No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man"s sight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, he discovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint.
Nothing was there but a clump of acacias, their twisted thorns parched white. They had been shooting at only fantasms of their own brains.
Now, even the mercy-bullets were gone.
Bitterly the man cursed himself, as he thrust the now useless pistol back into its holster. The woman, however, smiled with dry lips, and from her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead--the bullet which, fired at _Nissr_ from near the Ka"aba, had fallen at her feet and been picked up by her as a souvenir.
"Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two and shape it. We can reload two sh.e.l.ls with some of the Arab powder. It will do!"
They laughed irrationally. More than half mad as they now were, neither one thought of the fact that they had no percussion-caps.
Still laughing, they sat down in the hot sand, near the clawlike distortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. The sun"s anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky.
Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet--toying with them for its own delectation--respited them a little while by stumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this only after a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could both see the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees--trees they could touch and feel--gave them fresh courage.
Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle of blind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean some time ago by the pa.s.sage of a swarm of those voracious locusts known as _jarad Iblis_ (the locusts of Satan).
Nothing but bare branches remained in the _nakhil_, or grove. Nothing at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now choked with ma.s.ses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if the sun"s flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village to dust and ashes.
All the sufferers found, of any worth, was a few handfuls of dry dates in one of the hovels and a water-jar with about two quarts of brackish water.
This water the Master discovered, groping half blind through the hut.
Stale as it was, it far surpa.s.sed the strongly chemicalized water of the River of Night, still remaining in the goat-skin. It smote him with the most horrible temptation of his life. All the animal in his nature, every parched atom of his body shouted.
"Take it! Drink, drink your fill! She will never know. Take it, and drink!"
He seized the water-jar, indeed, but only to carry it with shaking hands to her, where she lay in the welcome shadow of the hut. His lips were black with thirst as he raised her head and cried to her:
"Here is water--real water! Drink!"
She obeyed, hardly more than half conscious. He gave her all he dared to have her drink at once, nearly half. Then he set down the jar, loosened the sack from his shoulders which were cut raw with the chafing of the thongs, and bathed her face with a little of that other water which, though bad, still might keep life in them.
"This may be an insane waste," he was thinking, "but it will help revive her. And--maybe--we shall find another, better oasis."
Out across the plain he peered, over the sun-dried earth, out into the distances shrouded with purple mists. His blurred eyes narrowed.
"Why, my G.o.d! There"s one, now!" he muttered. "A green one--cool--fresh--"
The Master laid the woman down again in the shadow, got up and staggered out into the blinding sun. He tottered forward, laughing hoa.r.s.ely.
"Cool--_fresh_--" The words came from between parched lips.
All at once the oasis faded to a blur in the brilliant tapestry of the desert that beckoned: "Come to me--and die!"
The Master recoiled, hands over eyes, mouthing unintelligible words.
Back beside the woman he crouched, fighting his own soul to keep it from madness. Then he heard her voice, weak, strange:
"Have you drunk, too?"
"Of course!"
"You are not--telling me the truth."
"So help me G.o.d!" His fevered lips could hardly form the words.
"There, in the hut--I drank. All I needed."
She grew silent. His conscience lapsed. They lay as if dead, till almost evening, under the shelter of the blessed shadow.
The rest, even in that desolation, put fresh life into them. At nightfall they bound up their feet again, ate the dry dates and again set their blistered faces toward the Red Sea.
The woman"s basket was now light, indeed, across her shoulders. Not all her begging had induced the Master to let her carry the water-jug there. This, too, he was carrying.
All night long, stopping only when one or the other fell, they ploughed over basalt and hornblende schist that lacerated their feet, over blanched immensities under the steel moon, across grim, black ridges and through a basin of clay, circled by hills.
Strange apparitions mocked and mowed before them, but grimly they gave no heed. This, they both realized in moments of lucidity, was the last trek. Either they must find the sea, before another night, or madness would sink its fangs into their brains. And madness meant--the end.
Their whole consciousness was pain. This pain localized itself especially in their heads, round which some _jinnee_ of the waste had riveted red-hot iron bands. There was other pain, too, in the limping feet cased in the last of the _babooches_, now stiffened with blood.
And in the throat and lungs, what was this burning?
CHAPTER LII
"Thala.s.sa! Thala.s.sa!"
Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a bra.s.s circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making perhaps a mile an hour.
Disjointed words and sentences kept framing themselves in the man"s mind; above all, a sentence he had read long ago in Greek, somewhere.
Where had he read that? Oh, in Xenophon, of course. In _The Retreat of the Ten Thousand._ The Master gulped it aloud, in a dead voice:
"Most terrible of all is--the desert--for it is full-of a great want."
After a while he knew that he was trying to laugh.
"A great want!" he repeated. "A great--"
Presently it was night again.
The Master"s mind cleared. Yes, there was the woman, lying in the sand near him. But where was the date-stick basket? Where was the last of the food? He tried to think.
He could remember nothing. But reason told him they must have eaten the last of the food and thrown the basket away. His shoulders felt strangely light. What was this? The water-bag was gone, too?
But that did not matter. There had been only a little of that chemicalized water left, anyhow. Perhaps they had drunk it all, or bathed their faces and necks with it. Who could tell? The water-sack was gone; that was all he knew.
A great fear stabbed him. The water-jar! Was that still on his back?
As he felt the pull of a thong, and dragged the jar around so that he could blink at it, a wonderful relief for a moment deadened his pain.