Meanwhile the man with the black beard had recovered and risen, and he and Sir Henry were pump-handling away at each other, apparently without a word to say.  But whatever they had quarrelled about in the past—­I suspect it was a lady, though I never asked—­it was evidently forgotten now.

“My dear old fellow,” burst out Sir Henry at last, “I thought you were dead.  I have been over Solomon’s Mountains to find you.  I had given up all hope of ever seeing you again, and now I come across you perched in the desert, like an old assvoegel."[*]

[*] Vulture.

“I tried to cross Solomon’s Mountains nearly two years ago,” was the answer, spoken in the hesitating voice of a man who has had little recent opportunity of using his tongue, “but when I reached here a boulder fell on my leg and crushed it, and I have been able to go neither forward nor back.”

Then I came up.  “How do you do, Mr. Neville?” I said; “do you remember me?”

“Why,” he said, “isn’t it Hunter Quatermain, eh, and Good too?  Hold on a minute, you fellows, I am getting dizzy again.  It is all so very strange, and, when a man has ceased to hope, so very happy!”

That evening, over the camp fire, George Curtis told us his story, which, in its way, was almost as eventful as our own, and, put shortly, amounted to this.  A little less than two years before, he had started from Sitanda’s Kraal, to try to reach Suliman’s Berg.  As for the note I had sent him by Jim, that worthy lost it, and he had never heard of it till to-day.  But, acting upon information he had received from the natives, he headed not for Sheba’s Breasts, but for the ladder-like descent of the mountains down which we had just come, which is clearly a better route than that marked out in old Dom Silvestra’s plan.  In the desert he and Jim had suffered great hardships, but finally they reached this oasis, where a terrible accident befell George Curtis.  On the day of their arrival he was sitting by the stream, and Jim was extracting the honey from the nest of a stingless bee which is to be found in the desert, on the top of a bank immediately above him.  In so doing he loosened a great boulder of rock, which fell upon George Curtis’s right leg, crushing it frightfully.  From that day he had been so lame that he found it impossible to go either forward or back, and had preferred to take the chances of dying in the oasis to the certainty of perishing in the desert.

As for food, however, they got on pretty well, for they had a good supply of ammunition, and the oasis was frequented, especially at night, by large quantities of game, which came thither for water.  These they shot, or trapped in pitfalls, using the flesh for food, and, after their clothes wore out, the hides for clothing.