"Thálassa! Thálassa!"
Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass 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.
"_Allah isélmak!_" he croaked, blessing the scant water the jar still
held. He realized the woman was looking at him.
"Water!" he whispered. "Let us drink again--and go on!"
She nodded silently. He loosed the thong, took the jar and peered into
its neck, gauging the small amount of water still there. Then he held
it to her lips.
She seemed to be drinking, but only seemed. Frowning, as she finished,
he once more squinted into the jar with bleared eyes. His voice was
even, dull, ominous as he accused:
"You drank nothing. You are trying to save water for me!"
She shook her head in negation, but he penetrated the lie. His teeth
gleamed through his stubble of beard, and his eyes glinted redly under
the hood of his ragged burnous as he cried:
"Will you drink?"
"I tell you--I have drunk!"
Slowly he tilted the jar toward the thirsty sands.
"Drink, now, or I pour all this on the ground!"
Beaten, she extended a quivering hand. They shared the last of the
water. The man took less than a third. Then they set out again on the
endless road of pain.
Was it that same day, or the next, that the man fell and could not
rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain
and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun
and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray
scorpion, too--but no, _that_ had been crushed to a pulp by the man's
heel. Or had it not? Well--
The man! Was there a man? Where was he? Here, of course, on the baked
earth.
As she cradled his head up into her lap and drew the shelter of her
burnous over it, she became rational again. Her hot, dry hand caressed
his face. After a while he was blinking up at her.
"Bara Miyan! Violator of the salt!" he croaked, and struck at
her feebly. And after another time, she perceived that they were
staggering on and on once more.
The woman wondered what had happened to her head, now that the sun had
bored quite through. Surely that must make a difference, must it not?
A jackal barked. But this, they knew, must be illusion.
No jackals lived so far from any habitation of mankind. The man
blinked into the glare, across which sand-devils of whirlwinds were
once more gyrating over a whiteness ending in dunes that seemed to be
peppered with camel-grass.
Another mirage! Grass could grow only near the coast. And now that
they had both been tortured to death by Jannati Shahr men and been
flung into Jehannum, how could there be any coast? It seemed so
preposterous.
It was all so very simple that the man laughed--silently.
Where had that woman gone to? Why, he thought there surely had been a
woman with him! But now he stood all alone. This was very strange.
"I must remember to ask them if there wasn't a woman," thought he.
"This is an extraordinary place! People come and go in such a manner!"
The man felt a dull irritation, and smeared the sand out of his eyes.
How had that sand got there? Naturally, from having laid on one of
those dunes. There seemed to be no particular reason for lying on
a dune, under the fire-box of an engine, so the man sat up and kept
blinking and rubbing his eyes.
"This is the best mirage, yet," he reflected. "The palms look real.
And the water--it sparkles. Those white blotches--one would say they
were houses!"
Indifferent, yet interested, too, in the appearance of reality,
the man remained sitting on the dune, squinting from under his torn
burnous.
The mirage took form as a line of dazzling white houses along a sea of
cobalt and indigo. And to add to the reality of the mirage, some miles
away, he could see two boats with sails all green and blue from the
reflection of the luster of the water.
The man's eyes fell. He studied his feet. They were naked, now, cut
to the bone, caked with blood and sand. Odd, that they did not hurt.
Where were his babooches? He seemed to remember something about having
taken some ragged ones from the feet of some woman or other, a very
long time ago, and having bound his own upon her mangled feet.
"I'll ask the people in those houses, down there," thought he; and on
hands and knees started to crawl down the slope of the dunes toward
the dazzling white things that looked like houses.
Something echoed at the back of his brain:
"_You must ask her if this is real! Unless you both see it, you must
not go!_"
He paused. "There was a woman, then!" he gasped. "But--where is she
now?"
Realization that she had disappeared sobered him. He got up, groped
with emaciated hands before his face as he turned back away from the
white houses and stumbled eastward.
All at once he saw something white lying on the sand, under a cooking
glare of sunlight. Memory returned. He fell on his knees beside the
woman and caught her up in quivering arms.
After a while, he noticed there was blood on her left arm. Blood, in
the bend of the elbow, coagulated there.
This puzzled him. All he could think was that she might have cut
herself on her _jambiyeh_, when she had fallen. He did not know then,
nor did he ever know, that he himself had fallen at this spot; that
she had thought him dying; that she had tried to cut her arm and give
him her blood to drink; that she had fainted in the effort. Some last
remnants of strength welled up in him. He stooped, got her across his
shoulder, struggled to his feet and went staggering up the dune.
Here he paused, swaying drunkenly.
Strange! The very same mirage presented itself to his eyes--blue
sails, turquoise sea, feathery palms, white houses.
"By God!" he croaked. "Mirages--they don't last, this way! That's
real--that's real water, by the living God!"
Up from dark profundities of tortured memory arose the cry of
Xenophon's bold Greeks when, after their long torment, they had of
a sudden fronted blue water. At sight of the little British consular
station of Batn el Hayil, on the Gulf of Farsan:
"_Thálassa!_" he cried. "_Thálassa, thálassa!_" (The sea, the sea!)