de.

I tried three times to chase her away. I felt that I should never
finish my task and that, even if I did, Gale would stay there and
disinter the body.

My carbine lay at my feet. A shot drew echoes from the immense empty
desert. A moment later, Gale also slept her last sleep, curled up, as
I so often had seen her, against the neck of her mistress.

When the surface showed nothing more than a little mound of trampled
sand, I rose staggering and started off aimlessly into the desert,
toward the south.

XX

THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE

At the foot of the valley of the Mia, at the place where the jackal
had cried the night Saint-Avit told me he had killed Morhange, another
jackal, or perhaps the same one, howled again.

Immediately I had a feeling that this night would see the
irremediable fulfilled.

We were seated that evening, as before, on the poor veranda improvised
outside our dining-room. The floor was of plaster, the balustrade of
twisted branches; four posts supported a thatched roof.

I have already said that from the veranda one could look far out over
the desert. As he finished speaking, Saint-Avit rose and stood leaning
his elbows on the railing. I followed him.

"And then...." I said.

He looked at me.

"And then what? Surely you know what all the newspapers told--how, in
the country of the Awellimiden, I was found dying of hunger and thirst
by an expedition under the command of Captain Aymard, and taken to
Timbuctoo. I was delirious for a month afterward. I have never known
what I may have said during those spells of burning fever. You may be
sure the officers of the Timbuctoo Club did not feel it incumbent upon
them to tell me. When I told them of my adventures, as they are
related in the report of the Morhange--Saint-Avit Expedition, I could
see well enough from the cold politeness with which they received my
explanations, that the official version which I gave them differed at
certain points from the fragments which had escaped me in my delirium.

"They did not press the matter. It remains understood that Captain
Morhange died from a sunstroke and that I buried him on the border of
the Tarhit watercourse, three marches from Timissao. Everybody can
detect that there are things missing in my story. Doubtless they guess
at some mysterious drama. But proofs are another matter. Because of
the impossibility of collecting them, they prefer to smother what
could only become a silly scanda