Fatou-gaye was lying face downwards, resting on her elbows. The upper part of her body was bare (her indoor costume), and her smooth back sloped upwards in a graceful curve from her shapely hips to the extraordinary erection of amber and coral which crowned her head.
Around Samba-Hamet’s hut there was silence, the rustling movements of lizards, the buzzing of flies, the shimmering of sand.
Fatou, half asleep, with her chin resting on her two hands, was singing to herself. She sang airs she had never heard sung, which were, nevertheless, not of her own composing. They were the expression, in strange, drowsy music, of her languid dreams, her voluptuous lassitude; reflex action, the effect produced upon her young negro girl’s brain by all that weight of circumstances, manifesting itself in song.
In that sonorous hour of noon, in that feverish half-sleep of the siesta, how plaintive are the vibrations of such a song, the vague, unconsidered result of circumstances, a musical paraphrase of silence, heat, solitude, exile.
Jean and Fatou have made peace. As usual, Jean has forgiven her. The trouble about the _khâliss_ and the earrings of Galam gold is all over.
The money has been procured elsewhere and sent to France. It was Nyaor who lent it, in large silver coins with very ancient effigies, which he had kept locked up with many others in a copper chest. The debt will be paid as soon as possible. True, it is another weight on Jean’s mind, but at least his dear old parents, who had counted on him, will not lack. Their minds will be at ease. The rest is not so important.
Sleeping on his _tara_ with his slave lying at his feet, Jean has a certain superb nonchalance, a certain counterfeit air of Arab prince. There is no trace remaining of the little mountaineer from the Cevennes. He has acquired something of the beggarly majesty of those men who dwell in tents.
These three years in Senegal, which have already thinned the ranks of the spahis, have spared him. His face is bronzed; his strength has developed; his features are more refined, and their original delicacy and beauty still more accentuated.
A certain lack of moral tone, periods of indifference and oblivion, a kind of insensibility of the heart, alternating suddenly with painful awakenings—such are the sole effects that these three years have succeeded in producing upon him. The climate of Senegal has gained no further hold upon his powerful nature.