Chapter 5: The Inscription

With a blow of the tip of his cane Morhange knocked a fragment of rock from the black flank of the mountain.

“What is it?” he asked, holding it out to me.

“A basaltic peridot,” I said.

“It can’t be very interesting, you barely glanced at it.”

“It is very interesting, on the contrary. But, for the moment, I admit that I am otherwise preoccupied.”

“How?”

“Look this way a bit,” I said, showing towards the west, on the horizon, a black spot across the white plain.

It was six o’clock in the morning. The sun had risen. But it could not be found in the surprisingly polished air. And not a breath of air, not a breath. Suddenly one of the camels called. An enormous antelope had just come in sight, and had stopped in its flight, terrified, racing the wall of rock. It stayed there at a little distance from us, dazed, trembling on its slender legs.

Bou-Djema had rejoined us.

“When the legs of the mohor tremble it is because the firmament is shaken,” he muttered.

“A storm?”

“Yes, a storm.”

“And you find that alarming?”

I did not answer immediately. I was exchanging several brief words with Bou-Djema, who was occupied in soothing the camels which were giving signs of being restive.

Morhange repeated his question. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Alarming? I don’t know. I have never seen a storm on the Hoggar. But I distrust it. And the signs are that this is going to be a big one. See there already.”

A slight dust had risen before the cliff. In the still air a few grains of sand had begun to whirl round and round, with a speed which increased to dizziness, giving us in advance the spectacle in miniature of what would soon be breaking upon us.

With harsh cries a flock of wild geese appeared, flying low. They came out of the west.

“They are fleeing towards the Sebkha d’Amanghor,” said Bou-Djema.

There could be no greater mistake, I thought.

Morhange looked at me curiously.

“What must we do?” he asked.

“Mount our camels immediately, before they are completely demoralized, and hurry to find shelter in some high places. Take account of our situation. It is easy to follow the bed of a stream. But within a quarter of an hour perhaps the storm will have burst. Within a half hour a perfect torrent will be rushing here. On this soil, which is almost impermeable, rain will roll like a pail of water thrown on a bituminous pavement. No depth, all height. Look at this.”

And I showed him, a dozen meters high, long hollow gouges, marks of former erosions on the rocky wall.

“In an hour the waters will reach that height. Those are the marks of the last inundation. Let us get started. There is not an instant to lose.”

“All right,” Morhange replied tranquilly.

We had the greatest difficulty to make the camels kneel. When we had thrown ourselves into the saddle they started off at a pace which their terror rendered more and more disorderly.

Of a sudden the wind began, a formidable wind, and, almost at the same time the light was eclipsed in the ravine. Above our heads the sky had become, in the flash of an eye, darker than the walls of the canyon which we were descending at a breathless pace.

“A path, a stairway in the wall,” I screamed against the wind to my companions. “If we don’t find one in a minute we are lost.”

They did not hear me, but, turning in my saddle, I saw that they had lost no distance, Morhange following me, and Bou-Djema in the rear driving the two baggage camels masterfully before him.

A blinding streak of lightning rent the obscurity. A peal of thunder, re-echoed to infinity by the rocky wall, rang out, and immediately great tepid drops began to fall. In an instant, our burnouses, which had been blown out behind by the speed with which we were traveling, were stuck tight to our streaming bodies.

“Saved!” I exclaimed suddenly.

Abruptly on our right a crevice opened in the midst of the wall. It was the almost perpendicular bed of a stream, an affluent of the one we had had the unfortunate idea of following that morning. Already a veritable torrent was gushing over it with a fine uproar.

I have never better appreciated the incomparable sure-footedness of camels in the most precipitate places. Bracing themselves, stretching out their great legs, balancing themselves among the rocks that were beginning to be swept loose, our camels accomplished at that moment what the mules of the Pyrannees might have failed in.

After several moments of superhuman effort we found ourselves at last out of danger, on a kind of basaltic terrace, elevated some fifty meters above the channel of the stream we had just left. Luck was with us; a little grotto opened out behind. Bou-Djema succeeded in sheltering the camels there. From its threshold we had leisure to contemplate in silence the prodigious spectacle spread out before us.

You have, I believe, been at the Camp of Chalons for artillery drills. You have seen when the shell bursts how the chalky soil of the Marne effervesces like the inkwells at school, when we used to throw a piece of calcium carbonate into them. Well, it was almost like that, but in the midst of the desert, in the midst of obscurity. The white waters rushed into the depths of the black hole, and rose and rose towards the pedestal on which we stood. And there was the uninterrupted noise of thunder, and still louder, the sound of whole walls of rock, undermined by the flood, collapsing in a heap and dissolving in a few seconds of time in the midst of the rising water.

All the time that this deluge lasted, one hour, perhaps two, Morhange and I stayed bending over this fantastic foaming vat; anxious to see, to see everything, to see in spite of everything; rejoicing with a kind of ineffable horror when we felt the shelf of basalt on which we had taken refuge swaying beneath us from the battering impact of the water. I believe that never for an instant did we think, so beautiful it was, of wishing for the end of that gigantic nightmare.

Finally a ray of the sun shone through. Only then did we look at each other.

Morhange held out his hand.

“Thank you,” he said simply.

And he added with a smile:

“To be drowned in the very middle of the Sahara would have been pretentious and ridiculous. You have saved us, thanks to your power of decision, from this very paradoxical end.”

Ah, that he had been thrown by a misstep of his camel and rolled to his death in the midst of the flood! Then what followed would never have happened. That is the thought that comes to me in hours of weakness. But I have told you that I pull myself out of it quickly. No, no, I do not regret it, I cannot regret it, that what happened did happen.

Morhange left me to go into the little grotto, where Bou-Djema’s camels were now resting comfortably. I stayed alone, watching the torrent which was continuously rising with the impetuous inrush of its unbridled tributaries. It had stopped raining. The sun shone from a sky that had renewed its blueness. I could feel the clothes that had a moment before been drenching, drying upon me incredibly fast.

A hand was placed on my shoulder. Morhange was again beside me.

“Come here,” he said.

Somewhat surprised, I followed him. We went into the grotto.

The opening, which was big enough to admit the camels, made it fairly light. Morhange led me up to the smooth face of rock opposite. “Look,” he said, with unconcealed joy.

“What of it?”

“Don’t you see?”

“I see that there are several Tuareg inscriptions,” I answered, with some disappointment. “But I thought I had told you that I read Tifinar writing very badly. Are these writings more interesting than the others we have come upon before?”

“Look at this one,” said Morhange. There was such an accent of triumph in his tone that this time I concentrated my attention.

I looked again.

The characters of the inscription were arranged in the form of a cross. It plays such an important part in this adventure that I cannot forego retracing it for you.

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o o o o -- W + --

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[Transcriber’s Note: This is but a crude ASCII representation of the inscription. The center ‘W’ is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise in the book.]

It was designed with great regularity, and the characters were cut deep into the rock. Although I knew so little of rock inscriptions at that time I had no difficulty in recognizing the antiquity of this one.