How am I to describe the misery of the next four days?  How am I to tell how we stumbled on through that awful desert, almost without food, and quite without water, for there were no streams, and we saw no springs?  We soon found how the case was, and saved almost all the water in our bottles for the child.  To look back on it is like a nightmare.  I can scarcely bear to dwell on it.  Day after day, by turns carrying the child through the heavy sand; night after night lying down in the scrub, chewing the leaves, and licking such dew as there was from the scanty grass!  Not a spring, not a pool, not a head of game!  It was the third night; we were nearly mad with thirst.  Tota was in a comatose condition.  Indaba-zimbi still had a little water in his bottle—­perhaps a wine-glassful.  With it we moistened our lips and blackened tongues.  Then we gave the rest to the child.  It revived her.  She awoke from her swoon to sink into sleep.

See, the dawn was breaking.  The hills were not more than eight miles or so away now, and they were green.  There must be water there.

“Come,” I said.

Indaba-zimbi lifted Tota into the kind of sling that we had made out of the blanket in which to carry her on our backs, and we staggered on for an hour through the sand.  She awoke crying for water, and alas! we had none to give her; our tongues were hanging from our lips, we could scarcely speak.

We rested awhile, and Tota mercifully swooned away again.  Then Indaba-zimbi took her.  Though he was so thin the old man’s strength was wonderful.

Another hour; the slope of the great peak could not be more than two miles away now.  A couple of hundred yards off grew a large baobab tree.  Could we reach its shade?  We had done half the distance when Indaba-zimbi fell from exhaustion.  We were now so weak that neither of us could lift the child on to our backs.  He rose again, and we each took one of her hands and dragged her along the road.  Fifty yards—­they seemed to be fifty miles.  Ah, the tree was reached at last; compared with the heat outside, the shade of its dense foliage seemed like the dusk and cool of a vault.  I remember thinking that it was a good place to die in.  Then I remember no more.

I woke with a feeling as though the blessed rain were falling on my face and head.  Slowly, and with great difficulty, I opened my eyes, then shut them again, having seen a vision.  For a space I lay thus, while the rain continued to fall; I saw now that I must be asleep, or off my head with thirst and fever.  If I were not off my head how came I to imagine that a lovely dark-eyed girl was bending over me sprinkling water on my face?  A white girl, too, not a Kaffir woman.  However, the dream went on.

“Hendrika,” said a voice in English, the sweetest voice that I had ever heard; somehow it reminded me of wind whispering in the trees at night.  “Hendrika, I fear he dies; there is a flask of brandy in my saddle-bag; get it.”