w of death which was closing in upon them.

What is there in life that we should cling to it so? It is not the
pleasures, for those whose hours are one long pain shrink away screaming
when they see merciful Death holding his soothing arms out for them. It
is not the associations, for we will change all of them before we walk
of our own free wills down that broad road which every son and daughter
of man must tread. Is it the fear of losing the I, that dear, intimate
I, which we think we know so well, although it is eternally doing things
which surprise us? Is it that which makes the deliberate suicide cling
madly to the bridge-pier as the river sweeps him by? Or is it that
Nature is so afraid that all her weary workmen may suddenly throw down
their tools and strike, that she has invented this fashion of keeping
them constant to their present work? But there it is, and all these
tired, harassed, humiliated folk rejoiced in the few more hours of
suffering which were left to them.

CHAPTER VII

There was nothing to show them as they journeyed onwards that they were
not on the very spot that they had passed at sunset upon the evening
before. The region of fantastic black hills and orange sand which
bordered the river had long been left behind, and everywhere now was the
same brown, rolling, gravelly plain, the ground-swell with the shining
rounded pebbles upon its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of
sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away
in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The
sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide
landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness
in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow
swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes,
halting at every rise, and peering backwards with their hands shading
their eyes. In the distance their spears and rifles seemed to stick out
of them, straight and thin, like needles in knitting.

"How far do you suppose we are from the Nile?" asked Cochrane. He rode
with his chin on his shoulder and his eyes straining wistfully to the
eastern sky-line.

"A good fifty miles," Belmont answered.

"Not so much as that," said the Colonel. "We could not have been moving
more than fourteen or fifteen hours, and a camel seldom goes more than
two and a half miles an hour unless he is trotting. Tha