Then she seized her baby with the intention of strangling him.
Dreading to hear his cries, she first filled his mouth with sand.
Nor could she bear to see his little face in the paroxysms of suffocation. Frenziedly she dug a hole in the ground, buried his head in it, and heaped more sand upon it.
Then she gripped his neck with her two hands and squeezed it—squeezed it hard, until his active little limbs, which were stiffening under the influence of pain, were relaxed in death.
When the child was dead, she laid him on his father’s bosom.
So died the son of Jean Peyral.... A mystery! What god had thrust him into life, the spahi’s child? What had he come to seek on this earth, and whither did he return?
Then Fatou-gaye wept tears of blood—her piercing lamentations echoed over the plains of Dialakar. And last of all, she took the Marabout’s leather wallet and swallowed a bitter paste contained therein.Her death throes began, a lingering and cruel agony. For a long time she lay in the sunlight shaken by death rattle and death sob; she tore her throat with her nails, and plucked out handfuls of hair mingled with amber.
Round her were the vultures, awaiting her last moment.
When the yellow sun set over the plains of Diambour, her struggles were over; her death agony at an end.
She lay, stretched out upon Jean’s body, clasping with rigid arms her dead son. Hot and starry, the first night of their death descended upon them—bringing with it the saturnalia of wild life, with its hushed mysterious beginning, in every corner of this sombre continent of Africa.
That same evening, in that far country at the foot of the Cevennes, Jeanne’s wedding procession was passing in front of the cottage of the old Peyrals.
At first it is heard as a distant moaning, rising from the furthest limits of the desert; then the gruesome chorus approaches through the luminousobscurity: the doleful howling of jackals, the piercing wails of hyenas and tiger-cats.
Poor mother, poor old woman!... This human form, vaguely discernible in the darkness, lying in the midst of these solitudes, its mouth gaping under a sky all strewn with stars, sleeping there at a time when the wild beasts awake—this form which will never rise again—poor mother, poor old woman!... this corpse that lies forsaken is your son!...
“Jean, come into our dance.”
The ravenous pack glides softly through the night, stealing through the thickets, creeping among the lofty grasses. By the light of the stars they fall upon the corpses of the young soldiers, and begin the repast, which has been ordained by blind nature. All that is alive draws its nourishment, in one form or another, from that which has died.
The man ever grasps in his dead hand the medal of the Virgin, the woman her leather grigris. Watch well over them, O precious amulets.
To-morrow, great, bald-headed vultures will carry on the work of destruction—the bones of the dead will be strewn upon the sand, scattered hither and thither by the beasts of the desert—their skulls will bleach in the sun, to be the sport of winds and grasshoppers.
Aged parents by the chimney corner, aged parents in your cottage; father, bowed under the weight of years, you who dream of your son, the handsome young soldier in his red jacket—aged mother! you who pray each evening for the absent one—aged parents, long will you await your son, long await the spahi!