tionless, unthinking, brutalized by
fatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of what
was yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live to
behold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested by
pursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes of
the Black Tent People, what hope could there be?

Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up,
painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lying
beside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master's face drew into
lines of anguish as he looked at her.

With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, and
tore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a little
of the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tight
again, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman's face, brow, and
throat.

Her closed lids did not open. No one paid any attention. No one
even stirred. The cloth grew dry, almost at once, as the thirsty air
absorbed its moisture. The Master pocketed it. Elbows on knees, head
between hands, he sat there pondering.

In thought he was living over again the incredible events of the
past hours, as they had been presented to his own experience. He was
remembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into the
steaming waters of the River of Night--waters which, had they been but
a few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on the
instant.

He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life,
clinging to the inflated goat-skin--the whirl and thunder of
unseen cataracts in the blind dark--the confusion of deafening,
incomprehensible violences.

He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mighty
waters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roof
close above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that might
have been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters--a
graying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush of
the strangling flood that whelmed him--and all at once a glare of
sun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the Iron
Mountains.

All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions of
fever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: a
long drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of the
lessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sa