“A mysterious love.  Shame to him who retails the secrets of his loves.  The Sahara lays its impassable barrier about Antinea; that is why the most unreasonable requirements of this woman are, in reality, more modest and chaste than your marriage will be, with its vulgar public show, the bans, the invitations, the announcements telling an evil-minded and joking people that after such and such an hour, on such and such a day, you will have the right to violate your little tupenny virgin.

“I think that is all I have to tell you.  No, there is still one thing more.  I told you a while ago about the red marble hall.  South of Cherchell, to the west of the Mazafran river, on a hill which in the early morning, emerges from the mists of the Mitidja, there is a mysterious stone pyramid.  The natives call it, ’The Tomb of the Christian.’  That is where the body of Antinea’s ancestress, that Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, was laid to rest.  Though it is placed in the path of invasions, this tomb has kept its treasure.  No one has ever been able to discover the painted room where the beautiful body reposes in a glass casket.  All that the ancestress has been able to do, the descendant will be able to surpass in grim magnificence.  In the center of the red marble hall, on the rock whence comes the plaint of the gloomy fountain, a platform is reserved.  It is there, on an orichalch throne, with the Egyptian head-dress and the golden serpent on her brow and the trident of Neptune in her hand, that the marvelous woman I have told you about will be ensconced on that day when the hundred and twenty niches, hollowed out in a circle around her throne, shall each have received its willing prey.

“When I left Ahaggar, you remember that it was niche number 55 that was to be mine.  Since then, I have never stopped calculating and I conclude that it is in number 80 or 85 that I shall repose.  But any calculations based upon so fragile a foundation as a woman’s whim may be erroneous.  That is why I am getting more and more nervous.  ’I must hurry,’ I tell myself.  ‘I must hurry.’

“I must hurry,” I repeated, as if I were in a dream.

He raised his head with an indefinable expression of joy.  His hand trembled with happiness when he shook mine.

“You will see,” he repeated excitedly, “you will see.”

Ecstatically, he took me in his arms and held me there a long moment.

An extraordinary happiness swept over both of us, while, alternately laughing and crying like children, we kept repeating: 

“We must hurry.  We must hurry.”

Suddenly there sprang up a slight breeze that made the tufts of thatch in the roof rustle.  The sky, pale lilac, grew paler still, and, suddenly, a great yellow rent tore it in the east.  Dawn broke over the empty desert.  From within the stockade came dull noises, a bugle call, the rattle of chains.  The post was waking up.