The Guide of the Desert

by Gustave Aimard

The painter congratulated himself on the solitude in which he found himself, after the noise and uproar with which he had been so long mingled, and which began to oppress his temples, and to cause him to feel a kind of moral lassitude.

He cast his eye round for a bench, which he soon discovered, half-concealed in a bower of orange trees, and sat down with an unspeakable sense of pleasure.

It was about five o'clock in the evening. The breeze had risen, and was refreshing the heated atmosphere; the sun, nearly level with the ground, immeasurably lengthened the shadow of the trees; a number of birds concealed in the foliage were singing with all their might, and millions of insects with transparent wings were humming and flying around the flowers, the sweets of which they were gathering.

The sounds of the fête only came as a far-off echo, and almost inaudible to this solitude, which breathed the most complete calm.

Carried away in spite of himself by all that surrounded him, and submitting to the enervating influence of the perfume exhaled by the flowers, the young man allowed himself to fall back, crossed his arms over his chest, and, half closing his eyes, he fell into a sweet reverie, which soon absorbed his whole being, and made him completely forget reality, to be borne away into the fantastic land of dreams.

How long had he been subjected to this delicious somnolence, without name in our language? He could not have answered his own question; when suddenly he gained consciousness with a rude gesture of ill humour, listening and casting around him a look of discontent.

The sound of conversation had reached him.

However, it would have been in vain for him to try and pierce the darkness, for night had come; he could see no one. He was still alone in the bower, into the recess of which he had withdrawn.

He redoubled his attention; then he discovered that the voices that he had heard were those of two men who had stopped at a few paces behind him, and that the cluster of orange trees, in the midst of which he was alone, precluded his seeing them.

These two men, whoever they might be, appeared to wish not to be heard, for they spoke in a low voice, though with some animation. Unhappily, the Frenchman was so near them that, in spite of himself, and do what he might to prevent it, he heard all they said.