XXVIII
All day long Fatou-gaye traversed with feverish step thickets and sand, still carrying her sleeping baby on her back. She went to and fro, sometimes breaking into a run, with the distracted movements of a pantheress that has lost her young. Ever she pursued her search under the burning sun, exploring the thickets, groping in the thorny brushwood.
About three in the afternoon, as she was crossing an arid plain, she caught sight of a dead horse, then of a red jacket, then another, and yet another.... It was the scene of the defeat. It was there that the spahis had fallen....
Here and there a sparse growth of mimosas and tamarisks cast upon the yellow soil slender shadows, sun-chequered....
In the remote distance, at the end of this vast plain, the skyline of a village of pointed huts could be seen against the deep blue of the horizon.
Fatou-gaye had halted, trembling and terrified.... She had recognised him, Jean, yonder, stretched out in the sun, with stiffened arms and open mouth. She muttered some obscure, heathen invocation and touched the grigris round her ebony neck.
With haggard, bloodshot eyes, she stood there a long time, muttering softly to herself....
From afar she caught sight of some old women of the enemy tribe, who were making for the corpses, and a horrible surmise flashed upon her....
These hideous old negresses, their skins glistening under the tropic sun, diffused an acrid odour of soumaré. With a jingling of grigris and beads they approached the young soldiers. They stirred them with their feet; as they desecrated them with obscene touch they laughed and uttered mocking ejaculations, resembling the gibbering of monkeys. They profaned these corpses with gruesome buffoonery....
And then they stripped them of their gilt buttons, which they stuck in their frizzled hair; they took from them their steel spurs, their red jackets, their belts....
Fatou-gaye was crouching behind her clump of brushwood, holding herself back, like a cat about to spring. When it came to Jean’s turn, she leaped out, her nails in readiness, uttering cries like a wild beast, and reviling the negro women in a strange tongue....
And the baby, who had woken up, clung to the back of his raging, terrifying mother....
The negro women were afraid and drew back....
Besides, their arms were full enough of booty, and they thought they could come back again on the morrow. They exchanged some words, which Fatou could not understand, and took their departure, turning round, however, to insult her with savage laughter and the mocking gestures of chimpanzees.
When Fatou-gaye was alone, she crouched close to Jean and called him by his name. Three times she cried, “Tjean! Tjean! Tjean!” in shrill tones, which echoed in these solitudes like the voice of a priestess of old who invokes the dead....
There she lay, crouching under the implacable African sun, with unseeing gaze fixed on the distance on the parched and desolate landscape. She was afraid to turn her eyes on Jean’s face.
The vultures swooped down insolently towards her, beating the heavy air with their great dark pinions....
They hovered near the corpses, not yet daring... it was too soon.
Fatou-gaye caught sight of the medal of the Virgin in the spahi’s hand, and understood that he had been praying when death came to him. She, too, had medals of the Virgin and a scapulary among the grigris round her neck. She had been baptised by Catholic priests at St Louis, but it was not in them that she put her trust.
She took a leather amulet, which formerly in the land of Galam a negro woman, her mother had given her. This was the fetish she loved, and she kissed it with ardour.
Then she bent over Jean’s body and raised his head.
Blue flies kept coming out from his open mouth, between his white teeth, and from the wounds in his thorax trickled a fluid already fetid.