Oh that awakening from the torpor of the midday sleep! Whence came that strange lucidity of mind which made this moment so terrifying?... His ideas began to waken, mournful, confused, incomplete—at first mere inconsequent shadowy conceptions, full of mystery, like traces of a previous existence. Then suddenly dawned conceptions of greater and agonising clearness. Radiant memories of old days, impressions of childhood, came back to him, rising from the depths of his irrevocable past, memories of thatched cottages, of the Cevennes on summer evenings, mingled with stridulation of African crickets; the agony of separations, of lost happiness, a swift and harrowing survey of his whole past, the events of life seen from beneath, like things beyond the tomb—the other side of existence, the obverse of this world. ... In these moments, especially, he seemed to be conscious of the rapid and inexorable flight of time, which the tonelessness of his spirit did not usually permit him to grasp. He woke up, hearing against the resonant _tara_ the faint throbbing of the arteries in his forehead, and he seemed to be listening to the pulsations of time, the vibrations of a great mysterious time-piece of eternity. He had the sensation that the moments were gliding by, passing, passing with the speed of objects falling into empty space, while the stream of his life bore him ever onwards, and he was powerless to stem it.... He rose abruptly, now wide awake, with a wild longing to be gone, in an agony of despair at the thought of the years that still lay between him and his return. * * * * * Fatou-gaye had a vague instinct that this instant of awakening was a dangerous and critical time when the white man evaded her influence. So she was on the watch for this moment, and when she saw Jean open his mournful eyes, and then suddenly start up with a bewildered look, she would quickly come and kneel beside him to minister to him, or she would put her supple arms round his neck and say, “What is the matter, my white man?” in a voice which she rendered as soft and languishing as the sound of a griot’s guitar. ... But these fancies of Jean did not last long. When he was wide awake his usual indifference possessed him once more, and he saw things again in their normal aspect. II ... The operation of dressing Fatou’s hair was a very important and complicated one. It took place once a week, and on this occasion the whole day was given up to it. In the early morning Fatou set out for Guet n’dar, the negro village, where in a hut with peaked roof, built of thatch and dry reeds, dwelt the hairdresser of most repute among the Nubian ladies. Fatou remained there for several hours, crouched on the sand, surrendering herself into the hands of this patient, painstaking artist.