The blood was trickling from his side, and the arid sand drank it as if it were dew.
But his sufferings diminished. Indeed, apart from this burning thirst, he was now in little pain.
Strange visions passed before poor Jean’s eyes: the mountain range of the Cevennes, the well-known haunts of his childhood, his cottage in the mountains.
Above all he saw visions of leafy landscapes, full of shade, mosses, coolness, and running water; his dear old mother, who took him gently by the hand to lead him as she had done in his childhood.
He felt his mother’s kiss! O, his mother, there she was, smoothing his brow with her poor old trembling hands, bathing his burning head with cool water. Could it be? Never more to feel a mother’s kiss, never more to hear her voice? Never, never more? Was this the end of everything? To die there alone, all alone, in the burning sun of the desert! And he half-raised himself, unwilling to die.
“Tjean, come into our dance!”
In front of him, like a whirlwind, like a furious gale, swept the circle of phantom dancers. The fierce gyrations of this vortex seemed to strike sparks from the burning pebbles.
And these spectral dancers, rising in swift spirals, like smoke before a rushing wind, faded away on high, in the fiery crucible of the blue ether.
Jean had the sensation of rising with them, of being borne aloft on terrible wings, and it came to him that this was the climax, the very moment of death.