But they still kept organization and coherence. Still, guided by
the stars that burned with ardent trembling in the black sky, they
followed their chosen course.

Morning heat-mist, noontide glare, wind like a beast with flaming
breath, a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, an inescapable
sun-furnace that seemed to boil the brains in their skulls--all these
and the mockery of mirages that made every long white line of salt
efflorescence a lake of cooling waters, brought the four tortured
Legionaries close to death.

Awaking toward evening of the fifth day, the Master discovered one of
the three camels gone--the one on which he had been riding with the
woman, lest she fall fainting to the sand. With this camel, Major
Bohannan had likewise disappeared. His big-shouldered, now emaciated
figure in its dirty-white burnous was nowhere visible. Only prints of
soft hoof-pads, leading off to north-eastward, betrayed the line of
flight.

The Master pondered a while as he sat there, dazed, blinking at the
desert all purple, gold, and tawny-red. His inflamed eyes, stubbly
beard and gaunt cheeks made him a caricature of the man he had been,
ten days before. After a little consideration, he awakened the woman
and Lebon.

The verdict on Bohannan was madness, mirage, desertion.

For two days the major had been babbling of wine and water, been
beholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginary
vultures. Now, well, the desert had got him.

To pursue would have been insanity. They got the two remaining camels
up, by dint of furious beating and of hoarse eloquence in Arabic
from the Master and Lebon. Once more, knowing themselves doomed, they
pushed into the eye of the flaming west, over the savage gorgeousness
of the Empty Abodes. In less than an hour the double-laden camel fell
to its knees and incontinently died.

Lebon dismounted from the one surviving animal, and stepped fair into
a scorpion's nest. The horrible little gray creature, striking up over
its back with spiked tail, drove the deadly barb half an inch into the
orderly's naked ankle.

The Master scarified, sucked, and cauterized the wound. Nothing
availed. Lebon, in his depleted condition, could not fight off the
poison. Thirty minutes later, swollen and black, he died in a frothing
spasm, his last words a hideous imprecation on the Arabs who had
enslaved and tortured him-a curse on the whole race of Moslems.

Shaken with horror, the woman and the man buried Lebon, loaded the
remaining water-bags, the guns and food on to the one camel and
dragged themselves away on foot, driving the spent beast. Obviously
this camel could not go far. Blindness had stricken it, and its black
lips were retracted with the parch of thirst.

They gave it half a skin of water, and goaded it along with
desperation. Everything now depended on this camel. Even though
it could not carry them, it could bear the burden of their scant
supplies. Without it, hope was lost.

All that night they drove the tortured camel. It fell more and more
often. The Master spared it not. For on its dying strength depended
the life of the woman he loved.

The camel died an hour before dawn. Not even vultures wheeled across
the steely sky. The Master cut from its wasted flanks a few strips of
meat and packed them into one of the palm-stick baskets that had held
the cameleers' supplies. With them he packed all the remaining food--a
few lentils, a little goat's-milk cheese, and a handful of dates fried
in clarified butter.

This basket, with a revolver and a handful of cartridges, also the
extra slippers taken from Leclair and the orderly, made all the burden
the woman could carry. The Master's load, heavier far, was one of the
water-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 best
they could, they planned the final stage of their long agony.

Before starting again, they sat a while beside the gaunt, mangled
camel, held council of war and pledged faith again. They drank a
little of the mordant water that burned the throat and seemed in no
wise to relieve the horrible thirst that blackened their lips and
shriveled all their tissues.

"I think," the Master gasped, "we can make an hour or so before the
sun gets too bad." He squinted at the crimson and purple banderoles
of cloud through which, like the eye of a fevered Cyclops, the sun was
already glowering. Already the range of obsidian hills ahead of them,
the drifted sands all fretted with wind-waves, the whole iron plain of
the desert was quivering with heat. "Every hour counts, now. Before we
start, let us agree to certain things."

She nodded silently, crouching beside him on the sand. He drew an
emaciated 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 delicacy
of 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 be
careful about scorpions. Above all, we must beware of mirages. You
understand?"

"I understand," she whispered.

"If either of us sees palms or water, that one must immediately
tell the other. Then, if the other does not also see them, that is a
mirage. We must not turn aside for anything like that, unless we both
see it. I am speaking rationally, now that I can. Remember what I
say!"

Silently she nodded. He went on:

"Now that we can still think, we must weigh every contingency. Our
only hope lies in our helping each other. Alone, either of us will
be led away by mirages in a little while. That kind of death must be
spared 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 would
leave 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, over
a scorching plain of crumbling, nitrous mud-flakes. Laden as they
were, they could barely shuffle one foot after the other. But blessed
lapses 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 of
death, _La Siwa Hu_--"where there is none but Allah."




CHAPTER LI


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?




CHAPTER LII


"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!)




CHAPTER LIII


THE GREATER TREASURE

New York, months later.

Spring had long departed--the spring of the year in which the Eagle of
the Air had flung itself aloft from the Palisades, freighted with such
vast hopes.

Summer was past and gone. The sparkling wine of autumn had already
begun to bubble in the cup of the year.

Sunset, as when this tale began. Sunset, bronzing the observatory of
_Niss'rosh_, on top of the huge skyscraper.

Two of the Legionaries--a woman and a man--were watching that sunset
from the western windows of that room where first had been conceived
the wonder-flight which had spelled death for so many a stout heart.

You could see great changes had come upon the man, as he paced slowly
up and down the singular room, hands deep in the pockets of his
riding-trousers. His hair was grayer, for one thing, his face leaner;
a certain sinewy strength had come to him that had not been there
before.

Some marks of suffering still remained on him, that not all of life
could take away. His eyes looked deeper and more wise, his mouth more
human in its smile. That he had learned to smile, at all, meant much.
And the look in his eyes, as he glanced at the woman, meant vastly
more. Yes, this man had learned infinitely much.

From a big, bamboo Chinese chair the woman was watching him.

Her eyes were musing, reminiscent. Her riding-costume well became her;
and by the flush on her cheek you might have guessed they had both
just come in from a long gallop together.

The costume gave her a kind of boyish charm; yet she remained entirely
feminine. A kind of bronze mist seemed to envelop her head, as the
dull-tawny sunset light fell on her from those broad windows. Near her
riding-crop stood a Hindu incense-holder, with joss-sticks burning.
As she took one of these and twirled it contemplatively, the blue-gray
vapor spiraling upward was no more dreamy than her eyes.

"The invincible Orient!" she said, all at once. "It absorbs everything
and gives back nothing. And we thought, we hoped, we might conquer
part of it! Well--no--that's not done."

The man stopped his slow pacing, sat on the edge of the table and
drummed with his fingers on the teak.

"Not at the first attempt, anyhow," said he, after a little thought.
"I think, though, another time--but there's no use dreaming. Of
course, it's not the treasure I'm thinking about. That was just a
detail. It's the men. Good men!"

She peered into the incense-smoke, as if exorcising the powers of
darkness.

"They're not dead, not all of them!" she exclaimed with conviction.

"I wish I could believe you!"

"But you _must_ believe me! Something tells me some of our good chaps
are still alive. All of them perhaps."

"Impossible!" He shook his head. "Even if they escaped the explosion,
the Jannati Shahr devils must have massacred them." He shuddered
slightly. "That's the worst of it. Death is all right. But the
crucifixion, and all--"

"Cold reason paints a cruel picture, I admit," the woman answered,
laying a hand on the man's. "But you know--a woman's intuition. I
don't believe as you do. And the major--and that rumor we got from old
Nasr ed Din, the Hejaz rug-merchant down on Hester Street, how about
that?"

"Yes, I know. But--"

"How could a rumor like that come through, about a big, white-skinned,
red-haired _Ajam_ slave held by that tribe near Jeddah? How could it,
unless there were some truth back of it?"

"He wandered away into the desert, quite insane. It's not impossible
he might have been captured. By Allah!" And the man struck the table
hard. "If I really believed Nasr ed Din--"

"Well?"

"I'd go again, if I died for it!"

"The pronoun's wrong. _We'd_ go!"

"Yes, _we_!" He took her hand. "We'd trail that rumor down and have
Bohannan out of there, and the others too, if--but no, no, the thing's
impossible!"

"Nothing is impossible, I tell you, in the East. And haven't we had
miracles enough? After we were judged pirates and condemned to die,
by the International Aero Tribunal, wasn't it a miracle about
that pardon? That immunity, for your vibratory secrets that have
revolutionized the defensive tactics of the League's air-forces?"

She smiled up at him, through the vapor. "It's the impossible that
happens, these days! The soul within me tells me some of our chaps are
still alive, out there!"

She waved her smoky wand toward the large-scale map of Arabia on the
wall.

"But Rrisa," said he. "About the others, there's no sense of guilt. I
feel, though, like a murderer about Rrisa."

"Rrisa still lives!"

He shook his head.

"The incense tells me." She insisted. "My heart tells me!"

"Allah make it so! But even if he is dead, he died like the others--a
man!"

"In pursuit of an ideal. We all had that, a dream and an ideal."

"Yes. It wasn't the treasure, of course," he mused. "It wasn't
material things. It was adventure. Well--you and I have had that, at
all events. And they had it too. They and we--all of us--we changed
the course of history for more than two hundred million human beings.
And as for you and me--"

He turned, looking at the map. Then he got up from the table, went to
that map and laid a hand on the vast, blank expanse across which was
printed only "Ruba el Khali"--the Empty Abodes.

"It would wreck the whole structure of civilization if we told," said
he. The woman put back the incense-stick into its holder, got up and