The caravan has halted suddenly. Something is wrong in the rear.
Gumbo calls out that Mizobe is down.
We find that he has collapsed wearily on the sand and does not want to move. He is far through, but we cannot camp and wait beside him. So in a little time he is persuaded to rise to his feet again; and the caravan moves slowly on.
But it is not very long before the poor old fellow gives up again, for his is a losing fight in the full heat of the midday sun. We try for a little to encourage him to get up, but to no avail. He is past further struggle.
I order the caravan to move onward, and remain behind with Elatu, beside the prostrate animal, for I cannot leave the poor brute to die a slow, lingering death, with the agony of pitiless surroundings holding finality immediately before his eyes.
When the caravan is distant there is a single revolver shot—and we are one less in our band.
Even although it is only an animal that has gone, Death casts a shadow that disturbs the human mind; and Elatu and I ride forward to rejoin the caravan with a pang of sadness in our hearts.
But such feelings are soon deadened of further thought. Shut out and overpowered by the throbbing, awful heat of the day, which has now reached its worst.
It is a heat that is tremendous; unbelievably trying, unless one has experienced it in actual fact. The full rays of the noonday sun blaze directly and intensely overhead, scorching the earth as a furnace blast; while hot-baked desert sands reflect the heat like the tray of an oven. It is small wonder that the caravan, oppressed by a pitiless force that attacks both from overhead and underfoot, wilts as a thing that is withering and sorely exhausted. In naked truth, man and beast of our little band are at the full mercy of a tyrant, and toil, yard by yard and mile by mile, slowly onward, sticking to the allotted task, because it is fated so to toil in the great ways of the desert. The shoulders of the camel-men are drooped languidly, and no one speaks; while head-coverings are drawn more and more closely about their faces in attempt to fight off the sun and protect eyes that are wearied to actual pain by the dazzling, incessant glare on the sand.
Thus is the desert at its worst, and its unspeakable heat.