The Moor wheeled his stallion with an elaborate caracole.
"If the Sidi had used my services from the first," he said, "he would have been saved an hour's ride. Forward, Sidi!"
The sergeant lifted his eyebrows at Aylmer with an air of comical resignation. To the native officer he gave a decisive little nod. With Daoud leading, the brown stallion arching his neck in remonstrance to a tightened rein and goading spur, the column broke formation and in single file turned northwards into the broom scrub which fringes the tilled lands of the Chawia.
The horsemen rode in silence. The mantle of Rattier's taciturnity, rent to rags in D'Hubert's office, seemed to have been restored to its pristine imperviousness, seemed, indeed, to hang heavy upon the spirits of the whole company. Now and again the commandant's lips moved uneasily, but the spoken word died still-born. A Goumier would address fervent maledictions to the memory of the female ancestors of a stumbling horse; curt conferences took place at long intervals between Perinaud and the native officer. But apart from this, the thud of hoofs meeting sand or earth and the dull rap of rein or stirrup leather were all the sounds which broke the stillness. The heavy noontide heat seemed to have swallowed into silence all sound. For sound denotes creative energy, and energy, when the sun is at its zenith in South Morocco, is sapped.
Their course, as Aylmer was quick to notice, led perpetually upward, but in gradients which almost eluded notice. Gray blue in the haze of distance, the rolling uplands culminated in a range of low hills, but these were a full day's march beyond their powers. Their goal, if it were to be reached within daylight, must be nearer than that. His attention, as the hours went monotonously by, was at last drawn to a gap in the far mapped expanse of vegetation.
A line of green, deeper and of more luxuriant growth than the thickets around them, divided the jungle from east to west. Daoud, turning in his saddle, waved his hand in an important gesture.
"The Gorge of the Bou Djerba, Sidi," he said. "It is my advice that I go forward to reconnoitre--alone."
Aylmer looked at Perinaud. The sergeant shrugged his shoulders.