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.  “Gale 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.

Cegheir-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, Cegheir-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....