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I want to see Gâo once again, Gâo with its blue gum-trees and its green water." I felt myself blushing. "I will go, Tanit-Zerga. I would rather die of thirst in the midst of the desert than stay here. Let us start." "Tut!" she said. "Not yet." She showed me that the dizzy descent was in brilliant moonlight. "Not yet. We must wait. They would see us.
But you must not think that we were only frivolous; and I will tell you, if you like, how I, who am talking to you, I saved a French chieftain who must be vastly greater than yourself, to judge by the number of gold ribbons he had on his white sleeves." "Tell me, little Tanit-Zerga," I said, my eyes elsewhere.
I heard, it is true, from Sydya and Aguida, that my companion liked pomegranates or that he could not endure kouskous of bananas. But if I asked for a different kind of information, they fled, in fright, down the long corridors. With Tanit-Zerga, it was different. This child seemed to have a distaste for mentioning before me anything bearing in any way upon Antinea.
She had four bracelets, still heavier, on her wrists and anklets, and, for clothing, a green silk tunic, slashed in points, braided with gold. Green, bronze, gold. "You are a Sonrhaï, Tanit-Zerga?" I asked gently. She replied with almost ferocious pride: "I am a Sonrhaï." "Strange little thing," I thought. Evidently this was a subject on which Tanit-Zerga did not intend the conversation to turn.
They all thought only of her.... But you, you wanted to kill her." I gave a low moan. "You are suffering," she said. "They broke your arm." "Dislocated it anyhow." "Let me see." With infinite gentleness, she passed her smooth little hands over my shoulder. "You tell me that there is a white Targa on guard before my door, Tanit-Zerga," I said. "Then how did you get in?"
That is what people feel and say even when they know that in a few hours they will have a good rest with food and water. I was suffering terribly. Every step jolted my poor shoulder. At one time, I wanted to stop, to sit down. Then I looked at Tanit-Zerga. She was walking ahead with her eyes almost closed. Her expression was an indefinable one of mingled suffering and determination.
"Well," said Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh, "you must not rejoin the road from Timissao to Timbuctoo until you are four hundred miles from here toward Iferouane, or better still, at the spring of Telemsi. That is the boundary between the Tuareg of Ahaggar and the Awellimiden Tuareg." The little voice of Tanit-Zerga broke in: "It was the Awellimiden Tuareg who massacred my people and carried me into slavery.
Tanit-Zerga was standing up. All about us, on our heads, the sun blazed on the hamada, burning it white. Suddenly the child stretched out her arms. She gave a terrible cry. "Gâo! There is Gâo!" I looked at her. "Gâo," she repeated. "Oh, I know it well! There are the trees and the fountains, the cupolas and the towers, the palm trees, the great red and white flowers. Gâo...."
"You are fleeing now, but you are mistaken if you think that you will look at the world with the same eyes as before. Henceforth, one idea, will follow you everywhere you go; and in one year, five, perhaps ten years, you will pass again through the corridor through which you have just come." "Be still, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh," said the trembling voice of Tanit-Zerga.
"We must not let her eat too much," said Tanit-Zerga. "She would not be able to follow us. And to-morrow she must work. If she catches another ourane, it will be for us." You have walked in the desert. You know how terrible the first hours of the night are. When the moon comes up, huge and yellow, a sharp dust seems to rise in suffocating clouds.
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