“Oh,” I murmured sadly, “if my shoulder were only not this way, I could carry the water skin.”

“It is as it is,” said Tanit-Zerga.

“You will take your carbine and two tins of meat.  I shall take two more and the one filled with water.  Come.  We must leave in an hour if we wish to cover the eighteen miles.  You know that when the sun is up, the rocks are so hot we cannot walk.”

I leave you to imagine in what sad silence we passed that hour which we had begun so happily and confidently.  Without the little girl, I believe I should have seated myself upon a rock and waited.  Gale only was happy.

“We must not let her eat too much,” said Tanit-Zerga.  “She would not be able to follow us.  And to-morrow she must work.  If she catches another ourane, it will be for us.”

You have walked in the desert.  You know how terrible the first hours of the night are.  When the moon comes up, huge and yellow, a sharp dust seems to rise in suffocating clouds.  You move your jaws mechanically as if to crush the dust that finds its way into your throat like fire.  Then usually a kind of lassitude, of drowsiness, follows.  You walk without thinking.  You forget where you are walking.  You remember only when you stumble.  Of course you stumble often.  But anyway it is bearable.  “The night is ending,” you say, “and with it the march.  All in all, I am less tired than at the beginning.”  The night ends, but then comes the most terrible hour of all.  You are perishing of thirst and shaking with cold.  All the fatigue comes back at once.  The horrible breeze which precedes the dawn is no comfort.  Quite the contrary.  Every time you stumble, you say, “The next misstep will be the last.”

That is what people feel and say even when they know that in a few hours they will have a good rest with food and water.

I was suffering terribly.  Every step jolted my poor shoulder.  At one time, I wanted to stop, to sit down.  Then I looked at Tanit-Zerga.  She was walking ahead with her eyes almost closed.  Her expression was an indefinable one of mingled suffering and determination.  I closed my own eyes and went on.

Such was the first stage.  At dawn we stopped in a hollow in the rocks.  Soon the heat forced us to rise to seek a deeper one.  Tanit-Zerga did not eat.  Instead, she swallowed a little of her half can of water.  She lay drowsy all day.  Gale ran about our rock giving plaintive little cries.

I am not going to tell you about the second march.  It was more horrible than anything you can imagine.  I suffered all that it is humanly possible to suffer in the desert.  But already I began to observe with infinite pity that my man’s strength was outlasting the nervous force of my little companion.  The poor child walked on without saying a word, chewing feebly one corner of her haik which she had drawn over her face.  Gale followed.

The well toward which we were dragging ourselves was indicated on Cegheir-ben-Cheikh’s paper by the one word Tissaririn.  Tissaririn is the plural of Tissarirt and means “two isolated trees.”