For five days, the rain had been falling on Algiers. "From the heights of an apparently inexhaustible sky, unending sheets of rain, so thick they were viscous, swooped down on the gulf. Soft and grey like a great sponge, the sea heaved in the shapeless bay. But the surface of the water seemed almost motionless beneath the steady rain.
"At long intervals, however, a broad and imperceptible movement raised a murky cloud of steam from off the sea and brought it into harbour, beneath a circle of soaking boulevards. The town itself, all its white walls running with damp, gave off another cloud of steam which moved out to meet the first.
"Wherever you turned when this happened, you seemed to be breathing water, and you could drink the very air," writes Albert Camus in 1953, in Return to Tipasa, collected in Albert Camus: Selected Essays and Notebooks, edited and translated by Philip Thody (Peregrine, 1970). The essay is a reflection on exile, a war memory and a meteorological mood piece on the immense melancholy of the skies.
The rain, mercifully, does stop. "A liquid morning rose, dazzling over the pure sea. From the sky, fresh as a rose, washed and rewashed by the waters, reduced by each successive laundering to its most delicate and clearest texture, there fell a quivering light which gave each house, each tree a palpable shape and a magic newness. The earth, on the morning the world was born, must have arisen in such a light."