Read The Gobi Desert for Free Online

have happened during my absence, something which was impossible for me to foresee, but which must have been serious, something more serious than anything I could have feared until then.
    Mme Domestici, however, was smiling her most beautiful smile, and held out a bag for me.
    â€˜Do me a favour please and take these two bottles upstairs. It was Miss Alzire who asked me to get them for her before you came home. And tell her that you can look everywhere in Fouzan and you won’t find anything of better quality.’
    She added, in an engaging little whisper, ‘In a moment I’ll come up and have a glass with you. That’s a promise.’
    I stumbled several times on the damp and mouldy staircase as I tried to half-open the bag and see what was inside. What an irony! And what a surprise. I discovered that the two bottles of champagne were the same as the champagne which Jack Sanders had just been plying us with so freely. How long it had been since I had tasted a drop of champagne! And now in less than one hour! . . . . What a strange day this was, really strange!
    My heart beating, and with an awkward smile I went into our room. Alzire was there alone. So that she could be by herself I had installed myself from the first day in a store room next door, which was much bigger and was well ventilated by a window in the ceiling. Alzire liked her creature comforts, the poor thing, and when I think of how little I had managed to provide for her!
    She also smiled, and putting a finger to her lips she motioned me to sit down on the settee next to the dressing table where she was sitting. I obeyed with the commotion in my heart of someone who, each time he sees her, always has the impression of seeing her for the first time.
    It would be wrong to imagine that, in the year or more since we had been reunited, our life had been one long round of pleasure. First of all it had been essential to get rid of Nevelsky. This foolhardy individual, who had allowed himself, in the middle of the trial, to condemn us both, Alzire with his hatred and me with his commiseration, here he was again in Vladivostok, living with Alzire, in that same town where his own testimony had succeeded in getting her convicted! One must agree that it was a rather unusual situation. And I didn’t have too much trouble in putting an end to it.
    When I arrived in Vladivostok Nevelsky’s days were numbered, and Alzire had pleaded with all her heart and soul not to be separated from him again. But it was not a man, just a wet blanket who I tried to deal with. He could not have been more astonished than when, four days earlier, I had rudely interrupted their intimacy and he had cried, kissing my hands, and begging me not to do anything to prevent Alzire leaving with him to the little garrison where he had just been posted. But she and I were leaving Vladivostok the next morning, without fanfare, me because as you have noticed, I had no special interest in prolonging my stay in a town swarming with police, and she because, as if by chance, once again the poor child had suffered as a result of someone else’s thoughtlessness and irresponsibility. It was she who suffered when, all of a sudden and without rhyme or reason, Nevelsky began to do stupid things. And one week earlier, the local authorities had brought up against Alzire a ridiculous piece of legislation, dating from the reign of Nicholas I, under which those who have been brought before a military council and sentenced to more than one year in prison are refused permission to stay in the town where they have been sentenced.
    Alzire was granted a delay which was due to expire in just two days. But encouraged by me, for whom Vladivostok definitely had only bad memories, she decided it was pointless waiting to the last minute. This news plunged Nevelsky into floods of tears. He had wanted so much not to be separated from her until the very last moment. The following week he was due to take up his