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: