THE DESERT
The Desert.
Four men, one woman.
Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that
great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, the
land "where there is none but He."
Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard,
unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons
of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness.
Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far,
iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare,
scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.
Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost
yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five
fugitives--pitiable handful of the Legion--were plodding south-west,
toward the sunset.
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 Hell." 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 masses 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 hoarse,
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 altitudes, 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 ashore, 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,
God knows--maybe!" He choked, coughed, added: "Or to the boys with
Nissr. God 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!" ejaculated 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
hoarsely.
"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
hoar-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!"