“My Tadekka is different, the capital of the veiled people, placed by Ibn-Khaldoun twenty days south of Wargla, which he calls Tadmekka.  It is towards this Tadmekka that I am headed.  I must establish Tadmekka in the ruins of Es-Souk.  The commercial trade route, which in the ninth century bound the Tunisian Djerid to the bend the Niger makes at Bourroum, passed by Es-Souk.  It is to study the possibility of reestablishing this ancient thoroughfare that the Ministries gave me this mission, which has given me the pleasure of your companionship.”

“You are probably in for a disappointment,” I said.  “Everything indicates that the commerce there is very slight.”

“Well, I shall see,” he answered composedly.

This was while we were following the unicolored banks of a salt lake.  The great saline stretch shone pale-blue, under the rising sun.  The legs of our five mehara cast on it their moving shadows of a darker blue.  For a moment the only inhabitant of these solitudes, a bird, a kind of indeterminate heron, rose and hung in the air, as if suspended from a thread, only to sink back to rest as soon as we had passed.

I led the way, selecting the route, Morhange followed.  Enveloped in a bernous, his head covered with the straight chechia of the Spahis, a great chaplet of alternate red and white beads, ending in a cross, around his neck, he realized perfectly the ideal of Father Lavigerie’s White Fathers.

After a two-days’ halt at Temassinin we had just left the road followed by Flatters, and taken an oblique course to the south.  I have the honor of having antedated Fourcau in demonstrating the importance of Temassinin as a geometrical point for the passage of caravans, and of selecting the place where Captain Pein has just now constructed a fort.  The junction for the roads that lead to Touat from Fezzan and Tibesti, Temassinin is the future seat of a marvellous Intelligence Department.  What I had collected there in two days about the disposition of our Senoussis enemies was of importance.  I noticed that Morhange let me proceed with my inquiries with complete indifference.

These two days he had passed in conversation with the old Negro guardian of the turbet, which preserves, under its plaster dome, the remains of the venerated Sidi-Moussa.  The confidences they exchanged, I am sorry to say that I have forgotten.  But from the Negro’s amazed admiration, I realized the ignorance in which I stood to the mysteries of the desert, and how familiar they were to my companion.

And if you want to get any idea of the extraordinary originality which Morhange introduced into such surroundings, you who, after all, have a certain familiarity with the tropics, listen to this.  It was exactly two hundred kilometers from here, in the vicinity of the Great Dune, in that horrible stretch of six days without water.  We had just enough for two days before reaching the next well, and you know these wells;