“Play your cards, gentlemen, play your cards.  There are ten thousand louis in the bank.  Play your cards, gentlemen.”

In the name of God, am I or am I not at Ahaggar?

VIII

AWAKENING AT AHAGGAR

It was broad daylight when I opened my eyes.  I thought at once of Morhange.  I could not see him, but I heard him, close by, giving little grunts of surprise.

I called to him.  He ran to me.

“Then they didn’t tie you up?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon.  They did.  But they did it badly; I managed to get free.”

“You might have untied me, too,” I remarked crossly.

“What good would it have done?  I should only have waked you up.  And I thought that your first word would be to call me.  There, that’s done.”

I reeled as I tried to stand on my feet.

Morhange smiled.

“We might have spent the whole night smoking and drinking and not been in a worse state,” he said.  “Anyhow, that Eg-Anteouen with his hasheesh is a fine rascal.”

“Cegheir-ben-Cheikh,” I corrected.

I rubbed my hand over my forehead.

“Where are we?”

“My dear boy,” Morhange replied, “since I awakened from the extraordinary nightmare which is mixed up with the smoky cave and the lamp-lit stairway of the Arabian Nights, I have been going from surprise to surprise, from confusion to confusion.  Just look around you.”

I rubbed my eyes and stared.  Then I seized my friend’s hand.

“Morhange,” I begged, “tell me if we are still dreaming.”

We were in a round room, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, and of about the same height, lighted by a great window opening on a sky of intense blue.

Swallows flew back and forth, outside, giving quick, joyous cries.

The floor, the incurving walls and the ceiling were of a kind of veined marble like porphyry, panelled with a strange metal, paler than gold, darker than silver, clouded just then by the early morning mist that came in through the window in great puffs.

I staggered toward this window, drawn by the freshness of the breeze and the sunlight which was chasing away my dreams, and I leaned my elbows on the balustrade.

I could not restrain a cry of delight.

I was standing on a kind of balcony, cut into the flank of a mountain, overhanging an abyss.  Above me, blue sky; below appeared a veritable earthly paradise hemmed in on all sides by mountains that formed a continuous and impassable wall about it.  A garden lay spread out down there.  The palm trees gently swayed their great fronds.  At their feet was a tangle of the smaller trees which grow in an oasis under their protection:  almonds, lemons, oranges, and many others which I could not distinguish from that height.  A broad blue stream, fed by a waterfall, emptied into a charming lake, the waters of which had the marvellous transparency which comes in high altitudes.  Great birds flew in circles over this green hollow; I could see in the lake the red flash of a flamingo.