“Saved!” I exclaimed suddenly.

Abruptly on our right a crevice opened in the midst of the wall.  It was the almost perpendicular bed of a stream, an affluent of the one we had had the unfortunate idea of following that morning.  Already a veritable torrent was gushing over it with a fine uproar.

I have never better appreciated the incomparable sure-footedness of camels in the most precipitate places.  Bracing themselves, stretching out their great legs, balancing themselves among the rocks that were beginning to be swept loose, our camels accomplished at that moment what the mules of the Pyrannees might have failed in.

After several moments of superhuman effort we found ourselves at last out of danger, on a kind of basaltic terrace, elevated some fifty meters above the channel of the stream we had just left.  Luck was with us; a little grotto opened out behind.  Bou-Djema succeeded in sheltering the camels there.  From its threshold we had leisure to contemplate in silence the prodigious spectacle spread out before us.

You have, I believe, been at the Camp of Chalons for artillery drills.  You have seen when the shell bursts how the chalky soil of the Marne effervesces like the inkwells at school, when we used to throw a piece of calcium carbonate into them.  Well, it was almost like that, but in the midst of the desert, in the midst of obscurity.  The white waters rushed into the depths of the black hole, and rose and rose towards the pedestal on which we stood.  And there was the uninterrupted noise of thunder, and still louder, the sound of whole walls of rock, undermined by the flood, collapsing in a heap and dissolving in a few seconds of time in the midst of the rising water.

All the time that this deluge lasted, one hour, perhaps two, Morhange and I stayed bending over this fantastic foaming vat; anxious to see, to see everything, to see in spite of everything; rejoicing with a kind of ineffable horror when we felt the shelf of basalt on which we had taken refuge swaying beneath us from the battering impact of the water.  I believe that never for an instant did we think, so beautiful it was, of wishing for the end of that gigantic nightmare.

Finally a ray of the sun shone through.  Only then did we look at each other.

Morhange held out his hand.

“Thank you,” he said simply.

And he added with a smile: 

“To be drowned in the very middle of the Sahara would have been pretentious and ridiculous.  You have saved us, thanks to your power of decision, from this very paradoxical end.”

Ah, that he had been thrown by a misstep of his camel and rolled to his death in the midst of the flood!  Then what followed would never have happened.  That is the thought that comes to me in hours of weakness.  But I have told you that I pull myself out of it quickly.  No, no, I do not regret it, I cannot regret it, that what happened did happen.