So
I lived
my
life
alone,
without anyone
that I could really talk to,
until
I had
an
accident
with
my plane
in
the
Desert of Sahara,
six years ago.
Something was broken
in
my
engine.
And
as
I had with me neither a mechanic
nor any passengers,
I set myself
to attempt
the difficult
repairs
all alone.
It was
a
question
of
life
or
death
for me:
I had
scarcely
enough
drinking water
to last a week.
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said:
"If you please-
draw me
a
sheep!"
"What!"
"Draw me
a
sheep!"
I jumped to my feet, completely thunderstruck. I blinked my eyes hard . I looked carefully all around me. And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness. Here you may see the best portrait that, later, I was able to make of him. But my drawing is certainly very much less charming than its model.
That, however, is not my fault. The grown-ups discouraged me in my painter's career when I was six years old, and I never learned to draw anything, except boas from the outside and boas from the inside.
Now I stared at this sudden apparition with my eyes with my eyes fairly starting out of my head in astonishment. Remember, I had crashed in the desert a thousand miles from any inhabited region. And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainly among the sands, nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear. Nothing about him gave any suggestion of a child lost in the middle of the desert, a thousand miles from any human habitation.
When at last I was able to speak, I said to him:
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