n a third. Then they set out again on the
endless road of pain.

Was it that same day, or the next, that the man fell and could not
rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain
and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun
and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray
scorpion, too--but no, _that_ had been crushed to a pulp by the man's
heel. Or had it not? Well--

The man! Was there a man? Where was he? Here, of course, on the baked
earth.

As she cradled his head up into her lap and drew the shelter of her
burnous over it, she became rational again. Her hot, dry hand caressed
his face. After a while he was blinking up at her.

"Bara Miyan! Violator of the salt!" he croaked, and struck at
her feebly. And after another time, she perceived that they were
staggering on and on once more.

The woman wondered what had happened to her head, now that the sun had
bored quite through. Surely that must make a difference, must it not?

A jackal barked. But this, they knew, must be illusion.

No jackals lived so far from any habitation of mankind. The man
blinked into the glare, across which sand-devils of whirlwinds were
once more gyrating over a whiteness ending in dunes that seemed to be
peppered with camel-grass.

Another mirage! Grass could grow only near the coast. And now that
they had both been tortured to death by Jannati Shahr men and been
flung into Jehannum, how could there be any coast? It seemed so
preposterous.

It was all so very simple that the man laughed--silently.

Where had that woman gone to? Why, he thought there surely had been a
woman with him! But now he stood all alone. This was very strange.

"I must remember to ask them if there wasn't a woman," thought he.
"This is an extraordinary place! People come and go in such a manner!"

The man felt a dull irritation, and smeared the sand out of his eyes.
How had that sand got there? Naturally, from having laid on one of
those dunes. There seemed to be no particular reason for lying on
a dune, under the fire-box of an engine, so the man sat up and kept
blinking and rubbing his eyes.

"This is the best mirage, yet," he reflected. "The palms look real.
And the water--it sparkles. Those white blotches--one would say they
were houses!"

Indifferent, yet interested, too, in the appearance of reality,
the man remained sitting on the dune, squinting from under his torn
burnous.

The mi