Around him all things were lapped in the profound stillness of noon. The old Moorish houses stood ranged in straight rows, milk-white beneath the intense blue of the sky. At times, behind their brick walls, the ear of the passer-by might catch some negress’s plaintive, drowsy song, or perhaps the eye might light on a small, coal-black negro asleep on a doorstep, lying on his back in the sun, quite naked, with a necklet of coral, forming a dark patch in the midst of universal radiance. On the smooth sand of the streets, the lizards were chasing one another with curious little swaying movements of the head, drawing their tails along the ground and tracing an infinity of fantastic zig-zags, complicated like an Arabic design. A distant noise of kouss-kouss pounders, in its monotonous regularity almost a form of silence, came from Guet n’dar, deadened by the hot, heavy strata of the noontide atmosphere.
It seemed as if this tranquillity of prostrate nature were seeking to make mock of poor Jean’s emotion, and to intensify his sufferings. It oppressed him like a leaden winding sheet.
Of a sudden this country appeared to him as a vast tomb.
The spahi awoke as if from a heavy sleep that had lasted five years.
He felt himself in fierce revolt, revolt against everything and everyone. Why had they taken him from his village, from his mother, to bury him, in the prime of life, in this country of death?
By what right had they made of him that anomalous being called a spahi, a swashbuckler, half African, an outcast, forgotten of everyone, and at last disowned even by his betrothed.
He felt his heart possessed with frantic rage; he was conscious of a desire to wreak his wrath on some person or some object; a desire to torture, to seize, to crush in his mighty arms a fellow man.
And all around him there was nothing, nothing but silence, and heat, and sand.
Alas! he had not even one friend in this whole country, not one devoted comrade to whom he could confide his sorrow. Good God! he was indeed forsaken, indeed alone in the world.