ither one thought of the fact that they had no percussion-caps.

Still laughing, they sat down in the hot sand, near the clawlike
distortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. The
sun's anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky.

Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet--toying
with them for its own delectation--respited them a little while by
stumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this only
after a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could both
see the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees--trees
they could touch and feel--gave them fresh courage.

Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle of
blind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean some
time ago by the passage of a swarm of those voracious locusts known as
_jarad Iblis_ (the locusts of Satan).

Nothing but bare branches remained in the _nakhil_, or grove. Nothing
at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now
choked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid
settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if
the sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village
to dust and ashes.

All the sufferers found, of any worth, was a few handfuls of dry dates
in one of the hovels and a water-jar with about two quarts of brackish
water.

This water the Master discovered, groping half blind through the hut.
Stale as it was, it far surpassed the strongly chemicalized water of
the River of Night, still remaining in the goat-skin. It smote him
with the most horrible temptation of his life. All the animal in his
nature, every parched atom of his body shouted.

"Take it! Drink, drink your fill! She will never know. Take it, and
drink!"

He seized the water-jar, indeed, but only to carry it with shaking
hands to her, where she lay in the welcome shadow of the hut. His lips
were black with thirst as he raised her head and cried to her:

"Here is water--real water! Drink!"

She obeyed, hardly more than half conscious. He gave her all he dared
to have her drink at once, nearly half. Then he set down the jar,
loosened the sack from his shoulders which were cut raw with the
chafing of the thongs, and bathed her face with a little of that other
water which, though bad, still might keep life in them.

"This may be an insane waste," he was thinking, "but