085-Sunrise at Sahara Brings a Sense of Grief

"Ah," I said to him, "I am a little frightened--" But he interrupted me. "Now you must work. You must return to your engine. I will be waiting for you here. Come back tomorrow evening..." But I was not reassured. I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed...

"Then it was not by chance that on the morning when I first met you-- a week ago-- you were strolling along like that, all alone, a thousand miles from any inhabited region? You were on the your back to the place where you landed?" The little prince flushed again. And I added, with some hesitancy: "Perhaps it was because of the anniversary?" The little prince flushed once more. He never answered questions-- but when one flushes does that not mean "Yes"?

"You have plans that I do not know about," I said. But he did not answer me. He said to me, instead: "You know-- my descent to the earth... Tomorrow will be its anniversary." Then, after a silence, he went on: "I came down very near here." And he flushed. And once again, without understanding why, I had a queer sense of sorrow. One question, however, occurred to me:

I had been so proud of my baobabs! "Your fox-- his ears look a little like horns; and they are too long." And he laughed again. "You are not fair, little prince," I said. "I don't know how to draw anything except boa constrictors from the outside and boa constrictors from the inside." "Oh, that will be all right," he said, "children understand." So then I made a pencil sketch of a muzzle. And as I gave it to him my heart was torn.

085-Sunrise at Sahara Brings a Sense of Grief I had drunk the water. I breathed easily. At sunrise the sand is the color of honey. And that honey color was making me happy, too. What brought me, then, this sense of grief? "You must keep your promise," said the little prince, softly, as he sat down beside me once more. "What promise?" "You know-- a muzzle for my sheep... I am responsible for this flower..." I took my rough drafts of drawings out of my pocket. The little prince looked them over, and laughed as he said: "Your baobabs-- they look a little like cabbages." "Oh!"