And he caressed her, patting her gently with his hand, with precisely the same emotion as he felt when he used to scratch the neck of the big, coaxing Tom cat, who at night in barracks would come and curl himself up on Jean’s soldier’s cot. Quivering under Jean’s innocent caress, with hanging head, half-closed eyes, and heaving bosom, she took up her festal garment and went away trembling all over with joy. XVI Poor Jean! Suffering was a new experience for him; he rebelled against this unknown power that had seized him and was strangling his heart with bruising hoops of iron. Smothered rage, rage against that young man, whom he longed to break in pieces with his own hands; rage against that woman, whom it would have delighted him to maul with blows of his spurs and whip; all this he endured, and at the same time he was possessed with I know not what urgent physical need of action, an impulse to rush headlong into some desperate piece of folly. He found, too, that his comrades vexed and irritated him. He was conscious that they cast upon him glances which were already inquisitive, and might to-morrow become ironical. Towards evening he asked for, and obtained permission, to go with Nyaor-fall to try some horses to the north of the Point of Barbary. They had a furious gallop over the desert sands in gloomy weather, under a wintry sky—for out there, too, there are wintry skies, less frequent than our own, of a startling and sinister effect in that land of desolation—unbroken clouds, so black and low that the plain beneath appears white, and the desert seems an interminable, snow-covered steppe. When the two spahis passed in their burnooses, carried at full speed on their madly excited horses, huge vultures, that were lazily walking about the ground in families, rose in startled flight and began to describe fantastic curves in the air overhead. * * * * * At night Jean and Nyaor returned dripping with sweat to their quarters, with their exhausted horses. XVII But on the morrow of this one day of unnatural excitement, fever attacked Jean. On the morrow, the spahi, lying on his wretched little grey mattress, was placed on a stretcher and taken to hospital. XVIII Noon!... The hospital is as still as a great mortuary. Noon!... The grasshopper is chirping. The African woman is singing in her thin voice her vague and drowsy song. Upon the whole expanse of the desert plains of Senegal the sun darts down its perpendicular rays of torrid light, which the vast horizon reflects in shimmer and glitter. * * * * *