"Certainly, you do! Did you think the Desert flat as the sea?"
"That's just it! If A see mountains, then A see water too! It keeps wavering."
"By which you may know it isn't water," warned Wayland.
"Wayland, A' don't believe you!"
He had dismounted as he spoke and proceeded down the yellow sands to a pit at the foot of the rolling slope. Wayland saw him halt, again shade his eyes from the sun glare, and stoop. On his knees, he looked again and rose. He came up the slope shaking his head. "Y'd swear it was water at y'r very feet till you bent down."
"Till you changed the angle of reflection . . . eh? and then the water vanished, sir."
Both men had thrown their coats across the rear of the saddles. Matthews now knotted a large handkerchief round his neck. There was not a cloud, nor the shadow of a cloud for shade. It was a wilted, shrivelled, heat-flayed, fire-blasted world of arid desolation; trenched by the dry arroyos; sifted by the hot winds fine as flour; with rings and belts and wavering layers of heat—heat from the orange sun edged red by the Desert dust of the atmosphere—heat from the wind off some white flamed furnace—heat from the ochre shifting sands panting to the loom and writhe of the blue-flamed air, and over all a veil, was it blue or lilac or lavender? tinted as of rainbow mists. For a little while, neither spoke. Each knew what the dusty dead orange earth, the smoking sand hills, the sifted volcanic ash, the burnt oil smell of shrivelled growth, meant to unprepared travellers.
"I wish, sir," said Wayland, "I wish you would turn back here and let me go on alone; I really do!"
"What! turn tail like a whipped dog an' scuttle at first danger? Go to blazes, my boy! Do you think y'r beasts will stand crossing before sunset?"
"It's about as easy going ahead as standing still. If we only had a water canteen, it wouldn't be such a fool-thing to risk."