“And it is these boundaries that you have come to determine here, no doubt,” I murmured.

“Just so,” replied my companion.

He was silent, and I respected his silence, prepared by now to be astonished at nothing.

“It is not possible to give confidences by halves, without being ridiculous,” he continued after several minutes of meditation, speaking gravely, in a voice which held no suggestion of that flashing humor which had a month before enchanted the young officers at Wargla.  “I have begun on mine.  I will tell you everything.  Trust my discretion, however, and do not insist upon certain events of my private life.  If, four years ago, at the close of these events, I resolve to enter a monastery, it does not concern you to know my reasons.  I can marvel at it myself, that the passage in my life of a being absolutely devoid of interest should have sufficed to change the current of that life.  I can marvel that a creature whose sole merit was her beauty should have been permitted by the Creator to swing my destiny to such an unforeseen direction.  The monastery at whose doors I knocked had the most valid reasons for doubting the stability of my vocation.  What the world loses in such fashion it often calls back as readily.  In short, I cannot blame the Father Abbot for having forbidden me to apply for my army discharge.  By his instructions, I asked for, and obtained, permission to be placed on the inactive list for three years.  At the end of those three years of consecration it would be seen whether the world was definitely dead to your servant.

“The first day of my arrival at the cloister I was assigned to Dom Granger, and placed by him at work on the Atlas of Christianity.  A brief examination decided him as to what kind of service I was best fitted to render.  This is how I came to enter the studio devoted to the cartography of Northern Africa.  I did not know one word of Arabic, but it happened that in garrison at Lyon I had taken at the Faculte des Lettres, a course with Berlioux,—­a very erudite geographer no doubt, but obsessed by one idea, the influence the Greek and Roman civilizations had exercised on Africa.  This detail of my life was enough for Dom Granger.  He provided me straightway with Berber vocabularies by Venture, by Delaporte, by Brosselard; with the Grammatical Sketch of the Temahaq by Stanley Fleeman, and the Essai de Grammaire de la langue Temachek by Major Hanoteau.  At the end of three months I was able to decipher any inscriptions in Tifinar.  You know that Tifinar is the national writing of the Tuareg, the expression of this Temachek language which seems to us the most curious protest of the Targui race against its Mohammedan enemies.