CHAPTER LI
TORTURE
How that day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony growstoo keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion.
Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of thedesert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the twolonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept anightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and draggedthemselves once more along.
Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now ofscudding sand-pillars--wind-_jinnee_ of the Empty Abodes--that dancedand mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaminglakes, afar.
But though they had lost the complete rationality that would havebidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they stillremembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld thesame lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slainBohannan.
Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoningwaters 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 suddenlyattacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away allhis ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, didlikewise.
No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man'ssight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, hediscovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint.
Nothing was there but a clump of acacias, their twisted thorns parchedwhite. 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 pistolback into its holster. The woman, however, smiled with dry lips, andfrom her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead--the bulletwhich, fired at _Nissr_ from near the Ka'aba, had fallen at her feetand been picked up by her as a souvenir.
"Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two andshape it. We can reload two shells with some of the Arab powder. Itwill 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 clawlikedistortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. Thesun's anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky.
Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet--toyingwith them for its own delectation--respited them a little while bystumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this onlyafter a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could bothsee the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees--treesthey could touch and feel--gave them fresh courage.
Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle ofblind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean sometime 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. Nothingat all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well nowchoked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalidsettlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as ifthe sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the villageto dust and ashes.
All the sufferers found, of any worth, was a few handfuls of dry datesin one of the hovels and a water-jar with about two quarts of brackishwater.
This water the Master discovered, groping half blind through the hut.Stale as it was, it far surpassed the strongly chemicalized water ofthe River of Night, still remaining in the goat-skin. It smote himwith the most horrible temptation of his life. All the animal in hisnature, every parched atom of his body shouted.
"Take it! Drink, drink your fill! She will never know. Take it, anddrink!"
He seized the water-jar, indeed, but only to carry it with shakinghands to her, where she lay in the welcome shadow of the hut. His lipswere 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 daredto have her drink at once, nearly half. Then he set down the jar,loosened the sack from his shoulders which were cut raw with thechafing of the thongs, and bathed her face with a little of that otherwater which, though bad, still might keep life in them.
"This may be an insane waste," he was thinking, "but it will helprevive her. And--maybe--we shall find another, better oasis."
Out across the plain he peered, over the sun-dried earth, out into thedistances shrouded with purple mists. His blurred eyes narrowed.
"Why, my God! There's one, now!" he muttered. "A greenone--cool--fresh--"
The Master laid the woman down again in the shadow, got up andstaggered out into the blinding sun. He tottered forward, laughinghoarsely.
"Cool--_fresh_--" The words came from between parched lips.
All at once the oasis faded to a blur in the brilliant tapestry of thedesert 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 itfrom 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, tillalmost evening, under the shelter of the blessed shadow.
The rest, even in that desolation, put fresh life into them. Atnightfall they bound up their feet again, ate the dry dates and againset their blistered faces toward the Red Sea.
The woman's basket was now light, indeed, across her shoulders. Notall her begging had induced the Master to let her carry the water-jugthere. This, too, he was carrying.
All night long, stopping only when one or the other fell, theyploughed over basalt and hornblende schist that lacerated their feet,over blanched immensities under the steel moon, across grim, blackridges and through a basin of clay, circled by hills.
Strange apparitions mocked and mowed before them, but grimly they gaveno heed. This, they both realized in moments of lucidity, was the lasttrek. Either they must find the sea, before another night, or madnesswould sink its fangs into their brains. And madness meant--the end.
Their whole consciousness was pain. This pain localized itselfespecially in their heads, round which some _jinnee_ of the waste hadriveted red-hot iron bands. There was other pain, too, in the limpingfeet cased in the last of the _babooches_, now stiffened with blood.And in the throat and lungs, what was this burning?