Rali was hard hit. The inscrutable reserve which was wont to give strength to his proud features had broken down.
A terrible thing had happened. In the night a powerful band of robbers from the north had swept through the camp of his tribe, and had captured and driven away many camels.
Only a month before the impoverished remnants of Rali’s band had moved south from the robber-molested mountains of Aïr to seek shelter and peace on the borders of bushland and desert in the territory of Damergou. But it had availed them nothing to seek to flee from the age-old oppression of a remorseless Destiny that pursued them.
Yet more had happened than met the eye, for Rali, chief of the band, was overwrought with grief, and this, of a man of his stamp, who had lived from boyhood in a wilderness of bandit warfare, and played with life as an easy hazard, surely told that the disaster of the night, terrible though it had been in general loss of property, held yet a deeper blow, to him, than appeared on the surface. And it was so. For, after the raid, it had been discovered that the robbers had carried off Kahena, the pale-faced wife of Rali, his bride of a few months, and belle of the tribe. And, whereas, to plunder camels is fair enough fortune of war in the remote and disturbed territories of the Sahara, to steal a man’s wife is an unpardonable offence.
For the moment Rali was bewildered and dazed by the blow that had fallen upon him.
But not for long would defeat overwhelm his proud and sensitive spirit. Verily he would awake. Like a creature of the wild, stung to blood-red anger, the time would come when he would seek his enemies—and kill!
For such is the law of the wilderness.
II
Months later, in a certain Tuareg camp on the edge of the desert, two men were engrossed in working out a sum upon the sand; in native fashion, marking out rows of double dots with imprint of the first two fingers of the right hand; then flicking out some portions of their handiwork when mutual consultation advised correction.
The men were Rali and his brother Yofa, and they were calculating the stages of a long journey. Their dark, hawk-like eyes, peering through the slit of their veils, glinted actively; and assuredly some great enterprise was afoot. At last the sums on the sand were swept out by a stroke or two of the hand, and the men arose.