Conscious or not, the life within them drove them onward, ever onward; slow, crawling things that all but blindly moved across the land of death, La Siwa Hu—"where there is none but Allah."
CHAPTER LI
TORTURE
How that day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion.
Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept a nightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and dragged themselves once more along.
Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sand-pillars—wind-jinnee of the Empty Abodes—that danced and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming lakes, afar.
But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the same lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slain Bohannan.
Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoning waters which were but air.
At nightfall, toiling up over the lip of a parched, chalky nullah that sunset turned to amethyst, a swarm of howling Arabs suddenly attacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away all his ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, did likewise.
No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man's sight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, he discovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint.