Four men, one woman.
Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that
great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, the
land "where there is none but He."
Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard,
unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons
of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness.
Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far,
iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare,
scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.
Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost
yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five
fugitives--pitiable handful of the Legion--were plodding south-west,
toward the sunset.
The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn from
their tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; for
everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp
stone--the black basalt named by the Arabs _Hajar Jehannum_, or "Rock
of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in
which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had
been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.
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