The four survivors, in addition to burying all the bodies, had buried the copper bars the caravan had been freighting to Jannati Shahr.  They had saved the scant food and water of the drivers, also their clothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.

Now, dressed like Arabs—­the best of all disguises in case of being sighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from far off—­they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels and leading the others.

For a week of Hell the failing beasts, already half dead of thirst when captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast.  Twice there rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whether these were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampments they could not tell.

Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one by one.

By the end of the fourth day only three remained.  Lebon methodically cut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in any stomach.

The fugitives sighted no oasis.  They found no wady other than stone-dry.  By day they slept, by night pushed forward.  Day by day they grew weaker and less rational.  The increasing nerve-strain that possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their bodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.

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.