they had come, and his heart sank. He didn’t understand the words of all the men around him. Above Smara the sky was unfathomable, frozen, its stars dimmed in the white haze of moonlight. And it was a bit like a sign of death, or abandonment, like a sign of the terrible absence that was hollowing out the tents that stood so still near the city walls. Nour felt this even more strongly when he looked at the fragile shape of the great sheik, it was as if he were entering into the very heart of the old man, entering his silence.
Other sheiks, chieftains of great tents, and Tuareg warriors came to join the group one after another. They all spoke the same words, their voices cracking from fatigue and from thirst. They spoke of the soldiers of the Christians who made incursions into the southern oases bringing war to the nomads; they spoke of fortified towns the Christians were building in the desert barring access to wells all the way to the seashore. They spoke of lost battles, of the men who had died, so many of them that their names could no longer be remembered, of swarms of women and children fleeing northward through the desert, of the carcasses of dead livestock strewn everywhere along the way. They spoke of caravans that were cut short when the soldiers of the Christians liberated the slaves and sent them back to the south, and how the Tuareg warriors received money from the Christians for each slave they had stolen from the convoys. They spoke of merchandise and livestock being seized, of bands of brigands that had forayed into the desert along with the Christians. They spoke also of troops of soldiers marching for the Christians, guided by the black men from the south, so numerous that they covered the sand dunes from one end of the horizon to the other. And the horsemen who encircled the camps and killed anyone who resisted them on the spot, and then took the children away to put them into Christian schools in the forts on the coast. So when the other men heard this, they said it was true, by God, and the clamor of voices swelled up and heaved in the square like the sound of a rising wind.
Nour listened to the clamoring of voices growing louder, then subsiding, like the passage of the desert wind over the dunes, and there was a knot in his throat because he knew a terrible danger was threatening the city and all the men, a danger he was unable to understand.
Now, almost without blinking, he was watching the white shape of the old man standing very still between his sons in spite of the weariness and the cold night air. Nour thought that he alone, Ma al-Aïnine, could change the course of this night, calm the anger of the crowd with a wave of his hand or, on the contrary, unleash it with just a few words that would be passed from mouth to mouth and make the wave of rage and bitterness seethe. Like Nour, all the men were looking at him, eyes bright with fatigue and fever, minds tense with suffering. They could all feel their skin, leathered from the burning sun, their lips, blistered from the desert wind. They waited, almost without moving, eyes fixed, searching for a sign. But Ma al-Aïnine didn’t seem to notice them. In his eyes there was a steady remote look as he gazed out over the men’s heads, out beyond the dried mud walls of Smara. Maybe he was looking for the answer to the men’s anxiety in the depths of the nocturnal sky, in the strange blur of light swimming around the disk of the moon. Nour looked up at the place where he could usually see the seven stars of the Little Dipper, but he saw nothing. Only the planet Jupiter was visible, frozen in the icy sky. The haze of moonlight had covered everything. Nour loved the stars, for his father had taught him their names ever since he was a baby; but on this night, it was as if he couldn’t recognize the sky. Everything was immense and cold, engulfed in the white light of the moon, blinded. Down on earth, the fires in the braziers made red holes that lit up