Not a soul stirred in the one long street of the n***o village. The
yellow crescent of the diminished moon swam low in the pearly light
of the dawn; and the bamboo walls of huts, thatched with palm leaves,
glistened here and there through the great leaves of bananas. All that
night we had been moving on and on, slowly crossing clear _savannas_,
in which nothing stirred beside ourselves but the escort of our own
shadows, or plunging through dense patches of forest of an obscurity
so impenetrable that the very forms of our rescuers became lost to us,
though we heard their low voices and felt their hands steadying us in
our saddles. Then our horses paced softly on the dust of a road, while
athwart an avenue of orange trees whose foliage seemed as black as coal,
the blind walls of t
