TORTURE
How that day passed, 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.
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 shells 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 passage 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 masses 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 surpassed 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 God! 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
hoarsely.
"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 God!" 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?