Behind this semi-European street lies a large negro town built of thatch. The town is divided into sections like honeycomb, by wide straight streets. Each of its quarters is bounded by thick wooden palisades, and fortified like a citadel. In the evening Jean wandered about the town, with his friend Nyaor for companion. The mournful songs that floated to his ears from behind those walls, those strange voices, that unfamiliar aspect of things, that hot wind, ceasing neither day nor night, inspired him with a kind of vague terror, an inexplicable anguish, compounded of home sickness and loneliness and hopelessness all in one. Never, not even in the distant outposts of Diakhallémé had he felt so completely alone, so utterly forsaken. Podor was surrounded by fields of millet; a few stunted trees grew there, some brushwood, some scanty grass. On the Moorish bank opposite lay absolute desert. Yet at the entrance to a road, of which scarcely the beginnings existed, and which soon lost its identity in the sands to the north, stood a signpost with this prophetic inscription: “_To Algiers_.” XV It was five in the morning; the red lustreless sun was rising over the land of the Douaïch. Jean returned to the Falémé, which was preparing to resume its voyage. The negro women who were travelling by the Falémé were already lying on the deck, rolled in their variegated _pagnes_, packed together so tightly that nothing could be distinguished on the ground but a confused heap of drapery, gilded by the morning light, with here and there a black, heavily braceletted arm waving in the air. Jean, who was making his way between them, suddenly felt himself seized by two supple arms that wound themselves like two serpents around his legs. The woman was hiding her head and kissing his feet. “Tjean! Tjean!” ... said a queer little voice, well known to him. “I have followed you for fear you should gain Paradise (be killed) in the war. Tjean, won’t you look at your son?” And the two black arms lifted up a bronzed child and held him towards the spahi. “My son? my son?” repeated Jean in his brusque soldier’s way, yet in a voice that trembled nevertheless, “my son? What nonsense are you talking, Fatou?” * * * * * “But it’s true all the same,” he added, strangely moved, bending down to look at the child, “It’s true all the same; he is nearly white.” The child had none of his mother’s blood in his veins; he was Jean’s son entirely. He was bronzed, but essentially white like the spahi; he had the same deep eyes, the same beauty. He stretched out his hands and looked about him, knitting his little brows with an expression of precocious seriousness, as if wondering what fate had in store for him, and how, his Cevennes blood came to be mingled with that of this impure black race.