XXVI
The first to awake after barely an hour’s sleep, Jean opens his eyes and sees the white light of dawn filtering between the planks of the hut, shining upon the young men, who are lying half-naked on the ground, their heads pillowed on their red jackets—Bretons, Alsatians, Picards—almost all of them fair-haired men from the north. In this moment of waking, Jean had a kind of prophetic vision, a mournful, mysterious, comprehensive foreknowledge of the destiny of all these exiles, their lives menaced by an ever-lurking death and recklessly cast away.
Close to him lay a graceful feminine form with two black, silver-braceletted arms curving towards him as if to embrace him.
Then, little by little, he remembered that he had arrived the previous night at a village in Guinea, lost in the midst of vast savage regions, that he was farther than ever from home, in a place where even letters would not reach him.
Quietly, so that he might not disturb Fatou and the still sleeping spahis, he approached the open window and gazed out at this new country.
He was overlooking a precipice some three hundred feet deep. This hut that he was in seemed suspended in the air above it. At his feet lay a landscape with the characteristic features of the interior, as yet but vaguely revealed in the pale light of dawn.
There were steep hills, covered with masses of verdure, such as he had never seen before.
Below, right at the foot of the precipice, flowed the river which had brought him thither, a long, silver ribbon upon the mud, partly veiled by a white cloud of morning mist. The crocodiles that lay on the banks looked like small lizards, seen from such a height. The air was filled with an unknown scent.
The exhausted rowers were sleeping down there, where they had halted the previous night, lying in their canoe upon their oars.