I accepted without further urging.

We commenced by unearthing various meteorological and astronomical instruments—­the thermometers of Baudin, Salleron, Fastre, an aneroid, a Fortin barometer, chronometers, a sextant, an astronomical spyglass, a compass glass....  In short, what Duveyrier calls the material that is simplest and easiest to transport on a camel.

As Saint-Avit handed them to me I arranged them on the only table in the room.

“Now,” he announced to me, “there is nothing more but books.  I will pass them to you.  Pile them up in a corner until I can have a book-shelf made.”

For two hours altogether I helped him to heap up a real library.  And what a library!  Such as never before a post in the South had seen.  All the texts consecrated, under whatever titles, by antiquity to the regions of the Sahara were reunited between the four rough-cast walls of that little room of the bordj.  Herodotus and Pliny, naturally, and likewise Strabo and Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, and Ammien Marcellin.  But besides these names which reassured my ignorance a little, I perceived those of Corippus, of Paul Orose, of Eratosthenes, of Photius, of Diodorus of Sicily, of Solon, of Dion Cassius, of Isidor of Seville, of Martin de Tyre, of Ethicus, of Athenee, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, the Itinerarium Antonini Augusti, the Geographi Latini Minores of Riese, the Geographi Graeci Minores of Karl Muller....  Since I have had the occasion to familiarize myself with Agatarchides of Cos and Artemidorus of Ephesus, but I admit that in this instance the presence of their dissertations in the saddle bags of a captain of cavalry caused me some amazement.

I mention further the Descrittione dell’ Africa by Leon l’African, the Arabian Histories of Ibn-Khaldoun, of Al-Iaquob, of El-Bekri, of Ibn-Batoutah, of Mahommed El-Tounsi....  In the midst of this Babel, I remember the names of only two volumes of contemporary French scholars.  There were also the laborious theses of Berlioux[3] and of Schirmer.[4]

[Footnote 3:  Doctrina Ptolemaei ab injuria recentiorum vindicata, sive Nilus Superior et Niger verus, hodiernus Eghiren, ab anitiquis explorati.  Paris, 8vo, 1874, with two maps. (Note by M. Leroux.)]

[Footnote 4:  De nomine et genere popularum qui berberi vulgo dicuntur.  Paris, 8vo, 1892. (Note by M. Leroux.)]

While I proceeded to make piles of as similar dimensions as possible I kept saying to myself: 

“To think that I have been believing all this time that in his mission with Morhange, Saint-Avit was particularly concerned in scientific observations.  Either my memory deceives me strangely or he is riding a horse of another color.  What is sure is that there is nothing for me in the midst of all this chaos.”

He must have read on my face the signs of too apparently expressed surprise, for he said in a tone in which I divined a tinge of defiance: