Yazouk went. He returned with the ass saddled and bridled before I was half through a cigarette. I mounted forthwith and started towards my long-deserted camp. "Come, Yazouk!" I called out carelessly, and I took good care not to look back. There is no means surer of making an African obey you than to act as if you are certain he has no alternative. Perhaps Yazouk hesitated for a moment, torn with fear and hate, but he followed me. Soon I heard the patter of his footsteps on the sand. Then I said to myself, "Now, if this man is to remain with me and be my servant I must make him fear me as he would the plague. But how?" I solved the riddle at the end of five miles. I must show him that I despised him utterly. So I stopped. He stopped. Twenty paces separated us. "Yazouk," I said, "come here!" He approached, eyeing me like a wolf. "From this day for a month, Yazouk, you shall be my slave," I observed calmly. "If you prove a good slave I shall pay you when the term ends at the rate of fifty piasters a day. If you offend me by so much as winking an eyelash I shall not only pay you nothing, but I shall ask Poseidon to transform you into a hyena. Will you like that?" Yazouk did not remark on my dreadful threat, but there was murder in his eyes. I smiled at him, and, always looking him full in the face, I took one by one the knives I had taken from his fellows, from my belt and cast them on the sand at his feet. "It is not fit for a lord to carry such trash when he has a slave," I said. "Pick up those knives."