The third day brought them nowhere. Still the brûlé stretched on and on before them, though now, far to right, Allan occasionally could glimpse a wooded mountain-spur through the binoculars, as though the limits of the vast conflagration were in sight at least in one direction.
But to left and ahead nothing still showed but devastated land.
The character of the country, however, had begun to change. The valleys had grown deeper and the ridges higher. Allan felt that they were now coming into a more mountainous region.
“Well, that's encouraging, anyhow,” he reflected. “Any time, now, I may sight the double-peaked mountain. It can't heave in sight any too soon to suit me!”
There was need of sighting it, indeed, for already the party had begun to suffer not a little. The perpetual tramping through ashes had started cracks and sores forming on the men's feet. Most of them were coughing and sneezing much of the time, with a kind of influenza caused by the acrid and biting dust.
The dried food, too, had started an intolerable thirst, and water was terribly scarce. The canteens were now almost always empty; and more than one brook or pool, to which the men eagerly hastened, turned out to be saline or hopelessly fouled by fallen forest wreckage, festering and green-slimed in the cooking sun.
In spite of the eye-shields and pigments, some of the men were already suffering from sunburn and ophthalmia, which greatly impaired their efficiency. Their failure to take fish was also beginning to dishearten them.
Allan pondered the advisability of suspending day travel and trekking only by night, but had to give over this plan, for it would obviate all possibility of his sighting the landmark, the cleft mountain. Though he said nothing, the pangs of apprehension were biting deep into his soul.
For the first time that night the idea was strongly borne in upon him that, after all, this might be little better than a wild-goose chase, and that--despite his desperate need of the Pauillac engine--perhaps the better part of valor might be discretion, retreat, return to Settlement Cliffs while there might still be time.
Yet even the few hours of troubled sleep he got that night, camped in a blackened ravine, served to strengthen his determination to push on again at all hazards.