Ambiguous Adventure Read Free Page B

outline which in a few moments came to represent Demba, but which at present was only the target which his body and allhis being had chosen. He was no longer conscious of anything, except that his body, like a butting ram, had catapulted itself upon the target, that the knot of the two entwined bodies had fallen to the ground, and that there was under him something which was struggling and panting, and which he was hitting. His own body, now, was not vibrating any more, but, marvellously supple, was bending and unbending with the blows he was striking, and the mutiny of his body was calmed somewhat with every blow, as every blow restored a little clarity to his benumbed intelligence. Beneath him, the target continued to struggle and pant and was perhaps also striking, but he felt nothing, other than the mastery which his body was progressively imposing upon the target, the peace which the blows he was striking were bringing back to his body, the clarity which they were restoring to his mind. Suddenly the target ceased to move, the clarity was complete. Samba Diallo perceived that silence had fallen, and that two powerful arms had seized him and were forcing him to let his target go.
    When he raised his head, his gaze encountered a haughty and imposing visage, muffled in a light veil of white gauze.
    They called her the Most Royal Lady. She was sixty years old, and she would have been taken for scarcely forty. Nothing was to be seen of her except her face. The big blue boubou that she wore fell to the ground, and let nothing be seen except the pointed toes of her golden-yellow Turkish slippers, when she walked. The little gauze veil was wound around her throat, covered her head, passed again under her chin, and hung behind. The Most Royal Lady, who could well have been six feet tall, had lost none of her impressive bearing, in spite of her age.
    The little white gauze veil clung to the oval of a face of full contours. Samba Diallo had been fascinated by this countenance the first time he had beheld it: it was like a living page from the history of the Diallobé country. Everything that the country treasured of epic tradition could be read there. All the features were in long lines, on the axis of a slightly aquiline nose. The mouth was large and strong, without exaggeration. An extraordinarily luminous gaze bestowed a kind of imperious lustre upon this face. All the rest disappeared under the gauze, which, more than a coiffure would have done, took on here a distinct significance. Islam restrained the formidable turbulence of those features, in the same way that the little veil hemmed them in. Around the eyes and on the cheeks, over all this countenance, there was, as it were, the memory of a youth and a force upon which the rigid blast of an ardent breath was later brutally to blow.
    The Most Royal Lady was the older sister of the Diallobé chief. It was said that it was she, more than her brother, whom the countryside feared. If she had ceased her indefatigable excursions on horseback, the memory of her tall silhouette continued no less to hold in obedience the northern tribes who were renowned for their haughty arrogance. The chief of the Diallobé was by nature more inclined to be peaceable. Where he preferred to appeal to understanding, his sister would cut through on the path of authority.
    “My brother is not a prince,” she was in the habit of saying, “he is a sage.” Or, again, “The sovereign should never argue in the public light of day, and the people should not see his face in the night’s darkness.”
    She had pacified the North by her firmness. The tribes subjugated by her extraordinary personality had beenkept in obedience by her prestige. It was the North that had given her the name “the Most Royal Lady.”
    Now there was complete silence among the disciples, turned to stone as if by the Gorgon’s head.
    “I have warned your great fool of a father that your place is not at the teacher’s hearth,”