“What an exhausting day.  What a night, heavy, heavy—­You don’t feel like yourself, you don’t know any more—­”

“Yes,” said the voice of Saint-Avit, as from a distance, “A heavy, heavy night:  as heavy, do you know, as when I killed Captain Morhange.”

III

THE MORHANGE-SAINT-AVIT MISSION

“So I killed Captain Morhange,” Andre de Saint-Avit said to me the next day, at the same time, in the same place, with a calm that took no account of the night, the frightful night I had just been through.  “Why do I tell you this?  I don’t know in the least.  Because of the desert, perhaps.  Are you a man capable of enduring the weight of that confidence, and further, if necessary, of assuming the consequences it may bring?  I don’t know that, either.  The future will decide.  For the present there is only one thing certain, the fact, I tell you again, that I killed Captain Morhange.

“I killed him.  And, since you want me to specify the reason, you understand that I am not going to torture my brain to turn it into a romance for you, or commence by recounting in the naturalistic manner of what stuff my first trousers were made, or, as the neo-Catholics would have it, how often I went as a child to confession, and how much I liked doing it.  I have no taste for useless exhibitions.  You will find that this recital begins strictly at the time when I met Morhange.

“And first of all, I tell you, however much it has cost my peace of mind and my reputation, I do not regret having known him.  In a word, apart from all question of false friendship, I am convicted of a black ingratitude in having killed him.  It is to him, it is to his knowledge of rock inscriptions, that I owe the only thing that has raised my life in interest above the miserable little lives dragged out by my companions at Auxonne, and elsewhere.

“This being understood, here are the facts:” 

[NOTE:  From this point on begins an extended narrative; indeed it may be most of the remaining book.  I was changing the quoting, until I reached the end of the chapter and found that it continued on from there.]

It was in the Arabian Office at Wargla, when I was a lieutenant, that I first heard the name, Morhange.  And I must add that it was for me the occasion of an attack of bad humor.  We were having difficult times.  The hostility of the Sultan of Morocco was latent.  At Touat, where the assassination of Flatters and of Frescaly had already been concocted, connivance was being given to the plots of our enemies.  Touat was the center of conspiracies, of razzias, of defections, and at the same time, the depot of supply for the insatiable nomads.  The Governors of Algeria, Tirman, Cambon, Laferriere, demanded its occupation.  The Ministers of War tacitly agreed....  But there was Parliament, which did nothing at all, because of England, because of Germany, and above all because