“’Your term of inactive service expires in fifteen days.  You will return to Paris, and apply at the Ministry to be reinstated.  With what you have learned here, and the relationships we have been able to maintain at Headquarters, you will have no difficulty in being attached to the Geographical Staff of the army.  When you reach the rue de Grenelle you will receive our instructions.’

“I was astonished at their confidence in my knowledge.  When I was reestablished as Captain again in the Geographical Service I understood.  At the monastery, the daily association with Dom Granger and his pupils had kept me constantly convinced of the inferiority of my knowledge.  When I came in contact with my military brethren I realized the superiority of the instruction I had received.  I did not have to concern myself with the details of my mission.  The Ministries invited me to undertake it.  My initiative asserted itself on only one occasion.  When I learned that you were going to leave Wargla on the present expedition, having reason to distrust my practical qualifications as an explorer, I did my best to retard your departure, so that I might join you.  I hope that you have forgiven me by now.”

* * * * *

The light in the west was fading, where the sun had already sunk into a matchless luxury of violet draperies.  We were alone in this immensity, at the feet of the rigid black rocks.  Nothing but ourselves.  Nothing, nothing but ourselves.

I held out my hand to Morhange, and he pressed it.  Then he said: 

“If they still seem infinitely long to me, the several thousand kilometers which separate me from the instant when, my task accomplished, I shall at last find oblivion in the cloister for the things for which I was not made, let me tell you this;—­the several hundred kilometers which still separate us from Shikh-Salah seem to me infinitely short to traverse in your company.”

On the pale water of the little pool, motionless and fixed like a silver nail, a star had just been born.

“Shikh-Salah,” I murmured, my heart full of an indefinable sadness.  “Patience, we are not there yet.”

In truth, we never were to be there.

V

THE INSCRIPTION

With a blow of the tip of his cane Morhange knocked a fragment of rock from the black flank of the mountain.

“What is it?” he asked, holding it out to me.

“A basaltic peridot,” I said.

“It can’t be very interesting, you barely glanced at it.”

“It is very interesting, on the contrary.  But, for the moment, I admit that I am otherwise preoccupied.”

“How?”

“Look this way a bit,” I said, showing towards the west, on the horizon, a black spot across the white plain.

It was six o’clock in the morning.  The sun had risen.  But it could not be found in the surprisingly polished air.  And not a breath of air, not a breath.  Suddenly one of the camels called.  An enormous antelope had just come in sight, and had stopped in its flight, terrified, racing the wall of rock.  It stayed there at a little distance from us, dazed, trembling on its slender legs.