For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself
south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair
was first to utter words.
"Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoarse,
choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many
hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained
by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events,
until that cursed sun has set!"
In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the
little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now
toiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon the
hot earth.
Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they
had soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; very
different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black
line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.
The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than
any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek,
was strangling the life out of them.
For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized by
fatigue and pain.
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