Delirious dreams. Mad imaginings. But these dreams, these imaginings,
are dear to me. "Captain de Saint-Avit and Lieutenant Ferrières,"
reads the official dispatch, "will proceed to Tassili to determine the
statigraphic relation of Albien sandstone and carboniferous limestone.
They will, in addition, profit by any opportunities of determining the
possible change of attitude of the Axdjers towards our penetration,
etc." If the journey should indeed have to do only with such poor
things I think that I should never undertake it.
So I am longing for what I dread. I shall be dejected if I do not
find myself in the presence of what makes me strangely fearful.
In the depths of the valley of Wadi Mia a jackal is barking. Now and
again, when a beam of moonlight breaks in a silver patch through the
hollows of the heat-swollen clouds, making him think he sees the young
sun, a turtle dove moans among the palm trees.
I hear a step outside. I lean out of the window. A shade clad in
luminous black stuff glides over the hard-packed earth of the terrace
of the fortification. A light shines in the electric blackness. A man
has just lighted a cigarette. He crouches, facing southwards. He is
smoking.
It is Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh, our Targa guide, the man who in three days
is to lead us across the unknown plateaus of the mysterious
Imoschaoch, across the hamadas of black stones, the great dried oases,
the stretches of silver salt, the tawny hillocks, the flat gold dunes
that are crested over, when the "alizé" blows, with a shimmering haze
of pale sand.
Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh! He is the man. There recurs to my mind Duveyrier's
tragic phrase, "At the very moment the Colonel was putting his foot in
the stirrup he was felled by a sabre blow."[2] Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh!
There he is, peacefully smoking his cigarette, a cigarette from the
package that I gave him.... May the Lord forgive me for it.
[Footnote 2: H. Duveyrier, "The Disaster of the Flatters Mission."
Bull. Geol. Soc., 1881.] The lamp casts a yellow light on the paper. Strange fate, which, I
never knew exactly why, decided one day when I was a lad of sixteen
that I should prepare myself for Saint Cyr, and gave me there André de
Saint-Avit as classmate. I might have studied law or medicine. Then I
should be today a respectable inhabitant of a town with a church and
running water, instead of this cotton-clad phantom, brooding with an
unspeakable anxiety over this desert which is about to swallow me.