His words were interrupted by a high, eager voice, which broke suddenly into a torrent of jostling words, words without meaning, pouring strenuously out in angry assertions and foolish repetitions.  The pink had deepened to scarlet upon Mr. Stuart’s cheeks, his eyes were vacant but brilliant, and he gabbled, gabbled, gabbled as he rode.  Kindly mother Nature! she will not let her children be mishandled too far.  “This is too much,” she says; “this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind.  Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable.”  And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its homecoming.  When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly face behind.

The Arab guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing.  One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir.  When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister’s camel, so as to prevent him from falling.  The friendly negro sidled his beast up to the Colonel, and whispered to him.

“We are going to halt presently, Belmont,” said Cochrane.

“Thank God!  They may give us some water.  We can’t go on like this.”

“I told Tippy Tilly that, if he could help us, we would turn him into a Bimbashi when we got him back into Egypt.  I think he’s willing enough if he only had the power.  By Jove, Belmont, do look back at the river.”

Their route, which had lain through sand-strewn khors with jagged, black edges—­places up which one would hardly think it possible that a camel could climb—­opened out now on to a hard, rolling plain, covered thickly with rounded pebbles, dipping and rising to the violet hills upon the horizon.  So regular were the long, brown pebble-strewn curves, that they looked like the dark rollers of some monstrous ground-swell.  Here and there a little straggling sage-green tuft of camel-grass sprouted up between the stones.  Brown plains and violet hills—­nothing else in front of them!  Behind lay the black jagged rocks through which they had passed with orange slopes of sand, and then far away a thin line of green to mark the course of the river.  How cool and beautiful that green looked in the stark, abominable wilderness!  On one side they could see the high rock—­the accursed rock which had tempted them to their ruin.  On the other the river curved, and the sun gleamed upon the water.  Oh, that liquid gleam, and the insurgent animal cravings, the brutal primitive longings, which for the instant took the soul out of all of them!  They had lost families, countries, liberty, everything, but it was only of water, water, water, that they could think.  Mr. Stuart in his delirium began roaring for oranges, and it was insufferable for them to have to listen to him.  Only the rough, sturdy Irishman rose superior to that bodily craving.  That gleam of river must be somewhere near Halfa, and his wife might be upon the very water at which he looked.  He pulled his hat over his eyes, and rode in gloomy silence, biting at his strong, iron-grey moustache.