Here and there are clumps of brushwood, blurred obscurities, forming great gloomy patches on the luminous, pink background of the sands; then sheets of stagnant water, with vapour floating above them like white smoke, feverish miasma, more noxious and subtle than that of the day time. There is a penetrating sensation of chilliness, strange after the heat of the day; the moist air is all impregnated with the odour of great swamps.
Here and there by the roadside lie large skeletons, contorted with pain, carcases of camels, swimming in a black, fetid fluid. There they lie, grinning at the moon, shamelessly displaying their flanks, torn by vultures, their bodies hideously disembowelled.
From time to time the cry of a swamp bird breaks the immense silence.
At long intervals a baobab stretches its massive branches into the still air, like a great dead madrepore, a tree of stone, and the moon defines with surprising sharpness the contours of its structure, rigid like a mastodon’s, conveying to the imagination the impression of a thing inert, petrified and cold.
In the midst of its polished branches perch black masses: the inevitable vultures. Whole families of them roost there confidingly, sleeping heavily; they suffer Jean to approach, with the indifference of fetish birds, and the moon casts blue reflections and metallic gleams on their great folded wings.
And Jean is full of wonder at this first revelation at dead of night of all the intimate details of this land.
At two o’clock there bursts forth a chorus of yells, as of dogs baying the moon, but more savage, more grating, more weirdly sinister. Sometimes at night at St Louis, when the wind blew from the direction of the cemetery, Jean had fancied he heard in the far distance similar lamentations. But to-night this lugubrious music was close at hand, there, in the brush. The dismal yelping of jackals mingled with piercing strident caterwaulings of hyenas. A battle was in progress between two wandering packs on the prowl in search of dead camels.
“What is it?” Jean asked the black spahi.