And the whole assembly, frenziedly clapping their hands, repeated _Anamalis fobil!_ _Anamalis fobil!_ ... words whose translation would blister these pages.... “Anamalis fobil!” the first words, the motive and refrain of a diabolical song, delirious with licentious passion, the song of the spring _bamboulas_.... _Anamalis fobil!_ the howling of frenzied desire of the sap of negroes heated to excess by the sun, of burning hysteria ... the negro’s alleluia of love, a hymn of seduction chanted likewise by nature, air, earth, plants, and scents. At the spring _bamboulas_, the young men mingled with the young girls who had just arrayed themselves in the pomp of their wedding finery. To a maddening rhythm, to a frantic melody, they all sang, as they danced upon the sand, _Anamalis fobil!_ ... XXXIV _Anamalis fobil!_ All the big, milky buds on the baobabs had burst into tender leaf.... And Jean felt this negro spring-time burning in his blood, flowing like a consuming poison through his veins.... He was exhausted by all this renewal of life, because it was a life in which he had no part. The blood that boiled in men’s veins was black; the sap that rose in the plants was poisonous; the perfume of the flowers was dangerous, and the insects were swollen with venom. In him, too, the sap was rising, the sap of his two-and-twenty years, but with a feverishness that exhausted the source from which it sprang, and in the end this terrible renascence would have brought him to the verge of death. _Anamalis fobil!_ How rapidly this spring advanced!... June was scarcely over, and already, under the influence of deadly heat, in an atmosphere no longer endurable, the leaves were turning yellow, the plants were dying, and the sere grasses drooped earthwards.... XXXV _Anamalis fobil!_ ... There are in hot countries certain fruits of harsh and bitter flavour—such as the gourous of Senegal—that are detestable to the palate in our cool latitudes, but which, out there, appeal to the taste in special conditions of thirst or ill-health. You may have a passionate craving for them, and they may seem to you curiously delicious. It was the same with that little creature with her shock of black sheep’s wool, her body of sculptured marble, and her glittering eyes, already fully aware of what they asked of Jean, yet downcast in his presence with a childish presence of timid modesty. This highly-flavoured fruit of the Soudan was precociously ripened by the tropical spring, bursting with poisonous juices, rife with morbid voluptuousness, febrile and foreign. * * * * * XXXVI _Anamalis fobil!_ Jean had dressed for the evening hastily, almost frenziedly. That morning he had told Fatou to go at nightfall to the foot of a certain solitary baobab in the marshes of Sorr, and to wait for him there. * * * * *