in Messad. Port decides to drink with Kit, and “[b]y twilight, they were pleasantly drunk” (169). They speak philosophically about life, Kit complaining that she thought she would understand more as she grew older, and Port laughing at the thought. Port accuses her of never wanting to discuss serious things, while she secretly thinks that his existential forays are nothing but “the most frivolous kind of chatter” (171). Port exclaims that he should never drink, as it makes him overwrought and weak. He accuses her of being a drinker and exclaims, “I think all you drinkers are victims of a huge mass hallucination,” if they believe alcohol helps them discover something profound (172). He gets up to peer out the window as Kit goes back to her room in a huff. “The landscape was there,” Port thinks as he looks out, “and more than ever, he felt he could not reach it” (173).

Port begins inquiring about the next destination, El Ga’a, determined to leave Bou Noura as quickly as possible. The lieutenant informs him that his passport has been found and that an alleged friend—this would be Tunner—has volunteered to bring it to Bou Noura. The thought panics Port, and he decides that he and Kit will leave that night rather than allow Tunner to catch up with them. He bribes the Arab to get them on the bus that night, displacing two locals. Kit observes that Port does not seem well, physically or mentally. She knows that Port is determined to leave to abandon Tunner, and this makes her feel guilty: “But a second later she said to herself that if this was an unpardonable act of deceit toward Tunner, how much graver was the deception she still practiced with Port in not telling him about her infidelity” (184).

As the journey gets underway, Port refuses to cover himself from the cold, and Kit, angry with his recalcitrant behavior, leaves him be. He sinks lower and lower into his seat as the bus travels onward. Finally, Kit makes him sit up and notices how chilled he is. She is worried and afraid.

Port continues to exhibit signs of illness, and Kit thinks to herself, “[h]e can’t get sick here. […] Neither of us can” (188). She makes him drink some coffee to warm him up, then later procures some food for them to eat. Port gets off the bus at a rest stop, where he experiences intense pain and nausea. A young Arab man and Kit help get him back onto the bus. The Arab speaks soothingly, in French, to Kit while Port tries to rest. When they reach El Ga’a, the Arab helps Kit get Port off the bus. He cannot make it to the hotel, so they leave him in the stable at a fondouk, a kind of traditional inn. His hand lay in a heap of camel dung which Kit cannot persuade him to move.

She and the Arab run through town, trying to find the hotel. Kit grows increasingly frantic, knowing that Port’s life is in her hands. However, the hotel proprietress will not allow them to stay: There has been an outbreak of meningitis nearby, and she fears that the strangers might be contagious. Kit runs back to Port and manages to get them a ride on a produce truck leaving for a neighboring town that night. She deliberately leaves the young Arab man behind, hiding in the bed of the truck. Her thoughts are disturbed: She knows she has been exposed to meningitis and that, whatever Port has, he is seriously ill. The truck travels throughout the cold, long night.

While on the journey, Kit considers Port’s life. When they began traveling, he had to put something as an occupation on his passport, so she urged him to claim he was a writer. Port has not worked “[s]ince the death of his father,” the implication being that he inherited a considerable fortune (206). But Port could not write, as it turned out: “As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it” (207). By this point in the trip, Port is in and out of consciousness, delirious with fever.

The two have arrived in the city of Sba, and they are under the care—more akin to imprisonment—of Captain Broussard. He does not approve of the couple, believing her to be a prostitute. They are kept in the one available bed at the local hospital, where Port drifts in and out of consciousness, and Kit is brought meals several times a day. It has been determined that Port has typhoid, and the captain has provided Kit with pills to give Port at precise intervals. She oversleeps at one point and panics: The pills are late, and Port’s fever burns. She awakes in the middle of the night to a furious wind, its “sudden arrival” the sure sign of “a new omen” (214).

The next day she goes to the captain, entreating him for some canned milk to bolster Port’s strength. The captain coldly informs her that he does not need the milk reserved only for infants and mothers; he assures Kit that typhoid is not typically deadly, with proper medication. When Kit returns to Port, he tells her that he is “very sick” and does not know “whether I’ll come back” (218). She goes down to the market, hoping to find milk and get some air, and meets Daoud Zozeph, a Jewish shopkeeper in town. They discuss the prejudice against Jews, particularly in this part of the world. He gives Kit sympathy and some milk.

When Kit returns to Port, he appears even sicker than before. Kit observes that “[h]e’s stopped being human” […]. Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue” (222). He moans and babbles about being alone, without purpose: “Kit! All these years I’ve been living for you. I didn’t know it, and now I do. I do know it! But now you’re going away” (225). He sits up, agitated, and Kit must calm him to get him to rest again.

Tunner has arrived in Bou Noura, and he discusses Port’s strange departure with Lieutenant d’Armagnac. Tunner is eager to reach Port and Kit in Sba, though the lieutenant warms to him and invites him to stay for dinner.

Meanwhile, Port raves with fever in the stifling hospital room while Kit tries to understand him and quell her growing fears. Kit refuses food, which brings Captain Broussard to the room. He demands to see their passports—his disapproval of their situation growing by the day—but Kit cannot convince the captain that they are married without Port’s passport. He is disinclined to do much to help them after that. Kit does not return to the room, and Port’s delirious cries alert the captain, who believes Kit has abandoned her charge. The captain administers a shot of morphine to quiet him and heads off searching for Kit.

Kit has gone to the rooftop to look down upon the town, trying to calm her panic. As the moon rises, she sees a vehicle in the distance and then hears the steady roar of the motor approaching. She runs down to the market to greet the truck, on some impulse, and recognizes Tunner as he disembarks. They embrace, and Kit breaks down sobbing. She is both intensely relieved to see Tunner and enormously guilt-ridden over their previous indiscretion. The two climb a tall dune at the edge of town. They sit together, talking, and Tunner asks if she remembers their liaison—only to note that this was the last time it rained. Then, he turns “paternal,” cajoling Kit to pull herself together so that she can nurse Port back to health. He doesn’t want “two patients on my hands” (145). This suddenly jolts Kit back to reality: They’ve been away from Port for hours; he could already have died, alone.

The final paragraph of the chapter returns to Port’s thoughts “through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart merge” (245).

Kit returns to find Port dead. She tells no one. Instead, she sits beside him, then paces the room, thinking of their past together, knowing they must have spoken of death: “Now she did not remember their many conversations built around the idea of death, perhaps because no idea of death has anything in common with the presence of death” (247-48). With Port’s death, she feels that she is the one who no longer exists, so bound up is her identity with his. He lives on in her thoughts, but she herself is gone.

Tunner comes to check on them in the hospital room, and Kit denies him entry, telling him that Port is “the same” (249). She promises to meet him that evening, then packs all of her things—plus the rest of Port’s money—into her valise. She returns to Douad Zozeph’s shop and asks him to put her up for the evening, saying that she has had a disagreement with her husband and wishes to be away for a night. He obliges her, and she waits until the household is asleep before sneaking out. She walks to the edge of town, toward an oasis, where she discovers a break in the wall enclosing a garden. She takes off all of her clothes and wades into the pool: “As she immersed herself completely, the thought came to her: ‘I shall never be hysterical again’” (258). After her bath, she eats some bread she has taken from the shopkeeper’s house “voraciously” (259). She leaves the garden and finds a great tamarisk tree to protect her as she sleeps.

Lieutenant d’Armagnac prepares for the return of his wife, who has just given birth to his child in Paris. He feels bad for the trouble in Sba, that the American died on Captain Broussard’s watch. Worse, though, for the captain is that “the disappearance of a white woman into the desert” creates an entirely more problematic set of issues. He suspects that Broussard was attracted to Kit and thus treated her poorly because of his Catholic propriety.

Tunner is back in Bou Noura, trying to enlist all the help he can to find Kit. He has decided he hates the desert, and all he wishes to do is get back—with Kit—to New York: “Port’s death had been the only truly unacceptable fact in his life” (264), but now “he would be practical, and the important thing now was to find Kit and get her back to New York” (265). He realizes how it would look to return without her. Reflecting on his relationship with Kit, Tunner thinks that “he was not in love with the poor girl. His overtures to her had been made out of pity (because she was a woman) and out of vanity (because he was a man)” (266). He also reminds himself that he will not be judged too harshly for Port’s death because Port had refused all immunizations before traveling.

Inevitably, the Lyles make their way to Bou Noura, which Tunner takes as further indication that Kit will not be found easily. He finds Eric particularly disgusting. Still, Tunner thinks that the longer the time that elapses between Port’s death and Kit’s and his return, the “less precise the blame that might attach to him” (274). When he returns to his room after playing chess with Abdelkader, he finds Eric there, who pretends to have wandered into the wrong room. Tunner is inclined to believe him when he notices that his luggage has been opened and his items placed on the bed. He grabs Eric and punches him, but not too hard. Eric merely looks at him with “bright eyes” and implores Tunner to hit him again (275). Tunner obliges and knocks Eric unconscious. When Eric comes to, Tunner shoves him out of the door. When Tunner awakes in the morning, the Lyles are already gone.