Chapter II
So I lived all alone, without anyone I could really talk to, until I had to make a crash landing in the Sahara Dert six years ago. Something in my plane''s engine had broken, and since I had her a meior pasngers in the plah me, I reparing to uake the difficult repair job by mylf. For me it was a matter of life or death: I had only enough drinking water fht days.
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand a thousand miles from any inhabited try. I was more isolated than a man shipwrecked on a raft in the middle of the o. So you imagine my surpri when I was awake daybreak by a funny little voice saying, "Plea ... draw me a sheep ..."
"What?"
"Draw me a sheep ..."
I leaped up as if I had been struck by lightning. I rubbed my eyes hard. I stared. And I saw araordinary little fellow staring back at me very riously. Here is the best portrait I mao make of him, later on. But of y drawing is much less attractive than my model. This is not my fault. My career as a painter was disced at the age of six by the grown-ups, and I had never learo draw anything except boa strictors, outside and inside.
So I stared wide-eyed at this apparition. Don''t fet that I was a thousand miles from any inhabited territory. Yet this little fellow emed to be her lost nor dying of exhaustion, hunger, or thirst; nor did he em scared to death. There was nothing in his appearahat suggested a child lost in the middle of the dert a thousand miles from any inhabited territory. When I finally mao speak, I asked him, "But ... what are you doing here?"
And then he repeated, very slowly and very riously, "plea ... draw me a sheep ..."
In the face of an over p mystery, you don''t dare disobey. Absurd as it emed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket. But then I remembered that I had mostly studied geography, history, arithmetid grammar, and I told the little fellow (rather crossly) that I didn''t know how to draw.
He replied, "That doesn''t matter. Draw me a sheep."
Since I had never drawn a sheep, I made him one of the only two drawings I knew how to make-the one of the boa strictor from outside. And I was astouo hear the little fellow answer:
"No! No! I don''t want an elephant inside a boa strictor. A boa strictor is very dangerous, and an elephant would get in the way. Where I live, everything is very small. I need a sheep. Draw me a sheep."
So then I made a drawing.
He looked at it carefully, and then said, "No. This one is already quite sick. Make another."