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for water. Repeatedly his party had been greeted with rejoicing in the encampments, welcomed with a clattering of tambourines and the booming of the chief's great tobol, only to be, after a few days of digging, while they fed their futile exertions upon the herdsmen's precious morsels of seed grain and caked blood, called into solemn conference with the ca'id and sent away beneath a hail of Tamahaq curses and flung pebbles. Wadal presented himself to me as a man of former property, whose plenteous herds of humped zebu had been turned to bones by the drought; but his woman whispered to me that he was a rascal without a tribe, who had never had so much as a pet pi-dog to his name. His father had been a dibia in a village to the south, and the son had been banished for blasphemy, for urinating on the fetishes in a fury of despair over his own impotence, which she assured me her lewdest wiles had proven intractable. Yet her fate had been cast with his when, a beautiful virgin asleep in her father's compound, this wretched outcast had crept into her hut and, as he had done to the fetishes, polluted her and rendered her forever unfit for marriage. She had nowhere to go but with him, though her father had owned herds that blanketed the hills, and her mother had been the granddaughter of an immortal leopard whose outline could now be traced in the stars in the sky. She may have told me these things to pass the night, for she slept little, and came to me even after she had ministered to another, during the days when we made our way north through the clustered encampments, begging and dancing and promising a deluge if our lives were spared. Named Kutunda, she showed herself by moonlight to be a wild and wakeful woman, lost in her stories, adept at languages, bewitched by the running of her tongue, which was as strong as her smell. I was sensitive to her tongue's strength, for my own mouth was tender; to prove my authenticity as a dervish I had, more than once, held a hot coal from the campfire in my mouth and mimed swallowing it. Such things are possible, when the needful spirit transfixes the body, and fear does not dry up the saliva. God is closer to a man than the vein in his neck, the Koran says. A Salu proverb has it, A man's fate follows him like the heel of his foot. Kutunda's rank smell grew sweet to me, and her low sharp laugh in the act of love lies within me like a bit of flint. We would sleep, often, in the ditches of our unsuccessful wells. The well we dug deepest-I was not precisely digging but standing on the edge of the pit chanting sacred verses and dodging clumps of dirt the dwarf tossed in my direction-yielded instead of water a Roman vase, banded with the scrolling waves of the fabulous wine-dark sea impossibly far to the north; also, a corroded metal disc that must once have served as a mirror. The Sahara long ago was green, and men crossed its grasslands in chariots. That was the meaning of our national flag, its field of bright and rampant green. The soil here had become gun-metal gray, with flickers of spar, and the people we travelled among had turned that gray tint which, in a black man, presages death. The blacks were slaves, bouzous, for we were in the territory of the Tuareg, whose pale eyes glittered above the indigo of the tagilmst-so wound, all six meters of it, as to cover their mouths, which they regard as obscene, the hole that takes in as obscene as the hole that expels. The camels were humpless and dying with that strange soft suddenness of camels, settling on their haunches and letting the spirit depart without a sigh. Among the tents, when the murmur of the day's prayers had subsided, a silence descended worse than the silence of death, because willed; only the children whimpered, and these only below the age of eight, before they could receive the consolatory discipline of religion. In their reduced state, their bodies took on a sculptural beauty-the amorphous padding of flesh lifted to reveal the