“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.