f the wonder
and the joy in his. It was a moment of magic. It brought a lump into
his throat.... He wanted to bend over her reverently, to lift a
strand of that shining hair to his lips, to touch the sandy little
hands....

Somehow he managed not to. The moment of longing and of glamor
passed.

"It's exactly as if we'd been shipwrecked!" said Arlee, looking
about with an air of childish delight.

"On a very large island," he smiled back, and felt a furtive pain
mingling with his joy. He was just her rescuer to her, of course;
she accepted him simply as a heaven-dropped deliverer; her thoughts
had not been going out to him in those long days as his had gone to
her.... Decisively he jumped to his feet and said breakfast. Where
was it? What was to be done?

Directions were vague. They had come south on the edge of the
desert, and the Nile lay somewhere to the east of them, and to the
east, therefore lay breakfast and trains and telegraph lines and all
the outposts of civilization.

To the east they rode then, straight toward the tinted dawn, and as
they went they laughed out at each other on their strange mounts
like two children on a holiday. Their spirits lifted with the beauty
of the morning, and with that strange primitive exhilaration of the
desert, that wild joy in vast, lonely reaches, in far horizons and
illimitable space. The air intoxicated them; the leaping light and
the free winds fired them, and with laughing shouts and challenges
they urged their camels forward in a wild race that sent the desert
hares scattering to right and left. Like runaways they tore over the
level wastes and through the rolling dunes, and at last, spent and
breathless, they pulled back into a walk their excited beasts that
squealed and tossed their tasseled heads.

Their eyes met in a gaiety of the spirit that no words could
express. When Arlee spoke she merely cried out, "I've read the camel
had four paces, but mine has forty-four," and Billy gave back, "And
forty-three are sudden death!" and their ringing laughter made a
worried little jackal draw back his cautious nose into his rocky
lair.

They were in broken ground now, more and more rocky, leading through
the low hills ahead of them, and great clumps of grayish _mit minan_
and bright green hyssop dotted the amber of the sands. Here and
there the fork-like helga showed its purple blossom, and sometimes
a scarlet ice-plant gleamed at them from a rocky crack. Across their