XXIV
It is a calm night at the end of February, a typical cold weather night—calm and cool, following upon a burning day.
The column of spahis bound for Dialamban is crossing at a walking pace the plains of Legbar. Leave had been given to break rank, each man at his choice and pleasure, and Jean, who has fallen to the rear, is marching quietly along in the company of his friend Nyaor....
In the Sahara and the Soudan there are cold nights such as this, possessing the clear splendour of our own winter nights, but with greater transparency and luminousness.
A death-like stillness pervades the whole country. The sky is greenish blue, sombre and deep, with an infinity of stars. The moon shines bright as day, and defines the outlines of things with surprising sharpness, tinging them with rosy light.
In the distance, farther than sight can penetrate, stretch swamps overgrown with the depressing vegetation of the mangrove tree. Such is all this region of Africa, from the left bank of the river as far as the inaccessible borders of Guinea.
Sirius is rising; the moon has reached its zenith; the silence is awe-inspiring.
Out of the pink sand rise the tall, bluish euphorbiæ, casting a short, hard shadow. The moon outlines the smallest shadows of the plants with a set and frozen precision, intense in its immobility and mystery.
Here and there are clumps of brushwood, blurred obscurities, forming great gloomy patches on the luminous, pink background of the sands; then sheets of stagnant water, with vapour floating above them like white smoke, feverish miasma, more noxious and subtle than that of the day time. There is a penetrating sensation of chilliness, strange after the heat of the day; the moist air is all impregnated with the odour of great swamps.
Here and there by the roadside lie large skeletons, contorted with pain, carcases of camels, swimming in a black, fetid fluid. There they lie, grinning at the moon, shamelessly displaying their flanks, torn by vultures, their bodies hideously disembowelled.
From time to time the cry of a swamp bird breaks the immense silence.
At long intervals a baobab stretches its massive branches into the still air, like a great dead madrepore, a tree of stone, and the moon defines with surprising sharpness the contours of its structure, rigid like a mastodon’s, conveying to the imagination the impression of a thing inert, petrified and cold.
In the midst of its polished branches perch black masses: the inevitable vultures. Whole families of them roost there confidingly, sleeping heavily; they suffer Jean to approach, with the indifference of fetish birds, and the moon casts blue reflections and metallic gleams on their great folded wings.
And Jean is full of wonder at this first revelation at dead of night of all the intimate details of this land.
At two o’clock there bursts forth a chorus of yells, as of dogs baying the moon, but more savage, more grating, more weirdly sinister. Sometimes at night at St Louis, when the wind blew from the direction of the cemetery, Jean had fancied he heard in the far distance similar lamentations. But to-night this lugubrious music was close at hand, there, in the brush. The dismal yelping of jackals mingled with piercing strident caterwaulings of hyenas. A battle was in progress between two wandering packs on the prowl in search of dead camels.
“What is it?” Jean asked the black spahi.
It was, perhaps, a presentiment: a kind of horror seized him. The thing was undoubtedly there, quite near him, in the brush, and the sound of these voices made his flesh creep and his hair stand on end.
“Those who are lying dead,” replied Nyaor-fall with expressive pantomime, “those who are lying dead on the ground, these beasts find them and eat them.”
And when he said “eat them,” he made as if to bite his black arm with his magnificent white teeth.
Jean understood and shuddered. Afterwards, whenever he heard at night these dismal concerts, he remembered the explanation which Nyaor’s mimicry had made so clear, and he, who in broad daylight was seldom afraid, shuddered and felt chilled to the bone by one of those vague and gloomy forebodings that assail the superstitious mountaineer.
The noise grows fainter and dies away in the distance; it breaks out again, somewhat muffled, at another point of the horizon, then it ceases and all is still again.
The white vapours that hang above the sleeping waters grow denser with the approach of morning. One is penetrated and chilled to the bone by the glacial dampness of the swamps. It is a curious sensation, to experience cold in this country. The dew falls. Little by little the moon glides down the western sky, is obscured, extinguished. The heart is wrung by the solitude.
At last, low on the horizon, appear the thatched roofs of the village of Dialamban, where at dawn the spahis are to pitch their camp.