영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 알라의 정원
로버트 히첸스의 《알라의 정원》은 1904년에 출판된 소설이다. 독실한 영국 가톨릭 신자인 도미니 엔필든은 프랑스령 알제리에서 마음의 평화를 찾아 떠나고, 사막의 오아시스 마을 베니-모라에서 수수께끼 같고 번민에 가득 찬 남자 보리스 안드로프스키를 만난다. 사하라의 거칠고 장엄한 아름다움을 배경으로 두 사람의 관계가 깊어질수록, 보리스는 자신의 과거에 숨겨진 어두운 비밀과 씨름한다. 그 비밀은 두 사람의 미래를 송두리째 위협할 수 있는 것이었다. 사막의 남쪽을 향한 그들의 여정은 마침내 구원과 진실을 향한 순례가 된다.
Classics Read in English _ The Garden of Allah by Robert Hichens
There are places in the world that do not merely surround you — they enter you.
The Sahara is one of them. Robert Hichens knew this, and it is into this pitiless, luminous wilderness that he sends Domini Enfilden — a woman of deep Catholic faith, worn thin by the noise and sorrow of the life she has left behind in England. She arrives in the Algerian desert town of Beni-Mora not as a tourist, but as a pilgrim, though she could not yet name what it is she is seeking.
She finds Boris Androvsky instead.
He is a man carved from contradiction — magnetic and tormented, tender and evasive, as though some part of him is perpetually braced against a blow that only he can see coming. Against the ancient silence of the dunes, where the sky feels closer to God and secrets feel heavier than anywhere else on earth, their love grows with the fierce inevitability of something long destined.
But Boris carries a shadow that the desert sun cannot burn away. A secret buried deep in his past coils beneath every tender moment they share, patient and waiting, threatening to unmake everything they are building together.
The Garden of Allah is at its heart a novel about the hunger for grace — the kind that can only be earned through honesty, and only survived through love. Hichens renders the Sahara not merely as a backdrop but as a living presence, vast and indifferent and strangely merciful, bearing silent witness to two souls navigating the treacherous distance between confession and redemption.
Among the contents
The fatigue caused by a rough sea journey, and, perhaps, the consciousness that she would have to be dressed before dawn to catch the train for Beni-Mora, prevented Domini Enfilden from sleeping. There was deep silence in the Hotel de la Mer at Robertville. The French officers who took their pension there had long since ascended the hill of Addouna to the barracks. The cafés had closed their doors to the drinkers and domino players. The lounging Arab boys had deserted the sandy Place de la Marine. In their small and dusky bazaars the Israelites had reckoned up the takings of the day, and curled themselves up in gaudy quilts on their low divans to rest. Only two or three gendarmes were still about, and a few French and Spaniards at the Port, where, moored against the wharf, lay the steamer Le Général Bertrand, in which Domini had arrived that evening from Marseilles.
In the hotel the fair and plump Italian waiter, who had drifted to North Africa from Pisa, had swept up the crumbs from the two long tables in the salle-à-manger, smoked a thin, dark cigar over a copy of the Dépêche Algérienne, put the paper down, scratched his blonde head, on which the hair stood up in bristles, stared for a while at nothing in the firm manner of weary men who are at the same time thoughtless and depressed, and thrown himself on his narrow bed in the dusty corner of the little room on the stairs near the front door.
