"We must go," she repeated. "We are going to eat and drink and make Galé eat and drink, for we cannot carry all the tins, and the water skin is so heavy that we should not get three miles if we tried to carry it. We will put a little water in one of the tins after emptying it through a little hole. That will be enough for to-night's stage, which will be eighteen miles without water. To-morrow we will set out for
another eighteen miles and we will reach the wells marked on the paper by Ceghéir-ben-Cheikh."
"Oh," I murmured sadly, "if my shoulder were only not this way, I could carry the water skin."
"It is as it is," said Tanit-Zerga.
"You will take your carbine and two tins of meat. I shall take two more and the one filled with water. Come. We must leave in an hour if we wish to cover the eighteen miles. You know that when the sun is up, the rocks are so hot we cannot walk."
I leave you to imagine in what sad silence we passed that hour which we had begun so happily and confidently. Without the little girl, I believe I should have seated myself upon a rock and waited. Galé only was happy.
"We must not let her eat too much," said Tanit-Zerga. "She would not be able to follow us. And to-morrow she must work. If she catches another ourane, it will be for us."
You have walked in the desert. You know how terrible the first hours of the night are. When the moon comes up, huge and yellow, a sharp dust seems to rise in suffocating clouds. You move your jaws mechanically as if to crush the dust that finds its way into your throat like fire. Then usually a kind of lassitude, of drowsiness, follows. You walk without thinking. You forget where you are walking. You remember only when you stumble. Of course you stumble often. But anyway it is bearable. "The night is ending," you say, "and with it the march. All in all, I am less tired than at the beginning." The night ends, but then comes the most terrible hour of all. You are perishing of thirst and shaking with cold. All the fatigue comes back at once. The horrible breeze which precedes the dawn is no comfort. Quite the contrary. Every time you stumble, you say, "The next misstep will be the last."
That is what people feel and say even when they know that in a few hours they will have a good rest with food and water.
I was suffering terribly. Every step jolted my poor shoulder. At one time, I wanted to stop, to sit down. Then I looked at Tanit-Zerga. She was walking ahead with her eyes almost