On a windy night of Spring I sat by a great fire that had been built by Moors on a plain of Morocco under the shadow of a white city, and talked with a fellow-countryman, stranger to me till that day. We had met in the morning in a filthy alley of the town, and had forgathered. He was a wanderer for pleasure like myself, and, learning that he was staying in a dreary hostelry haunted by fever, I invited him to dine in my camp, and to pass the night in one of the small peaked tents that served me and my Moorish attendants as home. He consented gladly. Dinner was over—no bad one, for Moors can cook, can even make delicious caramel pudding in desert places—and Mohammed, my stalwart valet de chambre, had given us most excellent coffee. Now we smoked by the great fire, looked up at the marvellously bright stars, and told, as is the way of travellers, tales of our wanderings. My companion, whom I took at first to be a rather ironic, sceptical, and by nature “unimaginative globe-trotter—he was a hard-looking, iron-grey man of middle-age—related the usual tiger story, the time-honoured elephant anecdote, and a couple of snake yarns of no special value, and I was beginning to fear that I should get little entertainment from so prosaic a sportsman, when I chanced to mention the desert.
“Ah!” said my guest, taking his pipe from his mouth, “the desert is the strangest thing in nature, as woman is the strangest thing in human nature. And when you get them together—desert and woman—by Jove!”
He paused, then he shot a keen glance at me.
“Ever been in the Sahara?” he said.
I replied in the affirmative, but added that I had as yet only seen the fringe of it.
“Biskra, I suppose,” he rejoined, “and the nearest oasis, Sidi-Okba, and so on?”
I nodded. I saw I was in for another tale, and anticipated some history of shooting exploits under the salt mountain of El Outaya.
“Well,” he continued, “I know the Sahara pretty fairly, and about the oddest thing I ever could believe in I heard of and believed in there.”
“Something about gazelle?” I queried.
“Gazelle? No—a woman!” he replied..
As he spoke a Moor glided out of the windy darkness, and threw an armful of dry reeds on the fire. The flames flared up vehemently, and I saw that the face of my companion had changed. The hardness of it was smoothed away. Some memory, that held its romance, sat with him.
“A woman,” he repeated, knocking the ashes out of his pipe almost sentimentally—“more than that, a French woman of Paris, with the nameless charm, the chic, the—— But I’ll tell you. Some years ago three Parisians—a man, his wife, and her unmarried sister, a girl of eighteen, with an angel and a devil in her dark beauty—came to a great resolve. They decided that they were tired of the Français, sick of the Bois, bored to death with the boulevards, that they wanted to see for themselves the famous French colonies which were for ever being talked about in the Chamber. They determined to travel. No sooner was the determination come to than they were off. Hôtel des Colonies, Marseilles; steamboat, Le Général Chanzy; five o’clock on a splendid, sunny afternoon—Algiers, with i