Fatou-gaye caught sight of the medal of the Virgin in the spahi’s hand, and understood that he had been praying when death came to him. She, too, had medals of the Virgin and a scapulary among the grigris round her neck. She had been baptised by Catholic priests at St Louis, but it was not in them that she put her trust. She took a leather amulet, which formerly in the land of Galam a negro woman, her mother had given her. This was the fetish she loved, and she kissed it with ardour. Then she bent over Jean’s body and raised his head. Blue flies kept coming out from his open mouth, between his white teeth, and from the wounds in his thorax trickled a fluid already fetid. * * * * * XXIX Then she seized her baby with the intention of strangling him. Dreading to hear his cries, she first filled his mouth with sand. Nor could she bear to see his little face in the paroxysms of suffocation. Frenziedly she dug a hole in the ground, buried his head in it, and heaped more sand upon it. Then she gripped his neck with her two hands and squeezed it—squeezed it hard, until his active little limbs, which were stiffening under the influence of pain, were relaxed in death. When the child was dead, she laid him on his father’s bosom. So died the son of Jean Peyral.... A mystery! What god had thrust him into life, the spahi’s child? What had he come to seek on this earth, and whither did he return? Then Fatou-gaye wept tears of blood—her piercing lamentations echoed over the plains of Dialakar. And last of all, she took the Marabout’s leather wallet and swallowed a bitter paste contained therein. Her death throes began, a lingering and cruel agony. For a long time she lay in the sunlight shaken by death rattle and death sob; she tore her throat with her nails, and plucked out handfuls of hair mingled with amber. Round her were the vultures, awaiting her last moment. * * * * * XXX When the yellow sun set over the plains of Diambour, her struggles were over; her death agony at an end. She lay, stretched out upon Jean’s body, clasping with rigid arms her dead son. Hot and starry, the first night of their death descended upon them—bringing with it the saturnalia of wild life, with its hushed mysterious beginning, in every corner of this sombre continent of Africa. * * * * * That same evening, in that far country at the foot of the Cevennes, Jeanne’s wedding procession was passing in front of the cottage of the old Peyrals. XXXI APOTHEOSIS At first it is heard as a distant moaning, rising from the furthest limits of the desert; then the gruesome chorus approaches through the luminous obscurity: the doleful howling of jackals, the piercing wails of hyenas and tiger-cats. * * * * *