n relieved their agony.

Conscious or not, the life within them drove them onward, ever onward;
slow, crawling things that all but blindly moved across the land of
death, _La Siwa Hu_--"where there is none but Allah."

CHAPTER LI

TORTURE

How that day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows
too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion.

Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the
desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two
lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept a
nightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and dragged
themselves once more along.

Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of
scudding sand-pillars--wind-_jinnee_ of the Empty Abodes--that danced
and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming
lakes, afar.

But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have
bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still
remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the
same lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slain
Bohannan.

Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoning
waters which were but air.

At nightfall, toiling up over the lip of a parched, chalky _nullah_
that sunset turned to amethyst, a swarm of howling Arabs suddenly
attacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away all
his ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, did
likewise.

No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man's
sight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, he
discovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint.

Nothing was there but a clump of acacias, their twisted thorns parched
white. They had been shooting at only fantasms of their own brains.
Now, even the mercy-bullets were gone.

Bitterly the man cursed himself, as he thrust the now useless pistol
back into its holster. The woman, however, smiled with dry lips, and
from her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead--the bullet
which, fired at _Nissr_ from near the Ka'aba, had fallen at her feet
and been picked up by her as a souvenir.

"Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two and
shape it. We can reload two shells with some of the Arab powder. It
will do!"

They laughed irrationally. More than half mad as they now were,
ne