Incoherent, tumultuous thoughts rushed through Jean’s brain.
He made a rapid calculation of dates. No! It was not all over yet, it was not yet an accomplished fact. Telegraph! No! What possessed him? There was no telegraphic communication between France and Senegal. And after all, what could he have said? If he could have gone away, leaving everything behind, gone away on some very swift ship, and still have arrived in time, he might have thrown himself at their feet, with supplications and tears, and have yet succeeded in moving them to relent. But so far away! What futility! What impotence! All would be consummated before he could even reach them with his message of grief.
And he felt as if his head were crushed by iron hands, and his breast in the grip of a remorseless vice.
He halted again and reread the letter, and then remembering that he was the bearer of urgent orders from the Governor, he folded up the letter and went on.
Around him all things were lapped in the profound stillness of noon. The old Moorish houses stood ranged in straight rows, milk-white beneath the intense blue of the sky. At times, behind their brick walls, the ear of the passer-by might catch some negress’s plaintive, drowsy song, or perhaps the eye might light on a small, coal-black negro asleep on a doorstep, lying on his back in the sun, quite naked, with a necklet of coral, forming a dark patch in the midst of universal radiance. On the smooth sand of the streets, the lizards were chasing one another with curious little swaying movements of the head, drawing their tails along the ground and tracing an infinity of fantastic zig-zags, complicated like an Arabic design. A distant noise of _kouss-kouss_ pounders, in its monotonous regularity almost a form of silence, came from Guet n’dar, deadened by the hot, heavy strata of the noontide atmosphere.
It seemed as if this tranquillity of prostrate nature were seeking to make mock of poor Jean’s emotion, and to intensify his sufferings. It oppressed him like a leaden winding sheet.
Of a sudden this country appeared to him as a vast tomb.
The spahi awoke as if from a heavy sleep that had lasted five years.
He felt himself in fierce revolt, revolt against everything and everyone. Why had they taken him from his village, from his mother, to bury him, in the prime of life, in this country of death?