THE DESERT
The Desert.
Four men, one woman.
Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"—that is to say, the land "where there is none but He."
Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard, unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness. Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far, iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare, scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.
Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five fugitives—pitiable handful of the Legion—were plodding south-west, toward the sunset.
The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn from their tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; for everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp stone—the black basalt named by the Arabs Hajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.
Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was, corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one of the most hideous deaths known to man—the death of thirst in the wilderness.
The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained its beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips, protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others, they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously tied into some semblance of cherchias. Above all, the Legionaries knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the desert sun.
In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in reality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizing effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been true.