“Thalassa!  Thalassa!”

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 iselmak!” 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—­