n.

For two days the major had been babbling of wine and water, been
beholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginary
vultures. Now, well, the desert had got him.

To pursue would have been insanity. They got the two remaining camels
up, by dint of furious beating and of hoarse eloquence in Arabic
from the Master and Lebon. Once more, knowing themselves doomed, they
pushed into the eye of the flaming west, over the savage gorgeousness
of the Empty Abodes. In less than an hour the double-laden camel fell
to its knees and incontinently died.

Lebon dismounted from the one surviving animal, and stepped fair into
a scorpion's nest. The horrible little gray creature, striking up over
its back with spiked tail, drove the deadly barb half an inch into the
orderly's naked ankle.

The Master scarified, sucked, and cauterized the wound. Nothing
availed. Lebon, in his depleted condition, could not fight off the
poison. Thirty minutes later, swollen and black, he died in a frothing
spasm, his last words a hideous imprecation on the Arabs who had
enslaved and tortured him-a curse on the whole race of Moslems.

Shaken with horror, the woman and the man buried Lebon, loaded the
remaining water-bags, the guns and food on to the one camel and
dragged themselves away on foot, driving the spent beast. Obviously
this camel could not go far. Blindness had stricken it, and its black
lips were retracted with the parch of thirst.

They gave it half a skin of water, and goaded it along with
desperation. Everything now depended on this camel. Even though
it could not carry them, it could bear the burden of their scant
supplies. Without it, hope was lost.

All that night they drove the tortured camel. It fell more and more
often. The Master spared it not. For on its dying strength depended
the life of the woman he loved.

The camel died an hour before dawn. Not even vultures wheeled across
the steely sky. The Master cut from its wasted flanks a few strips of
meat and packed them into one of the palm-stick baskets that had held
the cameleers' supplies. With them he packed all the remaining food--a
few lentils, a little goat's-milk cheese, and a handful of dates fried
in clarified butter.

This basket, with a revolver and a handful of cartridges, also the
extra slippers taken from Leclair and the orderly, made all the burden
the woman could carry. The Master's load, heavier far, was one of the
water-skins.

This load,