“See there?” said Morhange.

A blackish bundle was balancing on the waves of the creek.

When we had come up even with it we saw that it was a man in the long dark blue robes of the Tuareg.

“Give me your hand,” said Morhange, “and brace yourself against a rock, hard.”

He was very, very strong.  In an instant, as if it were child’s play, he had brought the body ashore.

“He is still alive,” he pronounced with satisfaction.  “Now it is a question of getting him to the grotto.  This is no place to resuscitate a drowned man.”

He raised the body in his powerful arms.

“It is astonishing how little he weighs for a man of his height.”

By the time we had retraced the way to the grotto the man’s cotton clothes were almost dry.  But the dye had run plentifully, and it was an indigo man that Morhange was trying to recall to life.

When I had made him swallow a quart of rum he opened his eyes, looked at the two of us with surprise, then, closing them again, murmured almost unintelligibly a phrase, the sense of which we did not get until some days later: 

“Can it be that I have reached the end of my mission?”

“What mission is he talking about?” I said.

“Let him recover himself completely,” responded Morhange.  “You had better open some preserved food.  With fellows of this build you don’t have to observe the precautions prescribed for drowned Europeans.”

It was indeed a species of giant, whose life we had just saved.  His face, although very thin, was regular, almost beautiful.  He had a clear skin and little beard.  His hair, already white, showed him to be a man of sixty years.

When I placed a tin of corned-beef before him a light of voracious joy came into his eyes.  The tin contained an allowance for four persons.  It was empty in a flash.

“Behold,” said Morhange, “a robust appetite.  Now we can put our questions without scruple.”

Already the Targa had placed over his forehead and face the blue veil prescribed by the ritual.  He must have been completely famished not to have performed this indispensable formality sooner.  There was nothing visible now but the eyes, watching us with a light that grew steadily more sombre.

“French officers,” he murmured at last.

And he took Morhange’s hand, and having placed it against his breast, carried it to his lips.

Suddenly an expression of anxiety passed over his face.

“And my mehari?” he asked.

I explained that our guide was then employed in trying to save his beast.  He in turn told us how it had stumbled, and fallen into the current, and he himself, in trying to save it, had been knocked over.  His forehead had struck a rock.  He had cried out.  After that he remembered nothing more.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Eg-Anteouen.”

“What tribe do you belong to?”