So I am longing for what I dread.  I shall be dejected if I do not find myself in the presence of what makes me strangely fearful.

In the depths of the valley of Wadi Mia a jackal is barking.  Now and again, when a beam of moonlight breaks in a silver patch through the hollows of the heat-swollen clouds, making him think he sees the young sun, a turtle dove moans among the palm trees.

I hear a step outside.  I lean out of the window.  A shade clad in luminous black stuff glides over the hard-packed earth of the terrace of the fortification.  A light shines in the electric blackness.  A man has just lighted a cigarette.  He crouches, facing southwards.  He is smoking.

It is Cegheir-ben-Cheikh, our Targa guide, the man who in three days is to lead us across the unknown plateaus of the mysterious Imoschaoch, across the hamadas of black stones, the great dried oases, the stretches of silver salt, the tawny hillocks, the flat gold dunes that are crested over, when the “alize” blows, with a shimmering haze of pale sand.

Cegheir-ben-Cheikh!  He is the man.  There recurs to my mind Duveyrier’s tragic phrase, “At the very moment the Colonel was putting his foot in the stirrup he was felled by a sabre blow."[2] Cegheir-ben-Cheikh!  There he is, peacefully smoking his cigarette, a cigarette from the package that I gave him....  May the Lord forgive me for it.

[Footnote 2:  H. Duveyrier, “The Disaster of the Flatters Mission.”  Bull.  Geol.  Soc., 1881.]

The lamp casts a yellow light on the paper.  Strange fate, which, I never knew exactly why, decided one day when I was a lad of sixteen that I should prepare myself for Saint Cyr, and gave me there Andre de Saint-Avit as classmate.  I might have studied law or medicine.  Then I should be today a respectable inhabitant of a town with a church and running water, instead of this cotton-clad phantom, brooding with an unspeakable anxiety over this desert which is about to swallow me.

A great insect has flown in through the window.  It buzzes, strikes against the rough cast, rebounds against the globe of the lamp, and then, helpless, its wings singed by the still burning candle, drops on the white paper.

It is an African May bug, big, black, with spots of livid gray.

I think of others, its brothers in France, the golden-brown May bugs, which I have seen on stormy summer evenings projecting themselves like little particles of the soil of my native countryside.  It was there that as a child I spent my vacations, and later on, my leaves.  On my last leave, through those same meadows, there wandered beside me a slight form, wearing a thin scarf, because of the evening air, so cool back there.  But now this memory stirs me so slightly that I scarcely raise my eyes to that dark corner of my room where the light is dimly reflected by the glass of an indistinct portrait.  I realize of how little consequence has become what had seemed at one time capable of filling all my life.  This plaintive mystery is of no more interest to me.  If the strolling singers of Rolla came to murmur their famous nostalgic airs under the window of this bordj I know that I should not listen to them, and if they became insistent I should send them on their way.