With Annette limp across his saddle, Casim Ammeh sped away.

A SON OF THE SAHARA

BY

LOUISE GERARD

With Illustrations from the Photo-Play
"A FIRST NATIONAL ATTRACTION"

Produced by EDWIN CAREWE,
Featuring BERT LYTELL AND CLAIRE WINDSOR

NEW YORK

THE MACAULAY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY THE MACAULAY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

TO
MY FRIEND

DOROTHEA THORNTON CLARKE

WITHOUT WHOSE HELP AND CONSTANT ENCOURAGEMENT
NEITHER THIS NOR ANY OF MY BOOKS
WOULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

PREFACE

A beach of white sand, the whisper of palms answering the murmuring moonlit sea, the fragrance of orange blossoms, the perfume of roses and syringa,—that is Grand Canary, a bit of Heaven dropped into the Atlantic; overlooked by writers and painters in general. Surely one can be pardoned a bit of praise and promise for this story, laid, as it is in part, in that magic island.

The Canaries properly belong to the African continent. That is best proven by their original inhabitants who were of pure Berber stock. The islands are the stepping stone between Europe and the Sahara. Mysterious Arabs and a continual stream of those silent men who come and go from the great desert tarry there for a while, giving color and romance to the big hotels.

The petty gossip, the real news of the Sahara "breaks" there.—Weird, passionate tales; believable or not, they carry an undercurrent of reality that thrills.

From such a source came this story. Unaltered in fact, it is given to you, the life story of a man and a woman who turned their backs on worldly conventions that they might find happiness. If it is frank, forgive it. Life near the Equator is not a milk and water affair.

THE PUBLISHERS.

CONTENTS

PART I

PART II

PART III

ILLUSTRATIONS

With Annette limp across his saddle, Casim Ammeh sped away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

He had come to the harem to say farewell

For sale as a common slave at the Taureg auction block

"Let us both dance for you, so that you may judge between us"

PART I

A Son of the Sahara

CHAPTER I

In the days when France was pursuing a vigorous forward policy in Africa, a policy started by General Faidherbe and carried on by subsequent governors, one of the bravest among her pioneer soldiers was Colonel Raoul Le Breton.

He was a big, handsome man with a swarthy complexion, coal-black hair and dark, fiery eyes, by nature impetuous and reckless. With a trio of white sergeants and a hundred Senegalese soldiers, he would attempt—and accomplish—things that no man with ten times his following would have attempted.

But there came a day when even his luck failed.

He left St. Louis, in Senegal, and went upwards to the north-east, intending to pierce the heart of the Sahara. From that expedition, however, he never returned. The Government at St. Louis assumed that he and his little pioneer force had been wiped out by some hostile negro king or Arab chief. It was but one of the tragedies attached to extending a nation's territory.

When Raoul Le Breton went on that ill-fated expedition, he did what no man should have done who attempts to explore the Back of Beyond with an indifferent force.

He took his wife with him.

There was some excuse for this piece of folly. He was newly married. He adored his wife, and she worshipped him, and refused to let him go unless she went also.

She was barely half his age; a girl just fresh from a convent school, whom he had met and married in Paris during his last leave.

Colonel Le Breton journeyed for weeks through an arid country, an almost trackless expanse of poor grass and stunted scrub, until he reached the edge of the Sahara.

Annette Le Breton enjoyed her travels. She did not mind the life in tents, the rough jolting of her camel, the poor food, the heat, the flies; she minded nothing so long as she was with her husband. He was a man of rare fascination, as many women had found to their cost; a light lover until Annette had come into his life and captured his straying heart once and for all.

On the edge of the Sahara Le Breton met a man who, on the surface at least, appeared to see even more quickly than the majority of negro kings and Arab chiefs he had come in contact with, the advantages attached to being under the shadow of the French flag.

It would be difficult to say where the Sultan Casim Ammeh came from. He appeared one afternoon riding like a madman out of the blazing distance; a picturesque figure in his flowing white burnoose, sitting his black stallion like a centaur.

He was a young man, perhaps about twenty-four, of medium height, lean and lithe and brown, with fierce black eyes and a cruel mouth: the hereditary ruler of that portion of the Sahara. His capital was a walled city that, so far, had not been visited by any European. In his way he was a man of great wealth, and he added to that wealth by frequent marauding expeditions and slave-dealing.

With a slight smile he listened to all the Frenchman had to say. Already he had heard of France—a great Power, creeping slowly onwards—and he wondered whether he was strong enough to oppose it, or whether the wiser plan might not be just to rest secure under the shadow of its distant wing, and under its protection continue his wild, marauding life as usual.

As he sat with Colonel Le Breton in the latter's tent, something happened which caused the Sultan Casim Ammeh to make up his mind very quickly.

It was late afternoon. From the open flap of the tent an endless, rolling expense of sand showed, with here and there a knot of coarse, twisted grass, a dwarfed shrub, or a flare of red-flowered, distorted cacti. The French officer's camp was pitched by an oasis; a little group of date palms, where a spring bubbled among brown rocks, bringing an abundance