“How long is this weary, unhappy quest to last?” he thought, and then with a faint smile he pondered upon the wild thought that had come upon him when he believed that they were about to charge the dervishes, and a strange, fierce determination had come to him that he would strike one blow for his brother’s sake, as he wondered whether he would ever know of his quest.
“And I’m not to be buried under the hot sand here yet,” he said, as his eyes wandered over the proportions of the camel, which struck him as one thoroughly adapted for flight across the desert.
“Just such a one as I should like to see Harry mounted upon, and all of us making for the north, or for the English advanced posts.”
It was then that the strange attack came on, dulling his faculties and making him ask himself whether he was sane or dreaming.
For as he thought of his brother, the heat of the sun seemed to strike down upon his head, bringing on a sudden attack of that form of apoplexy known as sunstroke, and in it he saw his brother step slowly forward holding the camel’s rein and changing from one side of the animal to the other, acting the while as a groom would with a favourite steed that he had brought out for his master’s use, patting and smoothing its coat, examining girth, buckle, and band, and arranging and rearranging the fine material which covered the saddle, before at last standing upright leaning his head back against the camel, gazing from a few yards away full in Frank’s eyes.
A vision—a waking vision, consequent upon the attack from which he suffered! There he was, Harry, the brother he loved, upright and military of carriage as ever, but so changed. Thin and wasted, his eyes sunken and full of a deep, weary, sorrowful longing, arms bare to the shoulder, legs naked to mid-thigh, and all burned of a dull brick-red by the torrid African sun, and the high forehead deeply marked by the lines of suffering and care. It was Harry as he had pictured him night after night when he had lain awake thinking of the time when they would meet; clothed, too, just the same as any other camel driver, with thin cotton garments tightened diagonally across the body, and about the thighs, looking more like bandages than ordinary clothes, confined by another broad band about the waist.
Yes: just as he had so often pictured what he must be like, even to the changes wrought by suffering and age. But not Harry, for his brother would surely have known him at a glance, as he leaned back against his camel looking him full in the face, and have acted as he had been about to do, till the bitter feeling came home to him that this was all a waking dream brought on by exertion and excitement, and he felt that if he gazed long and fixedly the imaginary picture would fade, leaving only the ordinary slave camel driver of the desert looking in his direction.
But the change did not come, and they gazed one at the other still, Frank waiting impatiently for the imaginary resemblance to die out.
“So like him,” he thought; “but he would have rushed to my arms as I was about to rush to his at all hazards, thinking of nothing but our meeting out here in this savage place. I am wild and dreaming from what I have gone through to-day, but he is cool and calm as he stands there. Yes: he would have known me at once.”
A shiver of misery ran through the thinker at that moment, as he grasped the truth.