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Up to the moment when, arrived at Shikh-Salah we turn our backs on each other to attain, you Touat, and I the Niger, all your recommendations, all your orders, will be followed by a subaltern, and, I hope, by a friend as well." All the time he was talking so openly I felt delightedly my worst recent fears melting away.
On the pale water of the little pool, motionless and fixed like a silver nail, a star had just been born. "Shikh-Salah," I murmured, my heart full of an indefinable sadness. "Patience, we are not there yet." In truth, we never were to be there. With a blow of the tip of his cane Morhange knocked a fragment of rock from the black flank of the mountain. "What is it?" he asked, holding it out to me.
If, at that moment, someone had offered to lead me back to the route across the white plain near Shikh-Salah, would I have accepted? Hardly. I tried to feel ashamed of my curiosity. I thought of Maillefeu. "He, too, followed this corridor. And now he is down there, in the red marble hall." I had no time to linger over this reminiscence.
In the morning, when I was marking our day's march upon the map, Morhange came toward me. I noticed that his manner was somewhat restrained. "In three days, we shall be at Shikh-Salah," I said to him. "Perhaps by the evening of the second day, badly as the camels go." "Perhaps we shall separate before then," he muttered. "How so?" "You see, I have changed my itinerary a little.
Then he said: "If they still seem infinitely long to me, the several thousand kilometers which separate me from the instant when, my task accomplished, I shall at last find oblivion in the cloister for the things for which I was not made, let me tell you this; the several hundred kilometers which still separate us from Shikh-Salah seem to me infinitely short to traverse in your company."
The change in my first plan was as follows: After reaching Ighelaschem, six hundred kilometers south of Temassinin, instead of taking the direct road to Touat via Rhât, I would, penetrating between the high land of Mouydir and Ahaggar, strike off to the southwest as far as Shikh-Salah. Here I would turn again northwards, towards In-Salah, by the road to the Soudan and Agadès.
"Because, if you promise me that, provided, of course, that my company is not unwelcome to you I will go with you. Either way, I shall have two hundred kilometers to go. I shall strike for Shikh-Salah from the south, instead of from the west that is the only difference." Morhange looked at me with emotion. "Why do you do this?" he murmured.
"You see," Captain Morhange said to me a week later, "that I was right in advising you to go farther south before making for Shikh-Salah. Something told me that this highland of Egere was not interesting from your point of view.
To the west, straight behind us, the track that we were leaving unrolled like a pale ribbon. The white plain, the road to Shikh-Salah, the established halts, the well-known wells.... And, on the other side, this black wall against the mauve sky, this dark passage. I looked at Morhange. "We had better stop here," he said simply. "Eg-Anteouen advises us to take as much water here as we can carry."
At the same time, at the Geographic Bureau, I heard of the journey that you are undertaking. From Wargla to Shikh-Salah our two itineraries are the same. Only I must admit to you that it is the first voyage of this kind that I have ever undertaken.
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