"I saw them all in contrast to myself when the diligence passed them.
They were terrible. Under the hideous searchlight their eyes shone
with a sombre fire in their pale and shaven faces. The burning dust
strangled their raucous voices in their throats. A frightful sadness
took possession of me.

"When the diligence had left this fearful nightmare behind, I regained
my self-control.

"'Further, much further South,' I exclaimed to myself, 'to the places
untouched by this miserable bilgewater of civilization.'

"When I am weary, when I have a moment of anguish and longing to turn
back on the road that I have chosen, I think of the prisoners of
Berroughia, and then I am glad to continue on my way.

"But what a reward, when I am in one of those places where the poor
animals never think of fleeing because they have never seen man, where
the desert stretches out around me so widely that the old world could
crumble, and never a single ripple on the dune, a single cloud in the
white sky come to warn me.

"'It is true,' I murmured. 'I, too, once, in the middle of the desert,
at Tidi-Kelt, I felt that way.'"

Up to that time I had let him enjoy his exaltations without
interruption. I understood too late the error that I had made in
pronouncing that unfortunate sentence.