There was other pain, too, in the limping
feet cased in the last of the _babooches_, now stiffened with blood.
And in the throat and lungs, what was this burning?
CHAPTER LII
"Thalassa! Thalassa!"
Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass circle of
horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped
by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making
perhaps a mile an hour.
Disjointed words and sentences kept framing themselves in the man's
mind; above all, a sentence he had read long ago in Greek, somewhere.
Where had he read that? Oh, in Xenophon, of course. In _The Retreat of
the Ten Thousand._ The Master gulped it aloud, in a dead voice:
"Most terrible of all is--the desert--for it is full-of a great want."
After a while he knew that he was trying to laugh.
"A great want!" he repeated. "A great--"
Presently it was night again.
The Master's mind cleared. Yes, there was the woman, lying in the sand
near him. But where was the date-stick basket? Where was the last of
the food? He tried to think.
He could remember nothing. But reason told him they must have eaten
the last of the food and thrown the basket away.
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