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 "alize" blows, with a shimmering haze
of pale sand.

Cegheir-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] Cegheir-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 Andre 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.

A great insect has flown in through the window. It buzzes, strikes
against the rough cast, rebounds against the globe of the lamp, and
then, helpless, its wings singed by the still burning candle, drops on
the white paper.

It is an African May bug, big, black, with spots of livid gray.

I think of others, its brothers in France, the golden-brown May bugs,
which I have seen on stormy summer evenings projecting themselves like
little particles of the soil of my native countryside. It was there
that as a child I spent my vacations, and later on, my leaves. On my
last leave, through those same meadows, there wandered beside me a
slight form, wearing a thin scarf, because of the evening air, so cool
back there. But now this memory stirs me so slightly that I scarcely
raise my eyes to that dark corner of my room where the light is dimly
reflected by the glass of an indistinct portrait. I realize of how
little consequence has become what had seemed at one time capable of
filling all my life. This plaintive mystery is of no more interest to
me. If the strolling singers of Rolla came to murmur their famous
nostalgic airs under the window of this bordj I know that I should not
listen to them, and if they became insistent I shou