taken my eyes off Morhange, who was still standing.

"Major, gentlemen, you will allow me," he said.

And before sitting down at that table, where every moment he was the
life of the party, in a low voice, with his eyes closed, Captain
Morhange recited the Benedicite.




IV

TOWARDS LATITUDE 25


"You see," said Captain Morhange to me fifteen days later, "you are
much better informed about the ancient routes through the Sahara than
you have been willing to let me suppose, since you know of the
existence of the two Tadekkas. But the one of which you have just
spoken is the Tadekka of Ibn-Batoutah, located by this historian
seventy days from Touat, and placed by Schirmer, very plausibly, in
the unexplored territory of the Aouelimmiden. This is the Tadekka by
which the Sonrhaï caravans passed every year, travelling by Egypt.

"My Tadekka is different, the capital of the veiled people, placed by
Ibn-Khaldoun twenty days south of Wargla, which he calls Tadmekka. It
is towards this Tadmekka that I am headed. I must establish Tadmekka
in the ruins of Es-Souk. The commercial trade route, which in the
ninth century bound the Tunisian Djerid to the bend the Niger makes at