whole life in your hands, fear in your bowels, looking the fool.
What else matters: waves of blood come throbbing to my temples and I feel I could smash everything around me.
But men die in spite of themselves, in spite of their surroundings. They are told: “When you get well …,” and they die. I want none of that. For if there are days when nature lies, there are others when she tells the truth. Djemila is telling the truth tonight, and with what sad, insistent beauty! As for me, here in the presence of this world, I have no wish to lie or to be lied to. I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror. It is to the extent I cut myself off from the world that I fear death most, to the degree I attach myself to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky.
Creating conscious deaths is to diminish the distance that separates us from the world and to accept a consummation without joy, alert to rapturous images of a world forever lost. And the melancholy song of the Djemila hills plunges this bitter lesson deeper in my soul.
Toward evening, we were climbing the slopes leading to the village and, retracing our steps, listened to explanations: “Here is the pagan town; this area outside the field is where the Christians lived. Later on …” Yes, it is true. Men and societies have succeeded one another in this place; conquerors have marked this country with their noncommissioned officer’s civilization. They had a vulgar and ridiculous idea of greatness, measuring the grandeur of their empire by the surface it covered.
The miracle is that the ruin of their civilization is the very negation of their ideal. For this skeleton town, seen from high above as evening closes in and white flights of pigeons circle round the triumphal arch, engraved no signs of conquest or ambition on the sky. The world always conquers history in the end.
The great shout of stone that Djemila hurls between the mountains, the sky, and the silence—well do I know its poetry: lucidity, indifference, the true signs of beauty or despair. The heart tightens at the grandeur we’ve already left behind. Djemila remains with its sad watery sky, the song of a bird from the other side of the plateau, the sudden, quick scurrying of goats along the mountainside, and, in the calm, resonant dusk, the living face of a horned god on the pediment of an altar.
1 Camus went to Djémila in the spring of 1936, in a small tourist plane chartered by some of his
friends. In the Carnets for 1936, there are references to this visit, but the actual essay does not seem to have been written until the following year. —P.T.
The end
