Chapter Eleven.
The Desert Journey.
A lonely traveller traversed the sandy desert wastes of Central Africa. He was ill-accoutred for so trying a journey, having only a cane to protect himself from the wild beasts, and patent-leather shoes on his feet. No one knew his name; and what made him more mysterious was that, although he spoke English, he paid for everything in Spanish doubloons half a century old!
What could his errand be, amid the typhoons and siroccos of that desolate continent?
For six weeks he had not moistened his parched lips with so much as a drop of water! And his only food had been dried elephant!
Yet he kept his eyes fixed on the mountain range twelve hundred leagues ahead of him; and as each day brought him fifty miles nearer (for he was evidently a practised walker), he murmured to himself, “I come, Velvetina!” and thought nothing of the fatigue.
The man’s shoes were unequal to his spirit, and within a hundred miles of his goal he sunk crippled to the ground. The blinding sand swept over him in mountains, and the tropical sun made the end of the cane he carried red-hot.
Any other man in such a condition would have succumbed. Not so our mysterious traveller.
If he could not walk, he could roll. And he rolled.