CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENTH.
Terrific Heat.--Hallucinations.--The Last Drops of Water.--Nights ofDespair.--An Attempt at Suicide.--The Simoom.--The Oasis.--The Lion andLioness.
The doctor's first care, on the morrow, was to consult the barometer.He found that the mercury had scarcely undergone any perceptibledepression.
"Nothing!" he murmured, "nothing!"
He got out of the car and scrutinized the weather; there was only thesame heat, the same cloudless sky, the same merciless drought.
"Must we, then, give up to despair?" he exclaimed, in agony.
Joe did not open his lips. He was buried in his own thoughts, andplanning the expedition he had proposed.
Kennedy got up, feeling very ill, and a prey to nervous agitation. Hewas suffering horribly with thirst, and his swollen tongue and lipscould hardly articulate a syllable.
There still remained a few drops of water. Each of them knew this, andeach was thinking of it, and felt himself drawn toward them; but neitherof the three dared to take a step.
Those three men, friends and companions as they were, fixed theirhaggard eyes upon each other with an instinct of ferocious longing,which was most plainly revealed in the hardy Scot, whose vigorousconstitution yielded the soonest to these unnatural privations.
Throughout the day he was delirious, pacing up and down, uttering hoarsecries, gnawing his clinched fists, and ready to open his veins and drinkhis own hot blood.
"Ah!" he cried, "land of thirst! Well might you be called the land ofdespair!"
At length he sank down in utter prostration, and his friends heard noother sound from him than the hissing of his breath between his parchedand swollen lips.
Toward evening, Joe had his turn of delirium. The vast expanse of sandappeared to him an immense pond, full of clear and limpid water; and,more than once, he dashed himself upon the scorching waste to drink longdraughts, and rose again with his mouth clogged with hot dust.
"Curses on it!" he yelled, in his madness, "it's nothing but saltwater!"
Then, while Ferguson and Kennedy lay there motionless, the resistlesslonging came over him to drain the last few drops of water that hadbeen kept in reserve. The natural instinct proved too strong. He draggedhimself toward the car, on his knees; he glared at the bottle containingthe precious fluid; he gave one wild, eager glance, seized the treasuredstore, and bore it to his lips.
At that instant he heard a heart-rending cry close beside him--"Water!water!"
It was Kennedy, who had crawled up close to him, and was begging there,upon his knees, and weeping piteously.
Joe, himself in tears, gave the poor wretch the bottle, and Kennedydrained the last drop with savage haste.
"Thanks!" he murmured hoarsely, but Joe did not hear him, for both alikehad dropped fainting on the sand.
What took place during that fearful night neither of them knew, but, onTuesday morning, under those showers of heat which the sun poured downupon them, the unfortunate men felt their limbs gradually drying up, andwhen Joe attempted to rise he found it impossible.
He looked around him. In the car, the doctor, completely overwhelmed,sat with his arms folded on his breast, gazing with idiotic fixednessupon some imaginary point in space. Kennedy was frightful to behold. Hewas rolling his head from right to left like a wild beast in a cage.
All at once, his eyes rested on the butt of his rifle, which juttedabove the rim of the car.
"Ah!" he screamed, raising himself with a superhuman effort.
Desperate, mad, he snatched at the weapon, and turned the barrel towardhis mouth.
"Kennedy!" shouted Joe, throwing himself upon his friend.
"Let go! hands off!" moaned the Scot, in a hoarse, grating voice--andthen the two struggled desperately for the rifle.
"Let go, or I'll kill you!" repeated Kennedy. But Joe clung to him onlythe more fiercely, and they had been contending thus without the doctorseeing them for many seconds, when, suddenly the rifle went off. At thesound of its discharge, the doctor rose up erect, like a spectre, andglared around him.
But all at once his glance grew more animated; he extended his handtoward the horizon, and in a voice no longer human shrieked:
"There! there--off there!"
There was such fearful force in the cry that Kennedy and Joe releasedeach other, and both looked where the doctor pointed.
The plain was agitated like the sea shaken by the fury of a tempest;billows of sand went tossing over each other amid blinding clouds ofdust; an immense pillar was seen whirling toward them through the airfrom the southeast, with terrific velocity; the sun was disappearingbehind an opaque veil of cloud whose enormous barrier extended clear tothe horizon, while the grains of fine sand went gliding together withall the supple ease of liquid particles, and the rising dust-tide gainedmore and more with every second.
Ferguson's eyes gleamed with a ray of energetic hope.
"The simoom!" he exclaimed.
"The simoom!" repeated Joe, without exactly knowing what it meant.
"So much the better!" said Kennedy, with the bitterness of despair. "Somuch the better--we shall die!"
"So much the better!" echoed the doctor, "for we shall live!" and, sosaying, he began rapidly to throw out the sand that encumbered the car.
At length his companions understood him, and took their places at hisside.
"And now, Joe," said the doctor, "throw out some fifty pounds of yourore, there!"
Joe no longer hesitated, although he still felt a fleeting pang ofregret. The balloon at once began to ascend.
"It was high time!" said the doctor.
The simoom, in fact, came rushing on like a thunderbolt, and a momentlater the balloon would have been crushed, torn to atoms, annihilated.The awful whirlwind was almost upon it, and it was already pelted withshowers of sand driven like hail by the storm.
"Out with more ballast!" shouted the doctor.
"There!" responded Joe, tossing over a huge fragment of quartz.
With this, the Victoria rose swiftly above the range of the whirlingcolumn, but, caught in the vast displacement of the atmosphere therebyoccasioned, it was borne along with incalculable rapidity away abovethis foaming sea.
The three travellers did not speak. They gazed, and hoped, and even feltrefreshed by the breath of the tempest.
About three o'clock, the whirlwind ceased; the sand, falling again uponthe desert, formed numberless little hillocks, and the sky resumed itsformer tranquillity.
The balloon, which had again lost its momentum, was floating in sight ofan oasis, a sort of islet studded with green trees, thrown up upon thesurface of this sandy ocean.
"Water! we'll find water there!" said the doctor.
And, instantly, opening the upper valve, he let some hydrogen escape,and slowly descended, taking the ground at about two hundred feet fromthe edge of the oasis.
In four hours the travellers had swept over a distance of two hundredand forty miles!
The car was at once ballasted, and Kennedy, closely followed by Joe,leaped out.
"Take your guns with you!" said the doctor; "take your guns, and becareful!"
Dick grasped his rifle, and Joe took one of the fowling-pieces. Theythen rapidly made for the trees, and disappeared under the freshverdure, which announced the presence of abundant springs. As theyhurried on, they had not taken notice of certain large footprints andfresh tracks of some living creature marked here and there in the dampsoil.
Suddenly, a dull roar was heard not twenty paces from them.
"The roar of a lion!" said Joe.
"Good for that!" said the excited hunter; "we'll fight him. A man feelsstrong when only a fight's in question."
"But be careful, Mr. Kennedy; be careful! The lives of all depend uponthe life of one."
But Kennedy no longer heard him; he was pushing on, his eye blazing; hisrifle cocked; fearful to behold in his daring rashness. There, under apalm-tree, stood an enormous black-maned lion, crouching for a sprin
g onhis antagonist. Scarcely had he caught a glimpse of the hunter, when hebounded through the air; but he had not touched the ground ere a bulletpierced his heart, and he fell to the earth dead.
"Hurrah! hurrah!" shouted Joe, with wild exultation.
Kennedy rushed toward the well, slid down the dampened steps, andflung himself at full length by the side of a fresh spring, in whichhe plunged his parched lips. Joe followed suit, and for some minutesnothing was heard but the sound they made with their mouths, drinkingmore like maddened beasts than men.
"Take care, Mr. Kennedy," said Joe at last; "let us not overdo thething!" and he panted for breath.
But Kennedy, without a word, drank on. He even plunged his hands,and then his head, into the delicious tide--he fairly revelled in itscoolness.
"But the doctor?" said Joe; "our friend, Dr. Ferguson?"
That one word recalled Kennedy to himself, and, hastily filling a flaskthat he had brought with him, he started on a run up the steps of thewell.
But what was his amazement when he saw an opaque body of enormousdimensions blocking up the passage! Joe, who was close upon Kennedy'sheels, recoiled with him.
"We are blocked in--entrapped!"
"Impossible! What does that mean?--"
Dick had no time to finish; a terrific roar made him only too quicklyaware what foe confronted him.
"Another lion!" exclaimed Joe.
"A lioness, rather," said Kennedy. "Ah! ferocious brute!" he added,"I'll settle you in a moment more!" and swiftly reloaded his rifle.
In another instant he fired, but the animal had disappeared.
"Onward!" shouted Kennedy.
"No!" interposed the other, "that shot did not kill her; her body wouldhave rolled down the steps; she's up there, ready to spring upon thefirst of us who appears, and he would be a lost man!"
"But what are we to do? We must get out of this, and the doctor isexpecting us."
"Let us decoy the animal. Take my piece, and give me your rifle."
"What is your plan?"
"You'll see."
And Joe, taking off his linen jacket, hung it on the end of the rifle,and thrust it above the top of the steps. The lioness flung herselffuriously upon it. Kennedy was on the alert for her, and his bulletbroke her shoulder. The lioness, with a frightful howl of agony, rolleddown the steps, overturning Joe in her fall. The poor fellow imaginedthat he could already feel the enormous paws of the savage beast in hisflesh, when a second detonation resounded in the narrow passage, and Dr.Ferguson appeared at the opening above with his gun in hand, and stillsmoking from the discharge.
Joe leaped to his feet, clambered over the body of the dead lioness, andhanded up the flask full of sparkling water to his master.
To carry it to his lips, and to half empty it at a draught, was thework of an instant, and the three travellers offered up thanks from thedepths of their hearts to that Providence who had so miraculously savedthem.