Chapter 19: The Tanezruft

During the first hour of our flight, the great mehari of Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh carried us at a mad pace. We covered at least five leagues. With fixed eyes, I guided the beast toward the gour which the Targa had pointed out, its ridge becoming higher and higher against the paling sky.

The speed caused a little breeze to whistle in our ears. Great tufts of retem, like fleshless skeletons, were tossed to right and left.

I heard the voice of Tanit-Zerga whispering:

“Stop the camel.”

At first I did not understand.

“Stop him,” she repeated.

Her hand pulled sharply at my right arm.

I obeyed. The camel slackened his pace with very bad grace.

“Listen,” she said.

At first I heard nothing. Then a very slight noise, a dry rustling behind us.

“Stop the camel,” Tanit-Zerga commanded. “It is not worth while to make him kneel.”

A little gray creature bounded on the camel. The mehari set out again at his best speed.

“Let him go,” said Tanit-Zerga. “Galé has jumped on.”

I felt a tuft of bristly hair under my arm. The mongoose had followed our footsteps and rejoined us. I heard the quick panting of the brave little creature becoming gradually slower and slower.

“I am happy,” murmured Tanit-Zerga.

Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had not been mistaken. We reached the gour as the sun rose. I looked back. The Atakor was nothing more than a monstrous chaos amid the night mists which trailed the dawn. It was no longer possible to pick out from among the nameless peaks, the one on which Antinea was still weaving her passionate plots.

You know what the Tanezruft is, the “plain of plains,” abandoned, uninhabitable, the country of hunger and thirst. We were then starting on the part of the desert which Duveyrier calls the Tassili of the south, and which figures on the maps of the Minister of Public Works under this attractive title: “Rocky plateau, without water, without vegetation, inhospitable for man and beast.”

Nothing, unless parts of the Kalahari, is more frightful than this rocky desert. Oh, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh did not exaggerate in saying that no one would dream of following us into that country.

Great patches of oblivion still refused to clear away. Memories chased each other incoherently about my head. A sentence came back to me textually: “It seemed to Dick that he had never, since the beginning of original darkness, done anything at all save jolt through the air.” I gave a little laugh. “In the last few hours,” I thought, “I have been heaping up literary situations. A while ago, a hundred feet above the ground, I was Fabrice of La Chartreuse de Parme beside his Italian dungeon. Now, here on my camel, I am Dick of The Light That Failed, crossing the desert to meet his companions in arms.” I chuckled again; then shuddered. I thought of the preceding night, of the Orestes of Andromaque who agreed to sacrifice Pyrrhus. A literary situation indeed...

Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had reckoned eight days to get to the wooded country of the Awellimiden, forerunners of the grassy steppes of the Soudan. He knew well the worth of his beast. Tanit-Zerga had suddenly given him a name, El Mellen, the white one, for the magnificent mehari had an almost spotless coat. Once he went two days without eating, merely picking up here and there a branch of an acacia tree whose hideous white spines, four inches long, filled me with fear for our friend’s oesophagus. The wells marked out by Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh were indeed at the indicated spots, but we found nothing in them but a burning yellow mud. It was enough for the camel, enough so that at the end of the fifth day, thanks to prodigious self-control, we had used up only one of our two water skins. Then we believed ourselves safe.

Near one of these muddy puddles, I succeeded that day in shooting down a little straight-horned desert gazelle. Tanit-Zerga skinned the beast and we regaled ourselves with a delicious haunch. Meantime, little Galé, who never ceased prying about the cracks in the rocks during our mid-day halts in the heat, discovered an ourane, a sand crocodile, five feet long, and made short work of breaking his neck. She ate so much she could not budge. It cost us a pint of water to help her digestion. We gave it with good grace, for we were happy. Tanit-Zerga did not say so, but her joy at knowing that I was thinking no more of the woman in the gold diadem and the emeralds was apparent. And really, during those days, I hardly thought of her. I thought only of the torrid heat to be avoided, of the water skins which, if you wished to drink fresh water, had to be left for an hour in a cleft in the rocks; of the intense joy which seized you when you raised to your lips a leather goblet brimming with that life-saving water ... I can say this with authority, with good authority, indeed; passion, spiritual or physical, is a thing for those who have eaten and drunk and rested.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon. The frightful heat was slackening. We had left a kind of rocky crevice where we had had a little nap. Seated on a huge rock, we were watching the reddening west.

I spread out the roll of paper on which Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had marked the stages of our journey as far as the road from the Soudan. I realized again with joy that his itinerary was exact and that I had followed it scrupulously.

“The evening of the day after to-morrow,” I said, “we shall be setting out on the stage which will take us, by the next dawn, to the waters at Telemsi. Once there, we shall not have to worry any more about water.”

Tanit-Zerga’s eyes danced in her thin face.

“And Gâo?” she asked.

“We will be only a week from the Niger. And Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh said that at Telemsi, one reached a road overhung with mimosa.”

“I know the mimosa,” she said. “They are the little yellow balls that melt in your hand. But I like the caper flowers better. You will come with me to Gâo. My father, Sonni-Azkia, was killed, as I told you, by the Awellimiden. But my people must have rebuilt the villages. They are used to that. You will see how you will be received.”

“I will go, Tanit-Zerga, I promise you. But you also, you must promise me...”

“What? Oh, I guess. You must take me for a little fool if you believe me capable of speaking of things which might make trouble for my friend.”

She looked at me as she spoke. Privation and great fatigue had chiselled the brown face where her great eyes shone ... Since then, I have had time to assemble the maps and compasses, and to fix forever the spot where, for the first time, I understood the beauty of Tanit-Zerga’s eyes.

There was a deep silence between us. It was she who broke it. ht is coming. We must eat so as to leave as soon as possible.”

She stood up and went toward the rocks.

Almost immediately, I heard her calling in an anguished voice that sent a chill through me.

“Come! Oh, come see!”

With a bound, I was at her side.

“The camel,” she murmured. “The camel!”

I looked, and a deadly shudder seized me.

Stretched out at full length, on the other side of the rocks, his pale flanks knotted up by convulsive spasms, El Mellen lay in anguish.

I need not say that we rushed to him in feverish haste. Of what El Mellen was dying, I did not know, I never have known. All the mehara are that way. They are at once the most enduring and the most delicate of beasts. They will travel for six months across the most frightful deserts, with little food, without water, and seem only the better for it. Then, one day when nothing is the matter, they stretch out and give you the slip with disconcerting ease.

When Tanit-Zerga and I saw that there was nothing more to do, we stood there without a word, watching his slackening spasms. When he breathed his last, we felt that our life, as well as his, had gone.

It was Tanit-Zerga who spoke first.

“How far are we from the Soudan road?” she asked.

“We are a hundred and twenty miles from the springs of Telemsi,” I replied. “We could make thirty miles by going toward Iferouane; but the wells are not marked on that route.”

“Then we must walk toward the springs of Telemsi,” she said. “A hundred and twenty miles, that makes seven days?”

“Seven days at the least, Tanit-Zerga.”

“How far is it to the first well?”

“Thirty-five miles.”

The little girl’s face contracted somewhat. But she braced up quickly.

“We must set out at once.”

“Set out on foot, Tanit-Zerga!”

She stamped her foot. I marveled to see her so strong.

“We must go,” she repeated. “We are going to eat and drink and make Galé eat and drink, for we cannot carry all the tins, and the water skin is so heavy that we should not get three miles if we tried to carry it. We will put a little water in one of the tins after emptying it through a little hole. That will be enough for to-night’s stage, which will be eighteen miles without water. To-morrow we will set out for another eighteen miles and we will reach the wells marked on the paper by Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh.”

“Oh,” I murmured sadly, “if my shoulder were only not this way, I could carry the water skin.”