In your voyage down the west coast of Africa, after passing the southern extremity of Morocco, you sail for days and nights together past the shores of a never-ending land of desolation. It is the Sahara, “the great sea without water,” to which the Moors have given also the name of “Bled-el-Ateuch,” the land of thirst.

These desert shores stretch for five hundred leagues without one port of call for the passing vessel, without one blade of grass, one sign of life.

Solitude succeeds solitude with mournful monotony; shifting sandhills, vague horizons—and the heat grows each day more intense.

At last there comes in sight over the sands an old city, white, with yellow palm trees set here and there—it is St Louis on the Senegal, the capital of Senegambia.

A church, a mosque, a tower, houses built in Moorish style—the whole seems asleep under the burning sun, like those Portuguese towns, St Paul and St Philip of Benguela, that once flourished on the banks of the Congo.

As one draws nearer one sees with surprise that this town is not built on the shore, that it has not even a port, nor any direct means of communication with the outer world. The flat, unbroken coast line is as inhospitable as that of the Sahara, and a ridge of breakers forever prevents the approach of ships.

Another feature, not visible from a distance, now presents itself in the vast human ant heaps on the shore, thousands and thousands of thatched huts, lilliputian dwellings with pointed roofs, and teeming with a grotesque population of negroes. These are the two large Yolof towns, Guet n’dar and N’dar-toute, which lie between St Louis and the sea.

If your ship lies to awhile off this country, long pirogues with pointed bows like fish-heads, and bodies shaped like sharks, are soon seen approaching. They are manned by negroes, who row standing. These pirogue men are tall and lean, of Herculean proportions, admirable build and muscular development, and their faces are those of gorillas. They have capsized ten times at least while crossing the breakers. With negro perseverance, with the agility and strength of acrobats, ten times in succession have they righted their pirogue and made a fresh start. Sweat and sea water trickle from their bare skins, which gleam like polished ebony.

Here they are in spite of all, smiling with an air of triumph, and displaying their magnificent white teeth. Their costume consists of an amulet and a bead necklet, their cargo of a carefully sealed leaden box, which contains the mails.

In this box also are orders from the governor for the newly arrived ship, and in it, too, are deposited papers addressed to members of the colony.

A man in a hurry can safely entrust himself to these boatmen, secure in the knowledge that he will be fished out of the sea as often as necessary with the utmost care, and that eventually he will be deposited on the beach.

But it is more comfortable to continue one’s voyage as far south as the mouth of the Senegal, where flat-bottomed boats take off the passengers and convey them smoothly by river to St Louis.

This isolation from the sea is one of the chief causes of the stagnation and dreariness of this country. St Louis cannot serve as a port of call to mail-steamers or merchantmen on their way to the southern hemisphere. One goes to St Louis if one must, and this gives one the feeling of being a prisoner cut off from the rest of the world.

II

In the northern quarter of St Louis, near the mosque, there stood a little solitary house belonging to one Samba-Hamet, trader on the upper river. It was a lime-washed house. The cracks of its brick walls, the crevices in its heat-shrunken wood-work harboured legions of white ants and blue lizards. Two marabout cranes haunted its roof, clacking their beaks in the sunshine, and solemnly stretching out their featherless necks when anyone chanced to pass along the straight, unfrequented street.

O the dreariness of this land of Africa!

The slight shadow of a frail thorn palm moved in its slow daily course along the whole length of the heated wall; the palm was the only tree in the quarter, where no green thing refreshed the eye. On its yellowed fronds flights of those tiny blue or pink birds, called in France bengalis, would often come and perch. But all around lay sand, sand, nothing but sand. Never a tuft of moss, never a fresh blade of grass grew on the soil, parched by the burning breath of the Sahara.

III

On the ground floor dwelt a horrible old negress called Coura n’diaye, once the favourite of a great negro monarch. There she had her collection of grotesque tatters, her little slave girls, decked with beads of blue glass, her goats, her big-horned sheep, her half-starved, yellow curs.

In the upper storey there was a large, lofty room, square in shape, to which an outside staircase of worm-eaten wood gave access.

IV

Every evening at sunset, a man in a red jacket, with a Mussulman fez on his head—in a word, a spahi—entered Samba-Hamet’s house. Coura n’diaye’s two marabout cranes used to watch him from a distance as he approached. From the farther end of the dead-alive town they would recognise his gait, his step, the striking colours of his uniform, and would show no nervousness at his entry—so long had they known him.

He was a tall man, of proud, erect carriage; he was of pure European race, although the African sun had already deeply embrowned his face and chest. This spahi was a remarkably fine-looking man, a grave and manly type of beauty, with large clear eyes, almond-shaped like an Arab’s. From under his fez, which was pushed to the back of his head, a lock of brown hair had escaped and hung in disorder over his broad, unsullied brow.

The red jacket was admirably becoming to his well-moulded figure, and his whole build was a compound of litheness and muscular strength.

As a rule he was serious and thoughtful, but his smile had a seductive charm, and gave a glimpse of teeth of remarkable whiteness.

V

One evening, the man in the red jacket could be seen climbing Samba-Hamet’s wooden staircase with more than his customary air of abstraction.

He entered the lofty chamber, his own, and seemed surprised at finding no one in it.

It was a curious place, this lodging of the spahi’s. It was a bare room, furnished with mat-covered benches. Strips of parchment, written upon by the priests of Maghreb, and talismans of various kinds hung from the ceiling.

He went to a large casket, raised on feet, ornamented with strips of copper and variegated with brilliant colours, a box such as is used by the Yolofs for locking up their valuables. He tried it and found it locked.

Thereupon he lay down on a tara, a kind of sofa made of light laths, the work of negroes of the Gambia shore. Then he took from his pocket a letter, and began to read it, first kissing the corner with the signature.

VI

It was without doubt a love-letter, written by some fair one—an elegant Parisienne, perhaps, or possibly a romantic senora—to this handsome spahi d’Afrique, who seems of the very mould for playing leading rÔles as the lover in melodrama.

This letter will perchance furnish us with the clue to some highly dramatic adventure, which will serve as prelude to our tale.

VII

The letter, which the spahi had touched with his lips, bore the postmark of a village hidden away in the Cevennes. It was written by a poor old hand, trembling and unpractised. Its lines overlapped, and it was not free from mistakes.

The letter said:—

VIII

... Jean leaning on his elbow at the window fell into a reverie, looking absently at the wide prospect of African scenery stretched out before him—the pointed outlines of the Yolof huts, grouped by hundreds at his feet—in the distance the troubled sea and the ceaseless onset of the African breakers; the yellow sun about to set, still shedding upon the desert, further than the eye could see, its wan radiance; sand interminable; a distant caravan of Moors; flights of birds of prey swooping through the air; and yonder, a point on which he fixed his eyes, the cemetery of Sorr, whither he had already escorted some of his comrades, mountain-bred like himself, who had died of fever in that accursed climate.

O to return home to his aged parents, to live in a little house with Jeanne MÉry, quite close to the humble paternal roof. Why had he been exiled to this land of Africa? What had he in common with this country? As for this uniform and this Arab fez in which they had dressed him up, and which, for all that, gave him so grand an air, what a burlesque disguise for him, the humble little peasant from the Cevennes.

He remained there a long time lost in thought, dreaming of his village, this poor soldier on the banks of the Senegal. With sunset and nightfall, his thoughts plunged themselves in unrelieved gloom.

From the direction of N’dar-toute came the hurried drumming of the tom-tom, summoning the negroes to the bamboula, and fires were lighted in the Yolof huts. It was an evening in December; a vexatious winter wind sprang up, whirling the sand in eddies here and there, and the great, parched land shuddered with an unwonted sensation of chill.