"WHERE THERE IS NONE BUT ALLAH"
An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the gaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so as to leave as little trace as possible.
Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his long experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead camel-driver. The dead man had suddenly revived from his feigned death and driven a _jambiyeh_ into the base of the lieutenant"s throat. That the lieutenant"s orderly had instantly shattered the cameleer"s skull with a point-blank shot had not saved Leclair.
The four survivors, in addition to burying all the bodies, had buried the copper bars the caravan had been freighting to Jannati Shahr.
They had saved the scant food and water of the drivers, also their clothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.
Now, dressed like Arabs--the best of all disguises in case of being sighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from far off--they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels and leading the others.
For a week of h.e.l.l the failing beasts, already half dead of thirst when captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast. Twice there rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whether these were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampments they could not tell.
Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one by one.
By the end of the fourth day only three remained. Lebon methodically cut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in any stomach.
The fugitives sighted no oasis. They found no wady other than stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their bodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.
But they still kept organization and coherence. Still, guided by the stars that burned with ardent trembling in the black sky, they followed their chosen course.
Morning heat-mist, noontide glare, wind like a beast with flaming breath, a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, an inescapable sun-furnace that seemed to boil the brains in their skulls--all these and the mockery of mirages that made every long white line of salt efflorescence a lake of cooling waters, brought the four tortured Legionaries close to death.
Awaking toward evening of the fifth day, the Master discovered one of the three camels gone--the one on which he had been riding with the woman, lest she fall fainting to the sand. With this camel, Major Bohannan had likewise disappeared. His big-shouldered, now emaciated figure in its dirty-white burnous was nowhere visible. Only prints of soft hoof-pads, leading off to north-eastward, betrayed the line of flight.
The Master pondered a while as he sat there, dazed, blinking at the desert all purple, gold, and tawny-red. His inflamed eyes, stubbly beard and gaunt cheeks made him a caricature of the man he had been, ten days before. After a little consideration, he awakened the woman and Lebon.
The verdict on Bohannan was madness, mirage, desertion.
For two days the major had been babbling of wine and water, been beholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginary vultures. Now, well, the desert had got him.
To pursue would have been insanity. They got the two remaining camels up, by dint of furious beating and of hoa.r.s.e eloquence in Arabic from the Master and Lebon. Once more, knowing themselves doomed, they pushed into the eye of the flaming west, over the savage gorgeousness of the Empty Abodes. In less than an hour the double-laden camel fell to its knees and incontinently died.
Lebon dismounted from the one surviving animal, and stepped fair into a scorpion"s nest. The horrible little gray creature, striking up over its back with spiked tail, drove the deadly barb half an inch into the orderly"s naked ankle.
The Master scarified, sucked, and cauterized the wound. Nothing availed. Lebon, in his depleted condition, could not fight off the poison. Thirty minutes later, swollen and black, he died in a frothing spasm, his last words a hideous imprecation on the Arabs who had enslaved and tortured him-a curse on the whole race of Moslems.
Shaken with horror, the woman and the man buried Lebon, loaded the remaining water-bags, the guns and food on to the one camel and dragged themselves away on foot, driving the spent beast. Obviously this camel could not go far. Blindness had stricken it, and its black lips were retracted with the parch of thirst.
They gave it half a skin of water, and goaded it along with desperation. Everything now depended on this camel. Even though it could not carry them, it could bear the burden of their scant supplies. Without it, hope was lost.
All that night they drove the tortured camel. It fell more and more often. The Master spared it not. For on its dying strength depended the life of the woman he loved.
The camel died an hour before dawn. Not even vultures wheeled across the steely sky. The Master cut from its wasted flanks a few strips of meat and packed them into one of the palm-stick baskets that had held the cameleers" supplies. With them he packed all the remaining food--a few lentils, a little goat"s-milk cheese, and a handful of dates fried in clarified b.u.t.ter.
This basket, with a revolver and a handful of cartridges, also the extra slippers taken from Leclair and the orderly, made all the burden the woman could carry. The Master"s load, heavier far, was one of the water-skins.
This load, he knew, would rapidly lighten. As it should diminish, faster than the woman"s, he would take part of hers. Thus, as best they could, they planned the final stage of their long agony.
Before starting again, they sat a while beside the gaunt, mangled camel, held council of war and pledged faith again. They drank a little of the mordant water that burned the throat and seemed in no wise to relieve the horrible thirst that blackened their lips and shriveled all their tissues.
"I think," the Master gasped, "we can make an hour or so before the sun gets too bad." He squinted at the crimson and purple banderoles of cloud through which, like the eye of a fevered Cyclops, the sun was already glowering. Already the range of obsidian hills ahead of them, the drifted sands all fretted with wind-waves, the whole iron plain of the desert was quivering with heat. "Every hour counts, now. Before we start, let us agree to certain things."
She nodded silently, crouching beside him on the sand. He drew an emaciated arm about her and for a moment peered down into her face.
But he did not kiss her. A kiss, as they both were--some fine delicacy of the soul seemed telling him--would have been mockery.
"Listen," he commanded. "We must strictly ration the food and water.
You must help me keep to that ration. I will help you. We must be careful about scorpions. Above all, we must beware of mirages. You understand?"
"I understand," she whispered.
"If either of us sees palms or water, that one must immediately tell the other. Then, if the other does not also see them, that is a mirage. We must not turn aside for anything like that, unless we both see it. I am speaking rationally, now that I can. Remember what I say!"
Silently she nodded. He went on:
"Now that we can still think, we must weigh every contingency. Our only hope lies in our helping each other. Alone, either of us will be led away by mirages in a little while. That kind of death must be spared us. We both live or die, together."
She smiled faintly, with parched lips.
"Do you think I would leave you," she asked, "any more than you would leave me? The pact is binding."
He pressed her hand.
"Come," said he. "Let us go!"
Once more they got to their feet, and set out to south-westward, over a scorching plain of crumbling, nitrous mud-flakes. Laden as they were, they could barely shuffle one foot after the other. But blessed lapses of consciousness now and then relieved their agony.
Conscious or not, the life within them drove them onward, ever onward; slow, crawling things that all but blindly moved across the land of death, _La Siwa Hu_--"where there is none but Allah."
CHAPTER LI
TORTURE
How that day pa.s.sed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion.
Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept a nightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and dragged themselves once more along.
Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sand-pillars--wind-_jinnee_ of the Empty Abodes--that danced and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming lakes, afar.
But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the same lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slain Bohannan.
Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoning waters which were but air.
At nightfall, toiling up over the lip of a parched, chalky _nullah_ that sunset turned to amethyst, a swarm of howling Arabs suddenly attacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away all his ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, did likewise.