Is this the moment when Jean’s soul will take its flight thither into that overwhelming noontide air?... So far from home, where will it find a resting place in all these desert plains?... Whither will it vanish?...
No. The doctor, who had remained there a long time, expecting the final departure, has quietly withdrawn.
The cooler hours of evening have come, and the breeze off the sea brings relief to the dying. To-morrow, perhaps! But Jean is more tranquil, and his head does not burn so terribly.
Down below in the street, outside the door, a small negro girl sat crouching on the sand, playing at knucklebones with white pebbles to keep herself in countenance when any one went past. She had been there since morning, endeavouring to avoid notice, playing her little part, for fear of being driven away. She did not venture to question any one, but she knew very well that if the spahi were to die, he would be carried through this door on his way to the cemetery of Sorr.
XIX
The fever lasted another week, and daily at noon Jean became delirious. Each renewed attack was regarded with anxiety. Nevertheless the danger was over, and the disease conquered.
Oh those hot hours of midday, hours that weigh most heavily upon the sick! Those who have had fever on the banks of these African rivers know them well, those deadly hours of torpor and slumber. Shortly before noon, Jean would fall asleep. It was a kind of suspended existence, haunted by confused visions and a persistent impression of suffering. And from time to time he had the sensation of dying, and for an instant he would lose all consciousness of himself. These were his moments of peace.
Towards four o’clock he would awake and ask for water. The visions faded, shrank away into remote corners of the ward, behind the white curtains, and vanished. Only his head continued to hurt violently, as if boiling lead had been poured into it, but the delirium had passed its climax.
Among these faces, gentle or grimacing, real or imaginary, that hovered around him, he had two or three times thought he recognised Cora’s lover standing near his bed and looking at him kindly, but disappearing as soon as Jean’s eyes were raised to his. Doubtless he, too, was an illusion, like those people from his village whom he imagined he saw there, strange in demeanour, vague and distorted in appearance.
Yet, curiously enough, since he had seemed to see him thus, he no longer felt that he hated him.