The Flying Legion Part 68

"_Allah iselmak!_" he croaked, blessing the scant water the jar still held. He realized the woman was looking at him.

"Water!" he whispered. "Let us drink again--and go on!"

She nodded silently. He loosed the thong, took the jar and peered into its neck, gauging the small amount of water still there. Then he held it to her lips.

She seemed to be drinking, but only seemed. Frowning, as she finished, he once more squinted into the jar with bleared eyes. His voice was even, dull, ominous as he accused:

"You drank nothing. You are trying to save water for me!"

She shook her head in negation, but he penetrated the lie. His teeth gleamed through his stubble of beard, and his eyes glinted redly under the hood of his ragged burnous as he cried:

"Will you drink?"

"I tell you--I have drunk!"

Slowly he tilted the jar toward the thirsty sands.

"Drink, now, or I pour all this on the ground!"

Beaten, she extended a quivering hand. They shared the last of the water. The man took less than a third. Then they set out again on the endless road of pain.

Was it that same day, or the next, that the man fell and could not rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray scorpion, too--but no, _that_ had been crushed to a pulp by the man's heel. Or had it not? Well--

The man! Was there a man? Where was he? Here, of course, on the baked earth.

As she cradled his head up into her lap and drew the shelter of her burnous over it, she became rational again. Her hot, dry hand caressed his face. After a while he was blinking up at her.

"Bara Miyan! Violator of the salt!" he croaked, and struck at her feebly. And after another time, she perceived that they were staggering on and on once more.

The woman wondered what had happened to her head, now that the sun had bored quite through. Surely that must make a difference, must it not?

A jackal barked. But this, they knew, must be illusion.

No jackals lived so far from any habitation of mankind. The man blinked into the glare, across which sand-devils of whirlwinds were once more gyrating over a whiteness ending in dunes that seemed to be peppered with camel-gra.s.s.

Another mirage! Gra.s.s could grow only near the coast. And now that they had both been tortured to death by Jannati Shahr men and been flung into Jehannum, how could there be any coast? It seemed so preposterous.

It was all so very simple that the man laughed--silently.

Where had that woman gone to? Why, he thought there surely had been a woman with him! But now he stood all alone. This was very strange.

"I must remember to ask them if there wasn't a woman," thought he.

"This is an extraordinary place! People come and go in such a manner!"

The man felt a dull irritation, and smeared the sand out of his eyes.

How had that sand got there? Naturally, from having laid on one of those dunes. There seemed to be no particular reason for lying on a dune, under the fire-box of an engine, so the man sat up and kept blinking and rubbing his eyes.

"This is the best mirage, yet," he reflected. "The palms look real.

And the water--it sparkles. Those white blotches--one would say they were houses!"

Indifferent, yet interested, too, in the appearance of reality, the man remained sitting on the dune, squinting from under his torn burnous.

The mirage took form as a line of dazzling white houses along a sea of cobalt and indigo. And to add to the reality of the mirage, some miles away, he could see two boats with sails all green and blue from the reflection of the l.u.s.ter of the water.

The man's eyes fell. He studied his feet. They were naked, now, cut to the bone, caked with blood and sand. Odd, that they did not hurt.

Where were his babooches? He seemed to remember something about having taken some ragged ones from the feet of some woman or other, a very long time ago, and having bound his own upon her mangled feet.

"I'll ask the people in those houses, down there," thought he; and on hands and knees started to crawl down the slope of the dunes toward the dazzling white things that looked like houses.

Something echoed at the back of his brain:

"_You must ask her if this is real! Unless you both see it, you must not go!_"

He paused. "There was a woman, then!" he gasped. "But--where is she now?"

Realization that she had disappeared sobered him. He got up, groped with emaciated hands before his face as he turned back away from the white houses and stumbled eastward.

All at once he saw something white lying on the sand, under a cooking glare of sunlight. Memory returned. He fell on his knees beside the woman and caught her up in quivering arms.

After a while, he noticed there was blood on her left arm. Blood, in the bend of the elbow, coagulated there.

This puzzled him. All he could think was that she might have cut herself on her _jambiyeh_, when she had fallen. He did not know then, nor did he ever know, that he himself had fallen at this spot; that she had thought him dying; that she had tried to cut her arm and give him her blood to drink; that she had fainted in the effort. Some last remnants of strength welled up in him. He stooped, got her across his shoulder, struggled to his feet and went staggering up the dune.

Here he paused, swaying drunkenly.

Strange! The very same mirage presented itself to his eyes--blue sails, turquoise sea, feathery palms, white houses.

"By G.o.d!" he croaked. "Mirages--they don't last, this way! That's real--that's real water, by the living G.o.d!"

Up from dark profundities of tortured memory arose the cry of Xenophon's bold Greeks when, after their long torment, they had of a sudden fronted blue water. At sight of the little British consular station of Batn el Hayil, on the Gulf of Farsan:

"_Thala.s.sa!_" he cried. "_Thala.s.sa, thala.s.sa!_" (The sea, the sea!)

CHAPTER LIII

THE GREATER TREASURE

New York, months later.

Spring had long departed--the spring of the year in which the Eagle of the Air had flung itself aloft from the Palisades, freighted with such vast hopes.

Summer was past and gone. The sparkling wine of autumn had already begun to bubble in the cup of the year.

Sunset, as when this tale began. Sunset, bronzing the observatory of _Niss'rosh_, on top of the huge skysc.r.a.per.