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: