Their whole consciousness was pain. This pain localized itself especially in their heads, round which some jinnee of the waste had riveted red-hot iron bands. There was other pain, too, in the limping feet cased in the last of the babooches, now stiffened with blood. And in the throat and lungs, what was this burning?
CHAPTER LII
"Thálassa! Thálassa!"
Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making perhaps a mile an hour.
Disjointed words and sentences kept framing themselves in the man's mind; above all, a sentence he had read long ago in Greek, somewhere. Where had he read that? Oh, in Xenophon, of course. In The Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The Master gulped it aloud, in a dead voice:
"Most terrible of all is—the desert—for it is full-of a great want."
After a while he knew that he was trying to laugh.
"A great want!" he repeated. "A great—"
Presently it was night again.
The Master's mind cleared. Yes, there was the woman, lying in the sand near him. But where was the date-stick basket? Where was the last of the food? He tried to think.