"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 Hell 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 hoarse 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 butter.
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."