The Professor’s History

Progress with three mules proved slower than with two, and the professor's crossing to Rabelais came to seem interminable. Hour after hour, the animal beneath him jangled his limbs and assaulted his spine, kicking up dust until his suit was wholly pink.

Ibrahim no longer waved his switch at the mules: he kept his eyes to the ground which, as they climbed higher, grew more unyielding. Mustafa strode several paces ahead, eyeing the landscape warily, scanning the horizon and the hills for movement. When they stopped, the two men from Cassaigne did not smile and made no attempt to converse with the professor. They spoke quietly to each other, almost furtively, and they ate their meals with their bodies hunched over upon themselves.

The professor was made nervous, but did not show it. Self-control was, he knew, the source of authority. But sometimes, as they jolted forwards, his stomach would leap. He wondered if uncle and nephew planned to murder him in the mountain pass, to abandon his corpse to the hyenas, and to return, in haste and with their extra mule, to Cassaigne. The Oriental character, he knew from his research–and from his experience with Menouira in the cave–was alien to his own. The compassion, the civilized impulse, was not there. Menouira had walked the length of the sepulchre where his ancestors had been massacred, and felt nothing. The Ouled Riah could live without revulsion under the rule of the caid. What, to such people, was the life of the professor? They did not see the necessity of his work: history, too, meant nothing to them.

When they stopped to camp for the night, by the edge of an oued between two crests, the professor withdrew from the fire, and unbuckled his case. He took from it, surreptitiously, the wallet that held his money, and stuffed it against his belly, beneath his shirt, tucked into the waistband of his trousers. In this way he felt protected, somewhat, from the danger he imagined he now saw in Mustafa's gaze, in the way his delicate fingers plucked at his beard.

In the night, the professor woke to see Mustafa still seated by the fire, watching him and smoking. Conjuring a flicker of menace in the Arab's eye, he felt for the wallet, his wealth resting, like his name, against him.

'Do you not sleep?' he asked, in Arabic.

'I will sleep tomorrow night,' said Mustafa. 'When we reach Rabelais.'

The professor closed his eyes again, and dreamt of his own murder.