Page:Kéraban the Inflexible Part 1 (Jules Verne).djvu/65

Rh "Certainly, so long as you do not go to sleep there."

"And how is it possible for me to sleep in the middle of this swarm of mosquitos?"

"Gnats," replied Kéraban; "merely gnats. Don't forget that, Bruno."

So saying, Kéraban and Van Mitten shut themselves up in the carriage, while Bruno climbed into the "dicky," to keep watch over his master, or masters; for since Kéraban and Van Mitten had met, Bruno could certainly count upon two masters.

Bruno, having carefully closed the carriage doors, went to see how the horses fared. The poor brutes, quite exhausted, lay prone upon the ground, breathing loudly, and mingling their hot breath with the fogs of the swamps.

"Old Nick himself will not drag them from this quagmire," muttered Bruno. "Seigneur Kéraban must have had some fine ideas concerning this route; but after all that is his business."

Then the valet ascended to his perch, and let down the glasses, through which he could see the luminous bars projected by the carriage lamps through the mist.

What better could Bruno do to keep himself awake and his eyes open than endeavour to review all the circumstances which had carried him in the train of the inflexible Kéraban, the most pig-headed of all Turks?

So he (Bruno), a native of ancient Batavia, a "loafer" in the streets and on the quays of Rotterdam, a fisherman of very slight pretence, a lounger by the canals which intersected his native town, had been carried away to the opposite end of Europe. He had made an enormous stride from Holland to Turkey. Scarcely disembarked in Constantinople, when fate dragged him to the steppes of the lower Danube. And there he was, perched up in the carriage, in the "dicky" of a post-chaise in the midst of the marshes of the Dobroutcha, lost in the darkness of night, and fixed in the ground as firmly as the Gothic tower of Zuidekirk. And all this because he had undertaken to obey his master, who, without any necessity, had yielded to Kéraban!