“I still had the strength to keep going, and even as far in the lead as possible, so as not to hear the cries of my little playmates.  Each time one of them fell by the way, unable to rise again, they saw one of the drivers descend from his camel and drag her into the bushes a little way to cut her throat.  But one day, I heard a cry that made me turn around.  It was my mother.  She was kneeling, holding out her poor arms to me.  In an instant I was beside her.  But a great Moor, dressed in white, separated us.  A red moroccan case hung around his neck from a black chaplet.  He drew a cutlass from it.  I can still see the blue steel on the brown skin.  Another horrible cry.  An instant later, driven by a club, I was trotting ahead, swallowing my little tears, trying to regain my place in the caravan.

“Near the wells of Asiou, the Moors were attacked by a party of Tuareg of Kel-Tazeholet, serfs of the great tribe of Kel-Rhela, which rules over Ahaggar.  They, in their turn, were massacred to the last man.  That is how I was brought here, and offered as homage to Antinea, who was pleased with me and ever since has been kind to me.  That is why it is no slave who soothes your fever to-day with stories that you do not even listen to, but the last descendant of the great Sonrhai Emperors, of Sonni-Ali, the destroyer of men and of countries, of Mohammed Azkia, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca, taking with him fifteen hundred cavaliers and three hundred thousand mithkal of gold in the days when our power stretched without rival from Chad to Touat and to the western sea, and when Gao raised her cupola, sister of the sky, above the other cities, higher above her rival cupolas than is the tamarisk above the humble plants of sorghum.”

XVI

THE SILVER HAMMER

Je ne m’en defends plus et je ne veux qu’ aller
Reconnaitre la place ou je dois l’immoler. 
(Andromaque.)

It was this sort of a night when what I am going to tell you now happened.  Toward five o’clock the sky clouded over and a sense of the coming storm trembled in the stifling air.

I shall always remember it.  It was the fifth of January, 1897.

King Hiram and Gale lay heavily on the matting of my room.  Leaning on my elbows beside Tanit-Zerga in the rock-hewn window, I spied the advance tremors of lightning.

One by one they rose, streaking the now total darkness with their bluish stripes.  But no burst of thunder followed.  The storm did not attain the peaks of Ahaggar.  It passed without breaking, leaving us in our gloomy bath of sweat.

“I am going to bed,” said Tanit-Zerga.

I have said that her room was above mine.  Its bay window was some thirty feet above that before which I lay.

She took Gale in her arms.  But King Hiram would have none of it.  Digging his four paws into the matting, he whined in anger and uneasiness.