The first time Jean has asked Fatou (this was long ago, in the house of his mistress),
“Where do you come from, child?”
Fatou had replied in a voice full of emotion,
“From the country of Galam” ...
Poor negroes of the Soudan, dwelling in exile, driven forth from their native village by great wars, or great famines, those vast catastrophes that come upon these primitive countries—sold, carried away into slavery, they have sometimes traversed on foot, under the lash of their master, stretches of country more extensive than the whole of Europe. But the picture of their native land has remained graven ineffaceably in the depths of their black hearts....
Sometimes it is far-away Timbuctoo or Ségou-Koro, with its great palaces of white clay mirrored in the waters of the Niger, or merely a humble village of straw, lost somewhere in the desert, or hidden away in an obscure cranny of the mountains of the south, and left in the wake of the conqueror a heap of ashes and a charnel house for the vulture....
“In Galam!” ... the words are repeated musingly, mysteriously.
“Galam!” Fatou would say,
“Tjean, one day I shall take you to Galam with me.” ...
That ancient, sacred land of Galam, which Fatou had only to close her eyes to see again—the land of Galam, a country of gold and ivory, a country in whose tepid waters grey alligators lie asleep in the shade of tall mangrove trees, where the elephant roams through the deep forest, trampling heavily upon the soil in his rapid stride.