"Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two and
shape it. We can reload two shells with some of the Arab powder. It
will do!"
They laughed irrationally. More than half mad as they now were,
neither one thought of the fact that they had no percussion-caps.
Still laughing, they sat down in the hot sand, near the clawlike
distortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. The
sun's anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky.
Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet--toying
with them for its own delectation--respited them a little while by
stumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this only
after a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could both
see the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees--trees
they could touch and feel--gave them fresh courage.
Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle of
blind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean some
time ago by the passage of a swarm of those voracious locusts known as
_jarad Iblis_ (the locusts of Satan).
Nothing but bare branches remained in the _nakhil_, or grove.
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