And Mandeville was quite as bad, though, being a bit stronger, he said nothing.
They went on again for half an hour by the billabong, which was here pretty straight, and deeper within its banks, but in that half-hour they did barely a mile.
"What's the use?" screamed the man Smith, to his inherited desire of life. "What's the use? Why should I suffer? Why not lie down and die?"
And yet the desire for life clawed on to hope, and struggled still, driving the failing creature of a day through torture which was sometimes lulled, and sometimes grew monstrously, splitting the man's mind as a tree's roots drive rocks asunder, as a cancer penetrates the living tissue.
When they talked, they returned again and again to the white man's fire, and to the great ball of gold, the lost weapon of some impenetrable mystery. And Smith's striving with its solution was near setting him mad; he felt almost as he had done in that day of thirst when his personality left him, and he became a nameless, brainless creature that only suffered blindly, ignorant of destiny.
But though they knew it not, a partial solution of the strange problem was at hand, a solution which solved it to present another still more terrible, still more inexplicable. As the sun went down upon the trees, they came suddenly, and without any dreadful warning in the warm wind, upon the body of a white man, only a few days dead.
They came suddenly upon the body of a white man.
But what a white man he was, said the two dying wanderers who found him lying there. No, indeed no! he was like no man they had ever seen, for his hair hung down his shoulders, his beard was below his breast. As he lay upon his back, with bared teeth, they beheld the great arched chest of a giant, and they could note, even yet, the scars of spear wounds on his breast and arms. He looked a savage, a strange and awful survival, for in the aspect of him was no suggestion that he had ever known any influence of any civilisation. He might have been solitary from his birth, for aloofness and suspicion were visible in him still. His face was burnt to an extreme brownness, which might have left doubts as to his race, but the muscles under the arms were white. He lay there with a rudely-tanned kangaroo skin just across his feet. There was no ornament nor any sign of personal adornment upon him. But in his hand was clenched a short stick, which Mandeville dared to drag from him. It fitted the golden ball which he still carried.