The man at his side lay with face upturned starkly to the moonlight.  It gleamed upon eyes that were glazed and sightless.  The ground all around them was dark with blood.

Slowly Piers raised himself, feeling his heart pump with the effort, feeling the stiffened wound above it tear and gape asunder.  He tried to hold his breath while he moved, but he could not.  It came in sharp, painful gasps, sawing its way through his tortured flesh.  But in spite of it he managed to lift himself to his hands and knees; and then for a long, long time he dared attempt no more.  For he could feel the blood flowing steadily from his wound, and a deadly faintness was upon him against which he needed all his strength to fight.

He thought it must have overwhelmed him for a time at least; yet when it began to lessen he had not sunk down again.  He was still propped upon hands and knees—­the only living creature in that place of dead men.

He could see them which ever way he looked over the trampled sward—­figures huddled or outstretched in the moonlight, all motionless, ashen-faced.

He saw none wounded like himself.  Perhaps the wounded had been already collected, perhaps they had crawled to shelter.  Or perhaps he was the only one against whom the Door had been closed.  He had been left for dead.  He had nothing to live for.  Yet it seemed that he could not die.

He looked at the man at his side lying wrapt in the aloofness of Death.  Poor devil!  How horrible he looked, and how indifferent!  A sense of shuddering disgust came upon Piers.  He wondered if he would die as hideously.

Again the fountain mocked him softly from afar.  Again the fiery torment of his thirst awoke.  He contemplated attempting to walk, but instinct warned him against the risk of a headlong fall.  He began with infinite difficulty to crawl upon hands and knees.

His progress was desperately slow, the suffering it entailed was sometimes unendurable.  And always he knew that the blood was draining from him with every foot of ground he covered.  But ever that maddening fountain lured him on...

The night had stretched into untold ages.  He wondered if in his frequent spells of unconsciousness he had somehow missed many days.  He had seen the moon swing half across the sky.  He had watched with delirious amusement the dead men rise to bury each other.  And he had spent hours in wondering what would happen to the last of them.  His head felt oddly light, as if it were full of air, a bubble of prismatic colours that might burst into nothingness at any moment.  But his body felt as if it were fettered with a thousand chains.  He could hear them clanking as he moved.

But still that fountain with its marble basin seemed the end and aim of his existence.  Often he forgot to be thirsty now, but he never forgot that he must reach the fountain before he died.

Sometimes his thirst would come back in burning spasms to urge him on, and he always knew that there was a great reason for perseverance, always felt that if he slackened he would pay a terrible penalty.