"In an hour the waters will reach that height. Those are the marks of
the last inundation. Let us get started. There is not an instant to
lose."
"All right," Morhange replied tranquilly.
We had the greatest difficulty to make the camels kneel. When we had
thrown ourselves into the saddle they started off at a pace which
their terror rendered more and more disorderly.
Of a sudden the wind began, a formidable wind, and, almost at the same
time the light was eclipsed in the ravine. Above our heads the sky had
become, in the flash of an eye, darker than the walls of the canyon
which we were descending at a breathless pace.
"A path, a stairway in the wall," I screamed against the wind to my
companions. "If we don't find one in a minute we are lost."
They did not hear me, but, turning in my saddle, I saw that they had
lost no distance, Morhange following me, and Bou-Djema in the rear
driving the two baggage camels masterfully before him.
A blinding streak of lightning rent the obscurity. A peal of thunder,
re-echoed to infinity by the rocky wall, rang out, and immediately
great tepid drops began to fall. In an instant, our burnouses, which
had been blown out behind by the speed with which we were traveling,
were stuck tight to our streaming bodies.
"Saved!" I exclaimed suddenly.
Abruptly on our right a crevice opened in the midst of the wall. It
was the almost perpendicular bed of a stream, an affluent of the one
we had had the unfortunate idea of following that morning. Already a
veritable torrent was gushing over it with a fine uproar.
I have never better appreciated the incomparable sure-footedness of
camels in the most precipitate places. Bracing themselves, stretching
out their great legs, balancing themselves among the rocks that were
beginning to be swept loose, our camels accomplished at that moment
what the mules of the Pyrannees might have failed in.
After several moments of superhuman effort we found ourselves at last
out of danger, on a kind of basaltic terrace, elevated some fifty
meters above the channel of the stream we had just left. Luck was with
us; a little grotto opened out behind. Bou-Djema succeeded in
sheltering the camels there. From its threshold we had leisure to
contemplate in silence the prodigious spectacle spread out before us.
You have, I believe, been at the Camp of Chalons for artillery drills.
You have seen when the shell bursts how the chalky soil of the Marne
effervesces like the inkwells at school, when we used to throw a piece
of calcium carbonate into them. Well, it was almost like that, but in
the midst of the desert, in the midst of obscurity. The white waters
rushed into the depths of the black hole, and rose and rose towards
the pedestal on which we stood. And there was the uninterrupted noise
of thunder, and still louder, the sound of whole walls of rock,
undermined by the flood, collapsing in a heap and dissolving in a few
seconds of time in the midst of the rising water.