The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn from their tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; for everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp stone--the black basalt named by the Arabs _Hajar Jehannum_, or "Rock of h.e.l.l." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.
Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was, corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one of the most hideous deaths known to man--the death of thirst in the wilderness.
The woman"s face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained its beauty. Her heavy ma.s.ses of hair, bound up with cloth strips, protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others, they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously tied into some semblance of _cherchias_. Above all, the Legionaries knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the desert sun.
In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in reality a woman. The Legionaries" anguish, the numbing, brutalizing effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been true.
For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair was first to utter words.
"Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoa.r.s.e, choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events, until that cursed sun has set!"
In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now toiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon the hot earth.
Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they had soared above it, at cool alt.i.tudes, in the giant air-liner; very different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.
The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours" trek, was strangling the life out of them.
For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized by fatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of what was yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live to behold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested by pursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes of the Black Tent People, what hope could there be?
Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up, painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lying beside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master"s face drew into lines of anguish as he looked at her.
With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, and tore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a little of the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tight again, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman"s face, brow, and throat.
Her closed lids did not open. No one paid any attention. No one even stirred. The cloth grew dry, almost at once, as the thirsty air absorbed its moisture. The Master pocketed it. Elbows on knees, head between hands, he sat there pondering.
In thought he was living over again the incredible events of the past hours, as they had been presented to his own experience. He was remembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into the steaming waters of the River of Night--waters which, had they been but a few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on the instant.
He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life, clinging to the inflated goat-skin--the whirl and thunder of unseen cataracts in the blind dark--the confusion of deafening, incomprehensible violences.
He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mighty waters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roof close above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that might have been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters--a graying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush of the strangling flood that whelmed him--and all at once a glare of sun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the Iron Mountains.
All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions of fever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: a long drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of the lessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sands absorbed it, and the ceasing of the palms.
Last of all, the river had diminished to a shallow, tortuous delta, where the Master"s numbed feet had touched bottom. There he had dragged himself ash.o.r.e, with his goatskin, far more dead than living.
And there, for a time he knew not, consciousness had wholly ceased.
A dull, toneless voice sounded in the Master"s ears. Bohannan was speaking.
"Faith, but it"s strange how even the five of us found each other, out there in the sand," said the major. "What happened to the rest of us, G.o.d knows--maybe!" He choked, coughed, added: "Or to the boys with Nissr. G.o.d rest their souls! I wish I had a sackful of that wine!"
After a long pause: "Don"t you, now? What?"
The Master gave no heed. He was trying to ease the position in which the woman was lying. His jacket was off, now, and he was folding it to put under her head.
At his touch, she opened vague eyes. She smiled with dry lips, and put his hand away.
"No, no!" she protested. "No special favors for me! I"m not a woman, remember. I"m "Captain Alden," still--only a Legionary!"
"But--"
"If you favor me in any way, to the detriment of any of the others or your own, I won"t go on! I"m just one of you. Just one of the survivors, on even terms with the rest. It"s give-and-take. I mean that! You"ve got to understand me!"
The Master nodded. He knew that tone. Silently he put on his jacket, again.
The lieutenant"s orderly, Lebon, groaned and muttered a prayer to the Virgin. Leclair sat up, heavily, and blinked with sand-inflamed eyes.
"Time to drink again, _n"est-ce pas_, my Captain?" asked he. "Drink to the dead!"
"I hope they are dead, rather than prisoners!" exclaimed the Master.
"Yes, we"ll drink, and get forward. We"ve got to make long strides, tonight. Those Jannati Shahr devils may be after us, tomorrow. Surely will, if they investigate that delta and find only a few bodies.
They"ll conclude some of us have got through. And if they pick up our trail, with those white dromedaries of theirs--"
"The sacred pigs!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Leclair. "Ah, _messieurs_, now you begin to know the Arabs as I have long known them." With eyes of hate and pain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.
Bohannan, already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughed hoa.r.s.ely.
"No wine!" he croaked, "and the water"s rationed; even the stinking water. But the food isn"t--good reason, too; there isn"t any. Pockets full of gems!" He slapped one hard pocket. "I"d swap the lot for a proper pair of shoes and a skin o" that wine! Faith--that wine, now--"
The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other raised for silence.
"Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!"
"What now?" demanded the Master.
"Bells! Camel-bells!"
"_Nom d"un, nom!_" And the lieutenant drew his gun.
The five fugitives stiffened for another battle. They looked well to their weapons. The Master"s weariness and pain were forgotten as he crawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady. The sound of distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reached his ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman"s.
Over the edge of the wady he peered, across a _wa"ar_, or stony ground covered with mummified scrub. Beyond, a blanched salt-plain gleamed h.o.a.r-white in the on-coming dusk; and farther off, the dunes began again.
Strangely enough, the Master laughed. He turned and beckoned, silently. The others joined him.
"From the west!" he whispered. "This is no pursuit! It is a caravan going to Jannati Shahr!"
Bohannan chuckled, and patted his revolver.
"Faith, but Allah is being good to us!" he muttered. "Now, when it comes to a fight--"
"Ten dromedaries--no, nine--" Leclair judged.
"And six camel-drivers," put in the woman, gun in hand. "A small caravan!"
"Hold your fire, all!" commanded the Master. "They"re headed right across this wady. Wait till I give the word; then rush them! And--no prisoners!"
CHAPTER L