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 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:
"But– what are you doing here?"
And in answer he repeated, very slowly, as if he were speaking of a matter
of great consequence:
"If you please– draw me a sheep. . . "
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it
might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of
death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then
I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history,
arithmetic, and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I
did not know how to draw. He answered me:
"That doesn’t matter. Draw me a sheep. . . "
But I had never drawn a sheep. So I drew for him one of the two pictures I
had drawn so often. It was that of the boa constrictor from the outside. And I
was astounded to hear the little fellow greet it with,
"No, no, no! I do not want an elephant inside a boa constrictor. A boa
constrictor is a very dangerous creature, and an elephant is very cumbersome.
Where I live, everything is very small. What I need is a sheep. Draw me a
sheep."
So then I made a drawing.
He looked at it carefully, then he said:
"No. This sheep is already very sickly. Make me another."
So I made another drawing.