Progress was easier when the cumbersome weapon had been disposed of.
But it was not long before clothing had to be jettisoned also. The
relatively thick and heavy garments of an aviator were intolerable
under the savage rays of the sun, and one by one they had to be
discarded. Even so, the going was terribly difficult and the journey
most exacting. By means of a compass a direction due west was
maintained, the one hope of the castaways being to keep on until some
point on the Canal should be reached.
The hours went slowly by as mile after mile was laboriously covered.
The strength of both men was steadily declining, but it was not until
something more than half the estimated distance from their goal had
been accomplished that either gave way. Then one collapsed; he could
go no farther, he declared. His companion, well aware how fatally
seductive a "rest" would inevitably be, bade him keep going, but
without effect. The weary man's legs gave way beneath him; he sank down
on the sand, and declared that he _preferred_ to stay there rather
than attempt to struggle on any longer. Advice, persuasion, cajolery,
threats, and even force were of no avail, and nothing remained but for
the second man to continue the journey, with waning hope, alone. To
stay with his comrade meant that both must inevitably perish miserably;
by pressing on there was, at all events, a faint chance, not only of
reaching the Canal himself, but of summoning aid to return in time to
rescue the other.
For some miles the wretched survivor, now tortured by an awful thirst
and so weakened that he seemed scarcely able to move his legs,
staggered blindly on across the desert. He had consciousness enough
to maintain his westerly direction, but as to how long he continued
stumbling forward in this almost aimless fashion, or what distance he
covered, he can hazard only the wildest guess. His progress became
largely automatic. Force of will kept him moving, his reluctant limbs
relapsing into semi-mechanical action.
At the moment of his direst extremity, as it seemed, when from sheer
lack of power his body threatened to collapse altogether, the hapless
wanderer espied a horse before him in the desert!
Now, if this were fiction, no writer, however cynical, would ever dare
to introduce a horse at such a point of the narrative. The thing would
be too absurd; the long arm of coincidence never reached so far as
that! Nobody could be expected to believe it.
Yet the fact is as stated. At the psychological moment, when
every new step taken might have proved his last, the wanderer saw
before him in the desert the miraculous apparition of a horse.
It can be easily supposed that at first he did not believe his
eyes. In his half-demented state he feared the creature must be an
hallucination--some trick of mirage, or the mere figment of his
disordered brain. Only when he came nearer, and could hear as well as
see the animal move, did a full realization of his good fortune begin
to dawn upon him.