"God help us!" said Smith. "Shall we get off this before the night? Be a man, Baker. Do you want to spend the night here, and be sucked down like sand in an hour-glass?"
"I'm coming," said the Baker, gulping down his horror. "Come, Kitty."
But the sun would soon set. It shot level over the desert, and turned the pine, now some five miles away, into a black bar across the mouth of a furnace. Then it touched the range, bit out a red gap, plunged, and left a red star on a blue crest for a moment, and died. The night came with a swing from the east of lucid stars, and a moon, with its horns turned westward, was sharply visible towards the north.
"Come," said Smith, "while there's a little light left."
He led the way as fast as he dared, and did not stop even when the last daylight was gone on the wings of the after-glow, for, on the whitish-red sand, the light of moon and stars showed the way almost as clearly as in the thin day of an Arctic winter. Yet every now and again there came the noise of subterranean thunder. He began to guess at its cause. If they could but get off that road of pits, it bade him hope.
Yet now he, too, was so terribly fatigued that he could hardly lift his feet; every motion he made required resolution, and his eyelids dropped as he walked. The Baker was in worse case physically, and only Kitty held out. Sleep, as heavy as that which takes men in deep frost, laid hold of Mandeville; he rocked to and fro like a drunken man. He implored Smith to stop.
"Lemme sleep," and he pitched upon his face.
"Wake him," said Smith, and Kitty lifted him on his feet.
"We are close to the edge of the sand," said the leader. "Let's try a bit more."
He caught the Baker by the hair; he wrenched his ear till it almost bled, and Mandeville struck at him blindly. Kitty cried out aloud in anger, and yet she understood. But at last they could not move. The Baker lay down like a dead man, and Kitty took him in her arms. She was asleep in a moment, and then a sudden dream caught the Baker.