The fire was alive, but those that had built and lit it were dead . . . of thirst.
They lay there, all that the vultures had left, a fearsome sight; and their swollen and protruding tongues told the tale as plainly as though they had spoken. Yellow bodies, emaciated, but the bodies of what had once been a splendidly proportioned man and woman no Bushmen these!
"They are of my folk," said Inyati gravely, as he stooped to examine them, "mayhap they too have fled from the priests? . . And they have crossed the desert the way we would go and are dead of thirst!"
CHAPTER III THE SAND-STORM
We scraped a hasty grave in the sand for the poor remains, and stood gazing silently across the dunes in the direction that the fresh spoors showed the two poor creatures had come from; stood there regardless of our fatigue, and of the blazing heat, of everything in fact but the grim tragedy before us, and the terrible significance it bore for us, who would follow the same path.
"We must rest, and eat," at length said Inyati, "so too must the horses, or they may die before there is need."
We stripped the loads from the poor brutes, and divided the bags of t'samma we had piled upon them, and soon they were munching away contentedly, whilst we rigged up some sort of shelter and lay and panted till the evening.
Then, and then only, did we discuss what we were next to do. "Master," at length said Inyati, "think, and think well. To go back is still easy, to go forward may well be that we die even as these two have died!"
"The desert is drier than when I struggled through it, more dead than alive, by the path these people came by and that way it would be madness to try! South, we might find another path, but it will be a longer one and . . . my master can still return. And the stone that my master can take and I will go on and bring him more, if he will but return to the camp and there await me. . . . And if I come not in two moons, I shall be dead. . . ."
He held out the blue diamond as he spoke; but the offer, genuine as it undoubtedly was, acted as a taunt to me, and I bade him sternly put back the stone, and talk not to me of returning.