Atlantida by Pierre Benoît (e book reader free .TXT) 📕

"Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh," I asked in a low voice, "why are you doing this?"

He stepped back and I saw his dark eyes gleam.

"Why?" he said.

"Yes, why?"

He replied with dignity:

"The Prophet permits every just man, once in his lifetime, to let pity take the place of duty. Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh is turning this permission to the advantage of one who saved his life."

"And you are not afraid," I asked, "that I will disclose the secret of Antinea if I return among Frenchmen?" He shook his head.

"I am not afraid of that," he said, and his voice was full of irony. "It is not to your interest that Frenchmen should know how the Captain met his death."

I was horrified at this logical reply.

"Perhaps I am doing wrong," the Targa went on, "in not killing the little one.... But she loves you. She will not talk. Now go. Day is coming."

I tried to press the hand of this strange rescuer, but he again drew back.

"Do not thank me. What I am doing, I do to acquire merit in the eyes of God. You may be sure that I shall never do it again neither for you nor for anyone else."

And, as I made a gesture to reassure him on that point, "Do not protest," he said in a tone the mockery of which still sounds in my ears. "Do not protest. What I am doing is of value to me, but not to you."

I looked at him uncomprehendingly.

"Not to you, Sidi Lieutenant, not to you," his grave voice continued. "For you will come back; and when that day comes, do not count on the help of Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh."

"I will come back?" I asked, shuddering.

"You will come back," the Targa replied.

He was standing erect, a black statue against the wall of gray rock.

"You will come back," he repeated with emphasis. "You are fleeing now, but you are mistaken if you think that you will look at the world with the same eyes as before. Henceforth, one idea, will follow you everywhere you go; and in one year, five, perhaps ten years, you will pass again through the corridor through which you have just come."

"Be still, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh," said the trembling voice of Tanit-Zerga.

"Be still yourself, miserable little fly," said Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh.

He sneered.

"The little one is afraid because she knows that I tell the truth. She knows the story of Lieutenant Ghiberti."

"Lieutenant Ghiberti?" I said, the sweat standing out on my forehead.

"He was an Italian officer whom I met between Rhât and Rhadamès eight years ago. He did not believe that love of Antinea could make him forget all else that life contained. He tried to escape, and he succeeded. I do not know how, for I did not help him. He went back to his country. But hear what happened: two years later, to the very day, when I was leaving the look-out, I discovered a miserable tattered creature, half dead from hunger and fatigue, searching in vain for the entrance to the northern barrier. It was Lieutenant Ghiberti, come back. He fills niche Number 39 in the red marble hall."

The Targa smiled slightly.

"That is the story of Lieutenant Ghiberti which you wished to hear. But enough of this. Mount your camel."

I obeyed without saying a word. Tanit-Zerga, seated behind me, put her little arms around me. Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh was still holding the bridle.

"One word more," he said, pointing to a black spot against the violet sky of the southern horizon. "You see the gour there; that is your way. It is eighteen miles from here. You should reach it by sunrise. Then consult your map. The next point is marked. If you do not stray from the line, you should be at the springs of Telemsi in eight days."

The camel's neck was stretched toward the dark wind coming from the south.

The Targa released the bridle with a sweep of his hand.

"Now go."

"Thank you," I called to him, turning back in the saddle. "Thank you, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh, and farewell."

I heard his voice replying in the distance:

"Au revoir, Lieutenant de Saint Avit."

During the first hour of our flight, the great mehari of Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh carried us at a mad pace. We covered at least five leagues. With fixed eyes, I guided the beast toward the gour which the Targa had pointed out, its ridge becoming higher and higher against the paling sky.

The speed caused a little breeze to whistle in our ears. Great tufts of retem, like fleshless skeletons, were tossed to right and left.

I heard the voice of Tanit-Zerga whispering:

"Stop the camel."

At first I did not understand.

"Stop him," she repeated.

Her hand pulled sharply at my right arm.

I obeyed. The camel slackened his pace with very bad grace.

"Listen," she said.

At first I heard nothing. Then a very slight noise, a dry rustling behind us.

"Stop the camel," Tanit-Zerga commanded. "It is not worth while to make him kneel."

A little gray creature bounded on the camel. The mehari set out again at his best speed.

"Let him go," said Tanit-Zerga. "Galé has jumped on."

I felt a tuft of bristly hair under my arm. The mongoose had followed our footsteps and rejoined us. I heard the quick panting of the brave little creature becoming gradually slower and slower.

"I am happy," murmured Tanit-Zerga.

Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had not been mistaken. We reached the gour as the sun rose. I looked back. The Atakor was nothing more than a monstrous chaos amid the night mists which trailed the dawn. It was no longer possible to pick out from among the nameless peaks, the one on which Antinea was still weaving her passionate plots.

You know what the Tanezruft is, the "plain of plains," abandoned, uninhabitable, the country of hunger and thirst. We were then starting on the part of the desert which Duveyrier calls the Tassili of the south, and which figures on the maps of the Minister of Public Works under this attractive title: "Rocky plateau, without water, without vegetation, inhospitable for man and beast."

Nothing, unless parts of the Kalahari, is more frightful than this rocky desert. Oh, Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh did not exaggerate in saying that no one would dream of following us into that country.

Great patches of oblivion still refused to clear away. Memories chased each other incoherently about my head. A sentence came back to me textually: "It seemed to Dick that he had never, since the beginning of original darkness, done anything at all save jolt through the air." I gave a little laugh. "In the last few hours," I thought, "I have been heaping up literary situations. A while ago, a hundred feet above the ground, I was Fabrice of La Chartreuse de Parme beside his Italian dungeon. Now, here on my camel, I am Dick of The Light That Failed, crossing the desert to meet his companions in arms." I chuckled again; then shuddered. I thought of the preceding night, of the Orestes of Andromaque who agreed to sacrifice Pyrrhus. A literary situation indeed....

Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had reckoned eight days to get to the wooded country of the Awellimiden, forerunners of the grassy steppes of the Soudan. He knew well the worth of his beast. Tanit-Zerga had suddenly given him a name, El Mellen, the white one, for the magnificent mehari had an almost spotless coat. Once he went two days without eating, merely picking up here and there a branch of an acacia tree whose hideous white spines, four inches long, filled me with fear for our friend's oesophagus. The wells marked out by Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh were indeed at the indicated spots, but we found nothing in them but a burning yellow mud. It was enough for the camel, enough so that at the end of the fifth day, thanks to prodigious self-control, we had used up only one of our two water skins. Then we believed ourselves safe.

Near one of these muddy puddles, I succeeded that day in shooting down a little straight-horned desert gazelle. Tanit-Zerga skinned the beast and we regaled ourselves with a delicious haunch. Meantime, little Galé, who never ceased prying about the cracks in the rocks during our mid-day halts in the heat, discovered an ourane, a sand crocodile, five feet long, and made short work of breaking his neck. She ate so much she could not budge. It cost us a pint of water to help her digestion. We gave it with good grace, for we were happy. Tanit-Zerga did not say so, but her joy at knowing that I was thinking no more of the woman in the gold diadem and the emeralds was apparent. And really, during those days, I hardly thought of her. I thought only of the torrid heat to be avoided, of the water skins which, if you wished to drink fresh water, had to be left for an hour in a cleft in the rocks; of the intense joy which seized you when you raised to your lips a leather goblet brimming with that life-saving water.... I can say this with authority, with good authority, indeed; passion, spiritual or physical, is a thing for those who have eaten and drunk and rested.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon. The frightful heat was slackening. We had left a kind of rocky crevice where we had had a little nap. Seated on a huge rock, we were watching the reddening west.

I spread out the roll of paper on which Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh had marked the stages of our journey as far as the road from the Soudan. I realized again with joy that his itinerary was exact and that I had followed it scrupulously.

"The evening of the day after to-morrow," I said, "we shall be setting out on the stage which will take us, by the next dawn, to the waters at Telemsi. Once there, we shall not have to worry any more about water."

Tanit-Zerga's eyes danced in her thin face.

"And Gâo?" she asked.

"We will be only a week from the Niger. And Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh said that at Telemsi, one reached a road overhung with mimosa."

"I know the mimosa," she said. "They are the little yellow balls that melt in your hand. But I like the caper flowers better. You will come with me to Gâo. My father, Sonni-Azkia, was killed, as I told you, by the Awellimiden. But my people must have rebuilt the villages. They are used to that. You will see how you will be received."

"I will go, Tanit-Zerga, I promise you. But you also, you must promise me...."

"What? Oh, I guess. You must take me for a little fool if you believe me capable of speaking of things which might make trouble for my friend."

She looked at me as she spoke. Privation and great fatigue had chiselled the brown face where her great eyes shone.... Since then, I have had time to assemble the maps and compasses, and to fix forever the spot where, for the first time, I understood the beauty of Tanit-Zerga's eyes.

There was a deep silence between us. It was she who broke it.

"Night is coming. We must eat so as to leave as soon as possible."

She stood up and went toward the rocks.

Almost immediately, I heard her calling in an anguished voice that sent a chill through me.

"Come! Oh, come see!"

With a bound, I was at her side.

"The camel," she murmured. "The camel!"

I looked, and a deadly shudder seized me.

Stretched out at full length, on the other side of the rocks, his pale flanks knotted up by convulsive spasms, El Mellen lay in anguish.

I need not say that we rushed to him in feverish haste. Of what El Mellen was dying, I did not know, I never have known. All the mehara are that way. They are at once the most enduring and the most delicate of beasts. They will travel for six months across the most frightful deserts, with little food, without water, and seem only the better for it. Then, one day when nothing is the matter, they stretch out