as Flatters wrote to his wife, “you have to work for hours before you can clean them out and succeed in watering beasts and men.”  By chance we met a caravan there, which was going east towards Rhadames, and had come too far north.  The camels’ humps, shrunken and shaking, bespoke the sufferings of the troop.  Behind came a little gray ass, a pitiful burrow, interfering at every step, and lightened of its pack because the merchants knew that it was going to die.  Instinctively, with its last strength, it followed, knowing that when it could stagger no longer, the end would come and the flutter of the bald vultures’ wings.  I love animals, which I have solid reasons for preferring to men.  But never should I have thought of doing what Morhange did then.  I tell you that our water skins were almost dry, and that our own camels, without which one is lost in the empty desert, had not been watered for many hours.  Morhange made his kneel, uncocked a skin, and made the little ass drink.  I certainly felt gratification at seeing the poor bare flanks of the miserable beast pant with satisfaction.  But the responsibility was mine.  Also I had seen Bou-Djema’s aghast expression, and the disapproval of the thirsty members of the caravan.  I remarked on it.  How it was received!  “What have I given,” replied Morhange, “was my own.  We will reach El-Biodh to-morrow evening, about six o’clock.  Between here and there I know that I shall not be thirsty.”  And that in a tone, in which for the first time he allowed the authority of a Captain to speak.  “That is easy to say,” I thought, ill-humoredly.  “He knows that when he wants them, my water-skin, and Bou-Djema’s, are at his service.”  But I did not yet know Morhange very well, and it is true that until the evening of the next day when we reached El-Biodh, refusing our offers with smiling determination, he drank nothing.

Shades of St. Francis of Assisi!  Umbrian hills, so pure under the rising sun!  It was in the light of a like sunrise, by the border of a pale stream leaping in full cascades from a crescent-shaped niche of the gray rocks of Egere, that Morhange stopped.  The unlooked for waters rolled upon the sand, and we saw, in the light which mirrored them, little black fish.  Fish in the middle of the Sahara!  All three of us were mute before this paradox of Nature.  One of them had strayed into a little channel of sand.  He had to stay there, struggling in vain, his little white belly exposed to the air....  Morhange picked him up, looked at him for a moment, and put him back into the little stream.  Shades of St. Francis.  Umbrian hills....  But I have sworn not to break the thread of the story by these untimely digressions.

* * * * *

“You see,” Captain Morhange said to me a week later, “that I was right in advising you to go farther south before making for Shikh-Salah.  Something told me that this highland of Egere was not interesting from your point of view.  While here you have only to stoop to pick up pebbles which will allow you to establish the volcanic origin of this region much more certainly than Bou-Derba, des Cloizeaux, and Doctor Marres have done.”