“How can I recount to thee, sidi, the days of that march? Am I then another Errendi, that the words of my lamentation should fall like burning oil on a new wound? But the history is well known in all the country above the River, for my father’s brother, Ahmed ben Djeba, he who had it out of the mouth of Djeba, has made it a chant at a hundred feasts and sung it under a hundred council-trees. He has sung the days of that going, the weeks, each week after the other through the hotness of that bush-trail. He has told the tale of the moons. In the roof of his mouth he has recalled the song of the lash that fell on those men’s shoulders and made of their flesh the flesh of goats that is hung on the stockade to cure. He has stirred the dung-heaps to bring in memory the meat that was given them at evening before they fell down to sleep. With his tongue he has made the clank of the chain that bound them together, the heavy chain of iron that bound together even those two who were bound by the strong bond of the breast that gave them suck! “Many among them died. When they died their bodies were cut from the chain with swords. Djeba and Moa grew thin. When Djeba looked at Moa he saw a skeleton that he did not know. When Moa looked at Djeba he saw a thing which filled him with terror. At night each bade the other farewell, saying, ‘In the morning I shall be dead.’ But they were strong and they did not die. Only their minds became empty. “Then they came at last to the banks of a great lake. This lake was so great that when they had been sold to a white boatman and when they had come out in the boat so far that they could no longer see the bank behind them, then they could yet see no bank before, and the water was all about them to the sky like the sand in the desert of Djouf. To my father’s brother Djeba has recounted that they were more than the length of a moon in that going, but it must be recalled that his mind was empty, since no lake to be compared with that is in our knowledge. A wind arose on that lake and water came into the boat. They were athirst, but when they drank of that water it was sour and their thirst consumed them tenfold after. What man is there master of words sufficiently bitter to recount that going upon the lake of those men who were captive? “Then they came at last to the other bank of that lake, and they were taken up swiftly into the bush of the country beyond, for there were war-boats of other white men on the water. And on another day they came to a great _ksar_ of a hundred shelters, and in the market-place of that _ksar_ they were exposed for sale. They were nine. Nine men left out of sevenscore strong men! What battle in the memory of the tribes so disastrous as that going! What ambush so bloody as that march of the companions of the Brothers of the Milk!”