The negroes’ songs of praise continued. Samba-Boubou still uttered his weird head note, with which mingled the shrieks of monkeys, and the chorus still made its sombre response. They sang as if in a kind of dream, and they rowed furiously, with superhuman strength, as if galvanised, in a feverish anxiety to reach their goal.
At last they come to a place where the river flows between deep banks formed by two chains of wooded hills. Lights appear high up on a great rock which stands out in front of them; the lights seem to be moving hastily down to the banks. Samba-Boubou kindles a torch and utters a rallying cry. The garrison of Gadiangué are here to greet them. They have reached their destination.
Gadiangué is perched there on the summit of this perpendicular rock, and is reached by steep paths, where negroes show them the way with torches. A large hut has been made ready for the spahis, and they lie down on mats to sleep until morning, which is not far off.
XXVI
The first to awake after barely an hour’s sleep, Jean opens his eyes and sees the white light of dawn filtering between the planks of the hut, shining upon the young men, who are lying half-naked on the ground, their heads pillowed on their red jackets—Bretons, Alsatians, Picards—almost all of them fair-haired men from the north. In this moment of waking, Jean had a kind of prophetic vision, a mournful, mysterious, comprehensive foreknowledge of the destiny of all these exiles, their lives menaced by an ever-lurking death and recklessly cast away.
Close to him lay a graceful feminine form with two black, silver-braceletted arms curving towards him as if to embrace him.
Then, little by little, he remembered that he had arrived the previous night at a village in Guinea, lost in the midst of vast savage regions, that he was farther than ever from home, in a place where even letters would not reach him.
Quietly, so that he might not disturb Fatou and the still sleeping spahis, he approached the open window and gazed out at this new country.
He was overlooking a precipice some three hundred feet deep. This hut that he was in seemed suspended in the air above it. At his feet lay a landscape with the characteristic features of the interior, as yet but vaguely revealed in the pale light of dawn.