hurry on
more steadily toward where, far below, he could see the green trees, and
as his dry lips parted he, in imagination, saw clear, cool water waiting
to quench his awful thirst.

But during the next two hours his progress grew more and more
mechanical, and there were times when he went on down and down the loose
slope like one in a dream. There, though far below, was the object
which guided him, a glistening thread of silver water from which the
sun's rays flashed, and down by which he fell at last to bathe his face
in its cool depths and drink as he had never drunk before.

It was as if he had imbibed new life when he finally drew away from the
water and lay gazing up at the mountain slope, and the summit whose
highest parts were hidden in the rounded cloud of smoke and steam which
rested there. Danger was apparently absent, and Oliver Lane felt ready
to imagine he had exaggerated everything, and been ready to take alarm
without sufficient cause. He was ready now, in the pleasant restful
feeling which came over him, to laugh at what he mentally called his
cowardice. But this passed off in time, and he knew that he had not
only been in grave peril, but that even now his position was far from
free of danger, it would soon be night again, he was without food, and
that line of mist was like an impassable wall between him and his
friends.

As he arrived at this point in his musings, he tried to spring up,
knowing that he must make an energetic effort to regain them.

But there was very little spring in his motions, for though the cool
draught of water had been delicious, and reclining there restful to a
degree, the moment he stirred every joint moved as if its socket was
harsh and dry, so that he would not have been surprised had they all
creaked. He began to walk with pain and difficulty, with his mind made
up as to what he should do. For there below him to his right was the
long line of mist, and his object was to keep along parallel with it
till he could pass round the end, which must be somewhere toward the
shore, over which they had been carried inland. Once there, he would be
able to reach his friends who ought, he felt, to have made some effort
to find him in a similar way to that which he now proposed trying
himself.

"And by the same rule," he said half aloud with a bitter laugh, as he
shifted his gun from one shoulder to the other, "I ought to have gone at
once to try and reach them instead of at