As had been foreseen, at the end of three months, the country was quiet. The war, the negro massacres were over. The caravans resumed their journeys, bringing to Gadiangué from the depths of Africa gold, ivory, feathers, all the products of the Soudan and the interior of Guinea.
And the order having been given to withdraw the reinforcements, a ship was sent to wait for the spahis at the mouth of the river to bring them back to Senegal.
Alas, poor fellows! not all of them had survived. Out of twelve that had fared forth, two failed to obey the order of recall; two lay asleep in the hot earth of Gadiangué, victims of fever.
But Jean’s hour had not yet come, and one day he set out on his return journey along the route that he had taken three months before in Samba-Boubou’s canoe.
This time it was high noon; the spahis were journeying in a Mandinga pirogue, shaded by a moistened awning.
They kept close to the dense verdure of the banks, gliding beneath branches and hanging roots of trees for the sake of the scanty shade, warm and danger-haunted, which these cast upon the river.
The water seemed stagnant and motionless, heavy as oil, with wisps of fever-impregnated vapour hovering here and there above its polished surface.
The sun was at its zenith; it darted down its perpendicular light from a sky of violet grey, leaden grey, dim with the miasma of the swamps.
The heat was so appalling that the black oarsmen, in spite of all their pluck, were obliged to take a rest. The tepid water could no longer quench their thirst; they were exhausted, and seemed to be melting away in perspiration.
And then, when they halted, the pirogue, carried gently along by an almost imperceptible current, drifted onwards. The spahis could study at close quarters a whole strange world, the underworld that had its being beneath the mangroves and peopled all the marshes of equatorial Africa.
In the shade, in the obscure network of great roots, this world lay asleep.
There, two steps away from the canoe, which glided past without a sound, stealing by so quietly that not even the birds were awakened—near enough to touch it—lay dull-green crocodiles, their sleek forms stretched out on the mud, yawning and grinning idiotically with gaping viscous jaws. There were graceful white herons asleep likewise, snowy white balls, standing on one leg, and to avoid contact with the mud actually perched on the backs of the crocodiles in their trance-like sleep. There were kingfishers of every shade of green and blue taking their noonday rest by the water’s edge, in the company of sluggish lizards and great, wonderful butterflies that had come to life in a temperature like a boiler’s, slowly folding and unfolding their wings wherever they happened to alight, resembling dead leaves when their wings were closed, brilliant as mysterious jewels when their wings were spread, all glittering with blue enamel and metallic gleams.