CHAPTER L
"WHERE THERE IS NONE BUT ALLAH"
An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving thegaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buriedLeclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them soas to leave as little trace as possible.
Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have mostabominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his longexperience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a deadcamel-driver. The dead man had suddenly revived from his feigned deathand driven a _jambiyeh_ into the base of the lieutenant's throat. Thatthe lieutenant's orderly had instantly shattered the cameleer's skullwith a point-blank shot had not saved Leclair.
The four survivors, in addition to burying all the bodies, had buriedthe copper bars the caravan had been freighting to Jannati Shahr.They had saved the scant food and water of the drivers, also theirclothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.
Now, dressed like Arabs--the best of all disguises in case of beingsighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from faroff--they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels andleading the others.
For a week of Hell the failing beasts, already half dead of thirstwhen captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast. Twicethere rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whetherthese were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampmentsthey could not tell.
Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one byone.
By the end of the fourth day only three remained. Lebon methodicallycut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in anystomach.
The fugitives sighted no oasis. They found no wady other thanstone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by daythey grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain thatpossessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of theirbodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.
But they still kept organization and coherence. Still, guided bythe stars that burned with ardent trembling in the black sky, theyfollowed their chosen course.
Morning heat-mist, noontide glare, wind like a beast with flamingbreath, a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, an inescapablesun-furnace that seemed to boil the brains in their skulls--all theseand the mockery of mirages that made every long white line of saltefflorescence a lake of cooling waters, brought the four torturedLegionaries close to death.
Awaking toward evening of the fifth day, the Master discovered one ofthe three camels gone--the one on which he had been riding with thewoman, lest she fall fainting to the sand. With this camel, MajorBohannan had likewise disappeared. His big-shouldered, now emaciatedfigure in its dirty-white burnous was nowhere visible. Only prints ofsoft hoof-pads, leading off to north-eastward, betrayed the line offlight.
The Master pondered a while as he sat there, dazed, blinking at thedesert all purple, gold, and tawny-red. His inflamed eyes, stubblybeard and gaunt cheeks made him a caricature of the man he had been,ten days before. After a little consideration, he awakened the womanand Lebon.
The verdict on Bohannan was madness, mirage, desertion.
For two days the major had been babbling of wine and water, beenbeholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginaryvultures. Now, well, the desert had got him.
To pursue would have been insanity. They got the two remaining camelsup, by dint of furious beating and of hoarse eloquence in Arabicfrom the Master and Lebon. Once more, knowing themselves doomed, theypushed into the eye of the flaming west, over the savage gorgeousnessof the Empty Abodes. In less than an hour the double-laden camel fellto its knees and incontinently died.
Lebon dismounted from the one surviving animal, and stepped fair intoa scorpion's nest. The horrible little gray creature, striking up overits back with spiked tail, drove the deadly barb half an inch into theorderly's naked ankle.
The Master scarified, sucked, and cauterized the wound. Nothingavailed. Lebon, in his depleted condition, could not fight off thepoison. Thirty minutes later, swollen and black, he died in a frothingspasm, his last words a hideous imprecation on the Arabs who hadenslaved and tortured him-a curse on the whole race of Moslems.
Shaken with horror, the woman and the man buried Lebon, loaded theremaining water-bags, the guns and food on to the one camel anddragged themselves away on foot, driving the spent beast. Obviouslythis camel could not go far. Blindness had stricken it, and its blacklips were retracted with the parch of thirst.
They gave it half a skin of water, and goaded it along withdesperation. Everything now depended on this camel. Even thoughit could not carry them, it could bear the burden of their scantsupplies. Without it, hope was lost.
All that night they drove the tortured camel. It fell more and moreoften. The Master spared it not. For on its dying strength dependedthe life of the woman he loved.
The camel died an hour before dawn. Not even vultures wheeled acrossthe steely sky. The Master cut from its wasted flanks a few strips ofmeat and packed them into one of the palm-stick baskets that had heldthe cameleers' supplies. With them he packed all the remaining food--afew lentils, a little goat's-milk cheese, and a handful of dates friedin clarified butter.
This basket, with a revolver and a handful of cartridges, also theextra slippers taken from Leclair and the orderly, made all the burdenthe woman could carry. The Master's load, heavier far, was one of thewater-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 bestthey could, they planned the final stage of their long agony.
Before starting again, they sat a while beside the gaunt, mangledcamel, held council of war and pledged faith again. They drank alittle of the mordant water that burned the throat and seemed in nowise to relieve the horrible thirst that blackened their lips andshriveled all their tissues.
"I think," the Master gasped, "we can make an hour or so before thesun gets too bad." He squinted at the crimson and purple banderolesof cloud through which, like the eye of a fevered Cyclops, the sun wasalready glowering. Already the range of obsidian hills ahead of them,the drifted sands all fretted with wind-waves, the whole iron plain ofthe desert was quivering with heat. "Every hour counts, now. Before westart, let us agree to certain things."
She nodded silently, crouching beside him on the sand. He drew anemaciated 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 delicacyof 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 becareful about scorpions. Above all, we must beware of mirages. Youunderstand?"
"I understand," she whispered.
"If either of us sees palms or water, that one must immediatelytell the other. Then, if the other does not also see them, that is amirage. We must not turn aside for anything like that, unless we bothsee it. I am speaking rationally, now that I can. Remember what Isay!"
Silently she nodded. He went on:
"Now that we can still think, we must weigh every contingency. Ouronly hope lies in our helping each other. Alone, either of us willbe led away by mirages in a little while. That kind of death must bespared 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 wouldleave 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, overa scorching plain of crumbling, nitrous mud-flakes. Laden as theywere, they could barely shuffle one foot after the other. But blessedlapses 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
ofdeath, _La Siwa Hu_--"where there is none but Allah."