“Be sincere in your turn, if you please.  I am sure that you have the greatest desire to inform the Arabian Office about the practices of the Senoussis.  But admit that the information that you will obtain is not the sole and innermost aim of your excursion.  You are a geologist, my friend.  You have found a chance to gratify your taste in this trip.  No one would think of blaming you because you have known how to reconcile what is useful to your country and agreeable to yourself.  But, for the love of God, don’t deny it; I need no other proof than your presence here on this side of the Tidifest, a very curious place from a mineralogical point of view, but some hundred and fifty kilometers south of your official route.”

It was not possible to have countered me with a better grace.  I parried by attacking.

“Am I to conclude from all this that I do not know the real aims of your trip, and that they have nothing to do with the official motives?”

I had gone a bit too far.  I felt it from the seriousness with which Morhange’s reply was delivered.

“No, my dear friend, you must not conclude just that.  I should have no taste for a lie which was based on fraud towards the estimable constitutional bodies which have judged me worthy of their confidence and their support.  The ends that they have assigned to me I shall do my best to attain.  But I have no reason for hiding from you that there is another, quite personal, which is far nearer to my heart.  Let us say, if you will, to use a terminology that is otherwise deplorable, that this is the end while the others are the means.”

“Would there be any indiscretion?....”

“None,” replied my companion.  “Shikh-Salah is only a few days distant.  He whose first steps you have guided with such solicitude in the desert should have nothing hidden from you.”

We had halted in the valley of a little dry well where a few sickly plants were growing.  A spring near by was circled by a crown of gray verdure.  The camels had been unsaddled for the night, and were seeking vainly, at every stride, to nibble the spiny tufts of had.  The black and polished sides of the Tidifest Mountains rose, almost vertically, above our heads.  Already the blue smoke of the fire on which Bou-Djema was cooking dinner rose through the motionless air.

Not a sound, not a breath.  The smoke mounted straight, straight and slowly up the pale steps of the firmament.

“Have you ever heard of the Atlas of Christianity?” asked Morhange.

“I think so.  Isn’t it a geographical work published by the Benedictines under the direction of a certain Dom Granger?”

“Your memory is correct,” said Morhange.  “Even so let me explain a little more fully some of the things you have not had as much reason as I to interest yourself in.  The Atlas of Christianity proposes to establish the boundaries of that great tide of Christianity through all the ages, and for all parts of the globe.  An undertaking worthy of the Benedictine learning, worthy of such a prodigy of erudition as Dom Granger himself.”