The silence was awful in its wild and terrible majesty.Infinity,immensity,closed in upon the soul from every side.Not a cloud in the sky,not a breath in the air,not a flaw on the bosom of the sand,ever moving in diminutive waves;the horizon ended as at sea on a clear day,with one line of light,definite as the cut of a sword.
The Provencal threw his arms round the trunk of one of the palm trees,as though it were the body of a friend,and then,in the shelter of the thin,straight shadow that the palm cast upon the granite,he wept.Then sitting down he remained as he was,contemplating with profound sadness the implacable scene,which was all he had to look upon.He cried aloud,to measure the solitude.His voice,lost in the hollows of the hill,sounded faintly,and aroused no echo--the echo was in his own heart.The Provencal was twenty-two years old:--he loaded his carbine.
"There'll be time enough,"he said to himself,laying on the ground the weapon which alone could bring him deliverance.
Viewing alternately the dark expanse of the desert and the blue expanse of the sky,the soldier dreamed of France--he smelled with delight the gutters of Paris--he remembered the towns through which he had passed,the faces of his comrades,the most minute details of his life.His Southern fancy soon showed him the stones of his beloved Provence,in the play of the heat which undulated above the wide expanse of the desert.Realizing the danger of this cruel mirage,he went down the opposite side of the hill to that by which he had come up the day before.The remains of a rug showed that this place of refuge had at one time been inhabited;at a short distance he saw some palm trees full of dates.Then the instinct which binds us to life awoke again in his heart.He hoped to live long enough to await the passing of some Maugrabins,or perhaps he might hear the sound of cannon;for at this time Bonaparte was traversing Egypt.
This thought gave him new life.The palm tree seemed to bend with the weight of the ripe fruit.He shook some of it down.When he tasted this unhoped-for manna,he felt sure that the palms had been cultivated by a former inhabitant--the savory,fresh meat of the dates were proof of the care of his predecessor.He passed suddenly from dark despair to an almost insane joy.He went up again to the top of the hill,and spent the rest of the day in cutting down one of the sterile palm trees,which the night before had served him for shelter.
A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert;and in case they might come to drink at the spring,visible from the base of the rocks but lost further down,he resolved to guard himself from their visits by placing a barrier at the entrance of his hermitage.
In spite of his diligence,and the strength which the fear of being devoured asleep gave him,he was unable to cut the palm in pieces,though he succeeded in cutting it down.At eventide the king of the desert fell;the sound of its fall resounded far and wide,like a sigh in the solitude;the soldier shuddered as though he had heard some voice predicting woe.
But like an heir who does not long bewail a deceased relative,he tore off from this beautiful tree the tall broad green leaves which are its poetic adornment,and used them to mend the mat on which he was to sleep.
Fatigued by the heat and his work,he fell asleep under the red curtains of his wet cave.
In the middle of the night his sleep was troubled by an extraordinary noise;he sat up,and the deep silence around allowed him to distinguish the alternative accents of a respiration whose savage energy could not belong to a human creature.
A profound terror,increased still further by the darkness,the silence,and his waking images,froze his heart within him.He almost felt his hair stand on end,when by straining his eyes to their utmost he perceived through the shadow two faint yellow lights.At first he attributed these lights to the reflections of his own pupils,but soon the vivid brilliance of the night aided him gradually to distinguish the objects around him in the cave,and he beheld a huge animal lying but two steps from him.Was it a lion,a tiger,or a crocodile?
The Provencal was not sufficiently educated to know under what species his enemy ought to be classed;but his fright was all the greater,as his ignorance led him to imagine all terrors at once;he endured a cruel torture,noting every variation of the breathing close to him without daring to make the slightest movement.An odor,pungent like that of a fox,but more penetrating,more profound,--so to speak,--filled the cave,and when the Provencal became sensible of this,his terror reached its height,for he could no longer doubt the proximity of a terrible companion,whose royal dwelling served him for a shelter.
Presently the reflection of the moon descending on the horizon lit up the den,rendering gradually visible and resplendent the spotted skin of a panther.
This lion of Egypt slept,curled up like a big dog,the peaceful possessor of a sumptuous niche at the gate of an hotel;its eyes opened for a moment and closed again;its face was turned towards the man.A thousand confused thoughts passed through the Frenchman's mind;first he thought of killing it with a bullet from his gun,but he saw there was not enough distance between them for him to take proper aim --the shot would miss the mark.And if it were to wake!--the thought made his limbs rigid.He listened to his own heart beating in the midst of the silence,and cursed the too violent pulsations which the flow of blood brought on,fearing to disturb that sleep which allowed him time to think of some means of escape.
Twice he placed his hand on his scimiter,intending to cut off the head of his enemy;but the difficulty of cutting the stiff short hair compelled him to abandon this daring project.To miss would be to die for CERTAIN,he thought;he preferred the chances of fair fight,and made up his mind to wait till morning;the morning did not leave him long to wait.