Cegheir-ben-Cheikh had reckoned eight days to get to the wooded country of the Awellimiden, forerunners of the grassy steppes of the Soudan.  He knew well the worth of his beast.  Tanit-Zerga had suddenly given him a name, El Mellen, the white one, for the magnificent mehari had an almost spotless coat.  Once he went two days without eating, merely picking up here and there a branch of an acacia tree whose hideous white spines, four inches long, filled me with fear for our friend’s oesophagus.  The wells marked out by Cegheir-ben-Cheikh were indeed at the indicated spots, but we found nothing in them but a burning yellow mud.  It was enough for the camel, enough so that at the end of the fifth day, thanks to prodigious self-control, we had used up only one of our two water skins.  Then we believed ourselves safe.

Near one of these muddy puddles, I succeeded that day in shooting down a little straight-horned desert gazelle.  Tanit-Zerga skinned the beast and we regaled ourselves with a delicious haunch.  Meantime, little Gale, who never ceased prying about the cracks in the rocks during our mid-day halts in the heat, discovered an ourane, a sand crocodile, five feet long, and made short work of breaking his neck.  She ate so much she could not budge.  It cost us a pint of water to help her digestion.  We gave it with good grace, for we were happy.  Tanit-Zerga did not say so, but her joy at knowing that I was thinking no more of the woman in the gold diadem and the emeralds was apparent.  And really, during those days, I hardly thought of her.  I thought only of the torrid heat to be avoided, of the water skins which, if you wished to drink fresh water, had to be left for an hour in a cleft in the rocks; of the intense joy which seized you when you raised to your lips a leather goblet brimming with that life-saving water....  I can say this with authority, with good authority, indeed; passion, spiritual or physical, is a thing for those who have eaten and drunk and rested.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon.  The frightful heat was slackening.  We had left a kind of rocky crevice where we had had a little nap.  Seated on a huge rock, we were watching the reddening west.

I spread out the roll of paper on which Cegheir-ben-Cheikh had marked the stages of our journey as far as the road from the Soudan.  I realized again with joy that his itinerary was exact and that I had followed it scrupulously.

“The evening of the day after to-morrow,” I said, “we shall be setting out on the stage which will take us, by the next dawn, to the waters at Telemsi.  Once there, we shall not have to worry any more about water.”

Tanit-Zerga’s eyes danced in her thin face.

“And Gao?” she asked.

“We will be only a week from the Niger.  And Cegheir-ben-Cheikh said that at Telemsi, one reached a road overhung with mimosa.”

“I know the mimosa,” she said.  “They are the little yellow balls that melt in your hand.  But I like the caper flowers better.  You will come with me to Gao.  My father, Sonni-Azkia, was killed, as I told you, by the Awellimiden.  But my people must have rebuilt the villages.  They are used to that.  You will see how you will be received.”