Podor is an important French post on the southern bank of the Senegal, and is one of the hottest places in the world.
It is a strong fortress, fissured by the heat of thesun. A street, tolerably shady, runs alongside the river; it consists of a few houses that are old already and sombre of aspect. You may see there some French farmers of revenue, yellow with fever and anæmia; Moorish or negro pedlars squatting on the sand; all the costumes and amulets known to Africa; sacks of ground nuts, bales of ostrich feathers, and elsewhere ivory and gold dust.
Behind this semi-European street lies a large negro town built of thatch. The town is divided into sections like honeycomb, by wide straight streets. Each of its quarters is bounded by thick wooden palisades, and fortified like a citadel.
In the evening Jean wandered about the town, with his friend Nyaor for companion. The mournful songs that floated to his ears from behind those walls, those strange voices, that unfamiliar aspect of things, that hot wind, ceasing neither day nor night, inspired him with a kind of vague terror, an inexplicable anguish, compounded of home sickness and loneliness and hopelessness all in one.
Never, not even in the distant outposts of Diakhallémé had he felt so completely alone, so utterly forsaken.
Podor was surrounded by fields of millet; a few stunted trees grew there, some brushwood, some scanty grass.
On the Moorish bank opposite lay absolute desert. Yet at the entrance to a road, of which scarcely the beginnings existed, and which soon lost its identity in the sands to the north, stood a signpost with this prophetic inscription: “To Algiers.”
It was five in the morning; the red lustreless sun was rising over the land of the Douaïch. Jean returned to the Falémé, which was preparing to resume its voyage. The negro women who were travelling by the Falémé were already lying on the deck, rolled in their variegatedpagnes, packed together so tightly that nothing could be distinguished on the ground but a confused heap of drapery, gilded by the morning light, with here and there a black, heavily braceletted arm waving in the air.
Jean, who was making his way between them, suddenly felt himself seized by two supple arms that wound themselves like two serpents around his legs.
The woman was hiding her head and kissing his feet.
“Tjean! Tjean!” ... said a queer little voice, well known to him. “I have followed you for fear you should gain Paradise (be killed) in the war. Tjean, won’t you look at your son?”
And the two black arms lifted up a bronzed child and held him towards the spahi.
“My son? my son?” repeated Jean in his brusque soldier’s way, yet in a voice that trembled nevertheless, “my son? What nonsense are you talking, Fatou?”
“But it’s true all the same,” he added, strangely moved, bending down to look at the child, “It’s true all the same; he is nearly white.”
The child had none of his mother’s blood in his veins; he was Jean’s son entirely. He was bronzed, but essentially white like the spahi; he had the same deep eyes, the same beauty. He stretched out his hands and looked about him, knitting his little brows with an expression of precocious seriousness, as if wondering what fate had in store for him, and how, his Cevennes blood came to be mingled with that of this impure black race.
Jean felt himself vanquished by some strange inner force, a troubling and mysterious emotion; he bent down and kissed his son gently with silent tenderness. Sentiments hitherto unknown penetrated to the very depths of his soul.
The voice of Fatou-gaye, moreover, had awakened in his heart a host of sleeping echoes. The fever of the senses, the habit of possession had linked them together with those strong and enduring bonds which separation can scarcely destroy.
And then Fatou, at least, was faithful to him in her own way, and besides he was so abjectly forlorn, poor fellow....
So he let her hang an African amulet round his neck, and then shared his day’s ration with her.
The ship continued her voyage. The river flowed in a more southernly direction, and the aspect of the country began to change.
Shrubs now grew on both banks, slim gum trees, mimosas, tamarisks with delicate foliage, grass and green sward. There were no signs of tropical flora; one might have fancied it the less luxurious vegetation of northern latitudes.
Apart from this excessive heat and silence there was nothing now to suggest that it was the heart of Africa—one might have imagined oneself on some peaceful European stream.
However, from time to time some idyll of negro character could be witnessed. In groves that might have served as a setting for a Watteau pastoral, the eye would light upon an amorous negro pair, decked with grigris and bead necklaces, pasturing lean zebus or herds of goats.
Further on were other herds that no one shepherded, herds of grey crocodiles, hundreds of them asleep in the sun, submerged belly-deep in the warm waters.
And Fatou-gaye would smile. Her eyes would light up with a strange joy, for she recognised the approach of Galam, her native land.
None the less there was one thing that kept her uneasy. When she passed great, grass-grown marshes, wide, gloomy pools, bordered with mangroves, she would shut her eyes for fear of seeing the black muzzle of a hippopotamus (n’gabou) emerging from the stagnant waters. For her and hers, such an apparition would have been an omen of death.
It would be impossible to describe the ruses, the importunity, the ingenuity she had brought to bearin order to secure a passage on this ship on which she knew Jean had embarked.
Where had she taken refuge when she left the house of the griot? In what lair had she hidden herself to bring the spahi’s child into the world?
Now, at any rate, she was happy. She was on her way back to Galam, and Jean was with her; her dream had come true.
Dialdé was situated at the confluence of the Senegal and a nameless stream, a tributary which flowed in from the south.
The post consisted of an unimportant negro village and a small protecting blockhouse of French construction, resembling the isolated forts of Upper Algeria.
It was the nearest point to the country of Boubakar-Ségou, and here in the midst of tribes that were still friendly, the French forces were to effect a junction, and to camp with the allied army of the Bambaras.
The flat country surrounding the village had the same monotony and aridity that characterised the banks of the lower Senegal.
None the less clumps of trees, or forests even, were already to be seen, indicating that this was the threshold of the land of Galam, the wooded regions of the interior.
It is the first reconnaissance made in the tract of country to the east of the encampment of Dialdé, towards Djidiam, and it is carried out by Jean, Sergeant Muller, and tall Nyaor.
According to the report of timid old women of the friendly tribe, fresh tracks of a large body of foot soldiers and mounted men, who could be no other than the army of the great black chief, had been seen on the sand.
For two hours the three mounted spahis patrolled the plain in all directions, but discovered no human footprint, nor any trace of the passage of an army.
On the other hand, the ground was covered with the spoor of all the fauna of Africa—from the great round pit made by the heavy foot of the hippopotamus to the dainty little triangular hoofprint of the light-stepping gazelle. The sand, hardened by the last showers of the winter season, preserved faithfully all the impressions made upon it by the denizens of the wild. The paws of monkeys, the great straggling stride of giraffes, the tracks of lizards and serpents, the pads of tigers and lions were visible. One might have traced the stealthy comings and goings of jackals, the prodigious leaps of hunted deer. There were suggestions of all the terrible vitality which darkness unchains in these deserts—deserts that lie so silent under the burning eye of the sun. One could form a picture of the saturnalia of wild life bursting forth under cover of darkness.
All the wild fowl lurking in the brushwood roseup, startled by the three spahis’ horses. It was miraculous shooting country. Red partridges, guinea fowl, blue jays, pink jays, sheeny blackbirds, and huge bustards flew across the very muzzles of their rifles. But the spahis let them all go, still continuing their vain search for human tracks.
It was nearly evening, and dense vapours were gathering on the horizon. The sky had that heavy, torpid aspect, such as the imagination pictures at the setting of antediluvian suns—at the period when the atmosphere, more torrid, more heavily charged with vital essences, was maturing on primitive earth the monstrous germs of the mammoth and the pleiosaurus.
The sun sank slowly down among the strange veils; it grew lustreless, livid, rayless; distorted and disproportionately magnified; and then at last its light was quenched.
Nyaor, who until that moment had followed Muller and Jean with his customary insouciance, remarked that it would be imprudent to pursue the reconnaissance further, and that the twotoubabs, his friends, would be unnecessarily rash if they persisted.
Actually there was a possibility of every kind of surprise attack, and danger might be lurking all around them. Moreover, there were everywhere fresh spoor of lions; the horses began to stop dead and to sniff at the five claw marks so clearly defined on the level sand, and to tremble with terror....
After consultation, Jean and Sergeant Muller decided to turn, and soon the three horses were racing like the wind in the direction of the blockhouse, thewhite burnooses of their riders floating behind them. In the distance, that awe-inspiring cavernous voice, which the Moors liken to thunder, began to make itself heard: the roar of the hunting lion.
They were brave men, these three, galloping there, yet they experienced that kind of vertigo which is produced by excessive speed; the contagion of that dread which was spurring on their maddened beasts. The reeds which bent under them, the branches that whipped their legs, seemed to them troops of lions of the desert, bounding in pursuit of them....
Soon they were within sight of the stream which separated them from the French tents, the inhabited world, and the little Arab blockhouse of the village of Dialdé, still glowing with the last red rays of sunset.
They swam their horses across and re-entered the camp.
It was the evening hour, with its atmosphere of intense melancholy. Sunset awakened this obscure village to a kind of animation all its own. The black herdsmen were driving home their flocks; the warriors of the tribe, busy with their preparations for battle, were sharpening their fighting knives, and furbishing up their prehistoric guns. The women were makingkouss-kouss, to serve as provisions for the army, and were milking their ewes and lean zebu cows. A confused murmur of negro voices arose, mingled with the querulous bleating of goats and the plaintive yelping of Laobé dogs....
Fatou was there, seated at the door of the blockhouse with her child, in the humble, suppliant attitude she had continued to adopt since her return.
And Jean, his heart oppressed with solitude, came and sat beside her, and took the child on his knee with a feeling of tenderness towards his black family in its happiness, and of finding at Dialdé in Galam someone who loved him.
Near them the griots were rehearsing their warlike songs. They were chanting softly, in mournful, falsetto voices, accompanying themselves on small primitive guitars, consisting of two strings stretched upon serpent skin, producing a faint sound like the stridulation of crickets. They were singing these African airs that harmonise so well with the desolation of their country and have a charm of their own, with their elusive rhythm and their monotony....
Jean’s son was a delightful baby, but very solemn, and was seldom seen to smile. He was dressed in a blue bou-bou and a necklace, like a Yolof child, but his head was not shaved or ornamented with little tails of hair, as is usual with children of the country. As he was a little “white” boy, his mother had let his curly hair grow, and one lock fell across his forehead, as with Jean.
Jean remained there a long time, seated at the door of the blockhouse, playing with his son.
The last rays of daylight fell upon this singular picture; the child with his angel face, the spahi with his soldierly beauty, playing together alongside of those sinister dark minstrels.
Fatou-gaye was seated at their feet contemplatingthe pair with adoring eyes, crouching on the ground before them like a dog at its master’s feet.
Poor Jean had remained very much of a child, as is commonly the case with young men who have led a hard life, and whose precocious physical development has endowed them early with a mature and serious manner. He dandled his son on his knees with soldierly awkwardness, constantly bursting into peals of fresh, youthful laughter. But the child, the spahi’s son, did not laugh much; he put his chubby arms round his father’s neck and nestled close to his breast, looking about him with a very solemn air....
When night fell, Jean disposed of them both safely in the interior of the blockhouse; then he gave Fatou all the money he had left, threekhâliss(fifteen francs)....
“See,” he said, “to-morrow you will buykouss-koussfor yourself and good milk for him.”
Then he made his way towards the camp, so that he, too, might lie down and sleep.
To reach the French tents, he had to pass through the camp of the allied Bambaras. The night was of a luminous transparency, and everywhere the whirring noises of insects were audible; one grew aware that there were thousands and thousands of crickets and cicadas under every blade of grass, in each little hole in the sand. Sometimes the concertedeffect of all these whirring sounds was strident and deafening, as if the whole vast country were covered with an infinite number of tiny bells and rattles, and then momentarily the whole din would seem to die down, as if all these crickets had passed the word for silence, and there was a sudden hush.
Lost in thought, Jean went his way. He was very dreamy this evening.... And as he mused, without looking where he was going, he found himself engulfed suddenly in a great circle of men, who kept revolving around him in the rhythm of a dance. (The circular dance is the form specially favoured by the Bambaras.)
The dancers were men of lofty stature, wearing long white robes and high turbans, likewise white, with two black horns.
And in the transparent night the circle revolved almost noiselessly; the movement was slow, but light-footed as a spirit dance. The sweep of the draperies gave forth rustling sounds like the feathers of great birds.... And the dancers, all in unison, assumed various poses, poised on tiptoe, swaying backwards or forwards, flinging out in one simultaneous movement their long arms, and thus spreading out, like transparent wings, the innumerable folds of their muslin robes.
There was a soft accompaniment of tom-toms, as if muted; the wailing flutes and the ivory horns sounded muffled and remote. This monotonous music, which gave the tune to the circular dance of the Bambaras, resembled a magical incantation.
And all the dancers, as they passed the spahi, benttheir heads towards him as a sign of recognition, and smiled as they said to him,
“Tjean, come into our dance.” ...
Jean also recognised most of them in their festal robes; they were black spahis or riflemen, who had donned the long whitebou-bouand thetemba-sembé, the ceremonial headdress.
Jean smiled and greeted them as he made his way through,
“Good evening, Niodagal; good evening, Imobé-Fafandou; good evening, Dempa-Taco and Samba-Fall; good evening, big Nyaor,” for Nyaor was there, too, one of the tallest and handsomest....
But nonetheless Jean quickened his step, anxious to shake off these long coils of white-robed dancers, ever winding and unwinding themselves around him.
All this was affecting him—the night, the dance, and the music, which seemed to be that of another world.
And ever they repeated, “Tjean, come into our dance,” and they continued to flit around him like visions, sportively encircling him, purposely extending their winding chain to prevent him from making his escape....
As soon as Jean had lain down in his tent, he set himself to work out a whole host of new plans for the future.
He was certainly going back first of all to see his old father and mother. Nothing should induce him to postpone this visit. But after that he would undoubtedly have to return to Africa, now that he had a son. He realised clearly that he already loved this little child of his with all his heart, and that no consideration on earth could induce him to abandon him.
Without, in the Bambara encampment, could be heard at regular intervals the voices of the griots, chanting on three dismal notes the sacred war cry. They cast this owl-like chant over the slumbering tents, and lulled the black warriors into their first sleep with exhortations to be brave, and to load their carbines with several bullets at once on the day of battle.
Everyone was aware that the day was close at hand, and Boubakar-Ségou not far off.
What should he do at St Louis when he came back after his leave and reclaimed his little son? Should he re-enlist? Or would it be better to try his fortune in some independent adventure?...
He might perhaps become a farmer of revenue on the river. No, he felt an invincible repugnance to any other professions than those of agriculture and arms.
All sounds of life were now hushed in the village of Dialdé, and the encampment itself was silent. From afar could be heard the lion’s roar, and every now and then the most dismal sound in the world, the howling of jackals, a dirge-like accompaniment to the poor spahi’s dream....
From every point of view the existence of that small child was making a complete change in all his plans, rendering the difficulties of the future infinitely more complicated....
“Tjean, come into our dance!”
Jean, worn out by the day’s long expedition, was half asleep, and even as he planned for his future, he saw in a dream the Bambara dance ever slowly revolving around him. The dancers flitted past with smooth movements of the limbs, languishing attitudes, to the strains of a vague music wherein there was something unearthly.
“Tjean, come into our dance!”
Their heads, inclining towards Jean in greeting, seemed to be bent under the burden of their lofty ceremonial headdress. And now again he saw grinning faces, death-like, leaning towards him with an air of recognition, and saying very softly with phantom smiles,
“Tjean, come into our dance.”
Finally, little by little, Jean was completely overcome by weariness, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. But he had decided nothing....
The great day, the day of battle, had come.
At three in the morning the whole encampment of Dialdé was astir—spahis, riflemen, Bambara friendlies, were getting ready to set out on their march, with their arms and ammunition.
The Marabouts had prayed at great length; numbers of talismans had been distributed. By order of the chiefs the black warriors, according to their custom on the occasion of great battles, had loaded their carbines with powder half-way up the barrel and with bullets up to the muzzle. With such thoroughness had they carried out the order that most of the firearms burst at the first discharge, not an infrequent occurrence in negro warfare.
The orders were to make for the village of Djidiam, where, according to the report of the native scouts, Boubakar-Ségou had ensconced himself with his army behind thick palisades of timber and mud. Djidiam was the principal fortress of this personage, who had become almost legendary, the terror of the country—a sort of fabulous hero, whose strength lay in retreat, in hiding himself always in the recesses of his murderous country, and in baffling discovery.
They were to camp during the afternoon in the great woods adjoining the enemy headquarters, and finally to fall upon Djidiam by night, to set fire to the village, which would burn in the moonlight like anauto-da-féof straw. Then they were to return victorious to St Louis, before fever should have had time to decimate the expedition.
On the eve of battle Jean had written a very affectionate letter to his old parents—a poor, pencilled letter! It went down the river by the Falémé on that very day, and must have soothed the heart of his old mother, in that far country....
A little before sunrise he kissed his child, who lay asleep in the arms of Fatou-gaye. Then he mounted his horse.
In the early morning Fatou-gaye, with her son in her arms, likewise took the road. She made her way to Nialoumbaé, a village belonging to a friendly tribe, the dwelling place of a famous Marabout, a preacher renowned for the arts of prediction and sorcery.
She asked her way to the hut of this centenarian, whom she found prostrate on his mat, muttering, like a dying man, prayers to his deity.
They had a long interview, and it resulted in the priest putting into the girl’s hands a small leather pouch, seemingly containing something very precious; and this pouch Fatou secured carefully in her waistband.
Then the Marabout administered a sleeping draught to Jean’s child, and in exchange Fatou offered the priest three large silver coins, the spahi’s lastkhâliss, which the old man put away in his purse. Then Fatou tenderly wrapped her son, already sunk into a charmed sleep, in an embroideredpagne, fastened the precious burden on to her back, and hadherself directed to the woods, where the French were to camp that evening.
It is seven in the morning, the scene a forlorn spot in the country of Diambour, a grass-covered marsh, surrounding a small sheet of water.
To the north a low hill bounds the horizon. Southwards as far as the eye can see stretch the great levels of Dialakar.
All is still and desolate; the sun mounts tranquilly into an azure sky.
In this African landscape, which would have fitted equally well into some solitary tract of ancient Gaul, horsemen come into view. They sit their horses proudly, handsome fellows all of them, in their red jackets, blue pantaloons, large white hats slouched over their bronzed faces. There are twelve of them, twelve spahis sent out as scouts in charge of an adjutant, and Jean is one of them.
The air holds no presage of death, no foreboding of ill-omen, nothing but the calmness and purity of the heavens. In the marshes the tall grasses, still wet with the dews of night, are sparkling in the sun; dragon flies are hovering on their long, black-flecked wings; waterlilies are opening their large white calyces.
The heat is already oppressive; the horses stretch their necks to drink, their nostrils wide, sniffing the stagnant water. The spahis halt for a moment totake counsel; they dismount in order to moisten their hats and bathe their foreheads.
Suddenly in the distance dull sounds are heard, like the noise of enormous drums all beaten simultaneously.
“It is the big tom-toms,” said Sergeant Muller, who had some experience of negro warfare.
Instinctively all the men who had dismounted made for their horses.
But a black head had just raised itself above the herbage. An old Marabout had made with his skinny arm a grotesque signal, like a magic order addressed to the reeds of the marsh. A hail of lead showered down upon the spahis.
The shots, steadily and carefully aimed from the shelter of the ambuscade, had all told. Five or six horses had dropped. The remainder, startled and maddened, reared and threw their wounded riders. Jean, also, had sunk to the ground with a bullet through his loins. At the same time, thirty sinister faces emerged from the grass; thirty black demons, covered with mud, bounded out, gnashing their white teeth like enraged monkeys.
O heroic combat, such as Homer might have sung, but which will remain unrecorded, unknown to fame, like so many of these far-away African frays. The poor spahis, in their fight to the death, performed prodigies of strength and valour. Fighting had on them the infuriating effect, which it produces on all such as are brave by nature. They soldtheir lives dearly, these men, all of whom were young, vigorous, and inured to war. In a few years they will be forgotten, even at St Louis. Who will ever mention their names, the names of those who fell in the land of Diambour, on the plains of Dialakar?
Meanwhile the sound of the great war-drums was drawing ever nearer.
Suddenly, while the mêlée was still proceeding, the spahis saw as in a dream, a great company of negroes passing by over the hill; warriors half naked, covered with grigris, were doubling in the direction of Dialdé in disorderly hordes. They had with them enormous war-drums, which four men together could hardly drag along. Their lean desert horses, seemingly full of fire and fury, were decked with tawdry harness, spangled with copper, their long tails and manes stained blood-red. It was a fantastic, demoniac procession, an African nightmare, swifter than the wind.
Boubakar-Ségou was passing.
He was on his way to hurl himself on the French forces.
He passed, paying no attention to the spahis, leaving them to the body of men who had lain in ambush for them, and were completing the work of exterminating them.
The spahis were being driven steadily back, away from the grass and water on to the arid sands, where a more overwhelming heat and an intenser glare would the sooner exhaust them.
No one had had time to reload. They fought with knives, sabres, nails, and teeth; there were many gaping wounds and bleeding bodies.
Two negroes had made a ferocious attack on Jean. He was stronger than they. In his fury he hurled them to earth time after time, but they always came back at him.
In the end his hands, slipping in blood, could no longer obtain a grip on the black, oily naked skins, and all the time his strength was ebbing because of his wounds.
He had a confused perception of these final impressions; his dead comrades, fallen by his side; the main body of the negro army ever hastening onwards, and now almost out of sight; handsome Muller near him, with the death rattle in his throat, and the blood pouring from his mouth; and further over, already at some distance, tall Nyaor cutting his way through towards Saldé, mowing a path with great sweeps of his sabre through a group of negroes.
And then three of them felled Jean to the ground, threw him on his side, holding his arms, while one of them pressed a large iron knife against his chest.
... For one terrifying moment of anguish Jean felt the pressure of this knife against his body. And there was not one human being to help him. All were dead, not a man was left.
The red cloth of his jacket, the coarse fabric of his soldier’s shirt, and his flesh formed a triple layerwhich offered resistance, and the knife had been badly sharpened.
The negro leaned more heavily. Jean uttered a loud, hoarse cry, and of a sudden his side was pierced. The blade, with a horrible little sound of slicing, plunged into the depths of his chest. The negro turned it in the wound, then tore it out with both hands, and kicked away the body with his foot.
Jean was the last to fall. The black demons raised their shout of victory and ran on without a moment’s delay, speeding like the wind in pursuit of their army.
The spahis were left alone; and the stillness of death descended upon them.
The main shock of the two armies took place further away, and was very bloody, although little was heard of it in France.
These minor battles, fought in a country so remote, and engaging a comparatively small number of soldiers, escape the notice of the general public; only those remember them who have lost a son or a brother.
The little French force was wavering when Boubakar-Ségou received, almost point-blank, a charge of slugs in the right temple.
The brains of the negro chief were scatteredabroad. To the sound of the tabala and the iron cymbals he fell, surrounded by his priests, and entangled in his long strings of amulets. For his tribes, his fall was the signal for retreat.
The negro army resumed its march towards the impenetrable tracts of the interior, and no obstacle was opposed to its flight. The French army, indeed, was no longer in any condition to pursue them.
The red head-band of the great rebel chief was brought back to St Louis. It was all singed and riddled with shot holes. A long festoon of talismans was suspended from it, consisting of little pouches covered with various sorts of embroidery, and containing mysterious powders, cabalistic drawings, and prayers in the Maghreb tongue.
Boubakar-Ségou’s death produced a far-reaching moral effect upon the indigenous population. Inasmuch as the battle was followed by the submission of several insurgent chiefs, it might fairly be considered a victory.
The expeditionary force returned to St Louis immediately. Promotions and decorations were conferred on all the participators, but there were many gaps in the ranks of the poor spahis.
Jean dragged himself under the scanty foliage of the tamarisks, sought a shady spot for his head, and disposed himself there to await death.
He suffered from thirst, burning thirst, and presentlyhis throat was convulsed by slight, spasmodic movements.
He had often witnessed the death of comrades in Africa, and he recognised this distressing indication of the approaching end, which people call the death sob.
The blood was trickling from his side, and the arid sand drank it as if it were dew.
But his sufferings diminished. Indeed, apart from this burning thirst, he was now in little pain.
Strange visions passed before poor Jean’s eyes: the mountain range of the Cevennes, the well-known haunts of his childhood, his cottage in the mountains.
Above all he saw visions of leafy landscapes, full of shade, mosses, coolness, and running water; his dear old mother, who took him gently by the hand to lead him as she had done in his childhood.
He felt his mother’s kiss! O, his mother, there she was, smoothing his brow with her poor old trembling hands, bathing his burning head with cool water. Could it be? Never more to feel a mother’s kiss, never more to hear her voice? Never, never more? Was this the end of everything? To die there alone, all alone, in the burning sun of the desert! And he half-raised himself, unwilling to die.
“Tjean, come into our dance!”
In front of him, like a whirlwind, like a furious gale, swept the circle of phantom dancers. The fierce gyrations of this vortex seemed to strike sparks from the burning pebbles.
And these spectral dancers, rising in swift spirals, like smoke before a rushing wind, faded away on high, in the fiery crucible of the blue ether.
Jean had the sensation of rising with them, of being borne aloft on terrible wings, and it came to him that this was the climax, the very moment of death.
But it was merely a convulsion of the muscles, a horrible pang of pain.
The red blood gushed from his mouth, and again a voice, whispering at his ear, said,
“Tjean, come into our dance.”
He grew calmer; his sufferings abated, and once more he sank down on his bed of sand.
Thronging memories of childhood came to life again in his mind, with singular clearness. He heard an old folksong, wherewith his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby in his cradle; then suddenly, in the midst of the desert, the village chime rang out the evening Angelus.
Tears coursed down his bronzed cheeks. The prayers of long ago returned to his memory, and the poor soldier set himself to praying with the fervour of a child. He took between his hands the medal of the Virgin, which his mother had hung round his neck. He still had sufficient strength to raise it to his lips, and he kissed it with immeasurable love. He prayed with all his soul to Our Lady of Sorrows, to whom his simple-minded mother was wont to pray on his behalf each evening. He was steeped in the splendourof those radiant hallucinations that surround a deathbed; and aloud, in the overwhelming silence of these solitudes, he repeated, in a fast-failing voice, the inevitable adieu, “Farewell, farewell, until we meet in heaven.”
It was close on noon. Jean’s sufferings were diminishing. The desert in the intense tropical light seemed to him like a great brasier of white fire which no longer had power to burn him. And yet his bosom heaved as if to breathe more deeply; his mouth opened as if to plead for water.
At last his lower jaw dropped; his mouth fell open for the last time, and Jean passed peacefully away in the dazzling sunshine.
When Fatou-gaye returned from the village of the great Marabout, bringing with her a mysterious article in a leather wallet, the women of the friendly tribe informed her that the battle was over.
Anxious, panting, exhausted, she made her way back to camp, hastening with feverish step over the hot sand, and carrying on her back her still-sleeping baby, wrapped in a piece of blue cloth.
The first person she met was the Mussulman, Nyaor-fall, the black spahi, who, as she approached, looked at her gravely, telling the beads of his long Maghreb rosary.
In the language of the country, she jerked out the words,
“Where is he?”
With a restrained gesture, Nyaor stretched his arm towards the south of Diambour, the open plains of Dialakar.
“Yonder!” ... said he. “He has gained Paradise.” ...
All day long Fatou-gaye traversed with feverish step thickets and sand, still carrying her sleeping baby on her back. She went to and fro, sometimes breaking into a run, with the distracted movements of a pantheress that has lost her young. Ever she pursued her search under the burning sun, exploring the thickets, groping in the thorny brushwood.
About three in the afternoon, as she was crossing an arid plain, she caught sight of a dead horse, then of a red jacket, then another, and yet another.... It was the scene of the defeat. It was there that the spahis had fallen....
Here and there a sparse growth of mimosas and tamarisks cast upon the yellow soil slender shadows, sun-chequered....
In the remote distance, at the end of this vast plain, the skyline of a village of pointed huts could be seen against the deep blue of the horizon.
Fatou-gaye had halted, trembling and terrified....She had recognised him, Jean, yonder, stretched out in the sun, with stiffened arms and open mouth. She muttered some obscure, heathen invocation and touched the grigris round her ebony neck.
With haggard, bloodshot eyes, she stood there a long time, muttering softly to herself....
From afar she caught sight of some old women of the enemy tribe, who were making for the corpses, and a horrible surmise flashed upon her....
These hideous old negresses, their skins glistening under the tropic sun, diffused an acrid odour of soumaré. With a jingling of grigris and beads they approached the young soldiers. They stirred them with their feet; as they desecrated them with obscene touch they laughed and uttered mocking ejaculations, resembling the gibbering of monkeys. They profaned these corpses with gruesome buffoonery....
And then they stripped them of their gilt buttons, which they stuck in their frizzled hair; they took from them their steel spurs, their red jackets, their belts....
Fatou-gaye was crouching behind her clump of brushwood, holding herself back, like a cat about to spring. When it came to Jean’s turn, she leaped out, her nails in readiness, uttering cries like a wild beast, and reviling the negro women in a strange tongue....
And the baby, who had woken up, clung to the back of his raging, terrifying mother....
The negro women were afraid and drew back....
Besides, their arms were full enough of booty, andthey thought they could come back again on the morrow. They exchanged some words, which Fatou could not understand, and took their departure, turning round, however, to insult her with savage laughter and the mocking gestures of chimpanzees.
When Fatou-gaye was alone, she crouched close to Jean and called him by his name. Three times she cried, “Tjean! Tjean! Tjean!” in shrill tones, which echoed in these solitudes like the voice of a priestess of old who invokes the dead....
There she lay, crouching under the implacable African sun, with unseeing gaze fixed on the distance on the parched and desolate landscape. She was afraid to turn her eyes on Jean’s face.
The vultures swooped down insolently towards her, beating the heavy air with their great dark pinions....
They hovered near the corpses, not yet daring ... it was too soon.
Fatou-gaye caught sight of the medal of the Virgin in the spahi’s hand, and understood that he had been praying when death came to him. She, too, had medals of the Virgin and a scapulary among the grigris round her neck. She had been baptised by Catholic priests at St Louis, but it was not in them that she put her trust.
She took a leather amulet, which formerly in the land of Galam a negro woman, her mother had given her. This was the fetish she loved, and she kissed it with ardour.
Then she bent over Jean’s body and raised his head.
Blue flies kept coming out from his open mouth, between his white teeth, and from the wounds in his thorax trickled a fluid already fetid.