Besides, their arms were full enough of booty, and they thought they could come back again on the morrow. They exchanged some words, which Fatou could not understand, and took their departure, turning round, however, to insult her with savage laughter and the mocking gestures of chimpanzees.
When Fatou-gaye was alone, she crouched close to Jean and called him by his name. Three times she cried, “Tjean! Tjean! Tjean!” in shrill tones, which echoed in these solitudes like the voice of a priestess of old who invokes the dead....
There she lay, crouching under the implacable African sun, with unseeing gaze fixed on the distance on the parched and desolate landscape. She was afraid to turn her eyes on Jean’s face.
The vultures swooped down insolently towards her, beating the heavy air with their great dark pinions....
They hovered near the corpses, not yet daring ... it was too soon.
Fatou-gaye caught sight of the medal of the Virgin in the spahi’s hand, and understood that he had been praying when death came to him. She, too, had medals of the Virgin and a scapulary among the grigris round her neck. She had been baptised by Catholic priests at St Louis, but it was not in them that she put her trust.
She took a leather amulet, which formerly in the land of Galam a negro woman, her mother had given her. This was the fetish she loved, and she kissed it with ardour.
Then she bent over Jean’s body and raised his head.
Blue flies kept coming out from his open mouth, between his white teeth, and from the wounds in his thorax trickled a fluid already fetid.