cried. "My father, here is food. The
robbers have dropped a bag of dates."

Sure enough, there it lay, a heavy bag of dates, shaken off from some
camel's pack during the struggle. Heavy as it was, and hard to carry,
Ahmed would fain have had it larger. It was their safety from
starvation. A handful of its contents satisfied hunger, and gave them
strength to begin their walk. What a walk it was! Poor Mustapha lay
down every half-hour from pain and weakness; the sand was heavy, the
darkness puzzled them. When morning broke, they had not accomplished
more than half the distance. All through the hot day-time they lay
panting on the ground, eating now and then a date, tormented with
thirst and heat; and when evening came, they dragged themselves to
their feet again, and recommenced their painful journey. Step by step,
hour by hour, each harder and longer than the last, moment by moment
they grew more feeble, less able to bear up, till it seemed as though
they could no longer struggle on. At last, the morning broke. Ahmed
raised his blood-shot eyes, seized Mustapha's arm, and pointed. There,
not a hundred yards away, was the oasis, its trees and bushes outlined
against the sky.

Poor Mustapha was so spent that his father had to drag him across the
short dividing space. It was a small oasis, and not very fertile; its
well was shallow and scanty, but no ice-cooled sherbet ever seemed more
delicious than did its brackish waters to the parched tongues of the
exhausted men.

All day and all night they lay under the shadow of the cactuses and the
acacia-trees, rousing only to drink, and falling asleep again
immediately. Shade, and sleep, and water seemed the only things in the
world worth having just then.

The second day they slept less, but it was nearly a week before they
could be said to be wide-awake again. Such a pair of scare-crows as
they looked! Ahmed was almost naked. The robbers had taken part of his
clothes, and the desert thorns the rest. Haggard, wild, blackened by
the sun, they gazed at each other with horror; each thought, "Do I look
like that?" and each tried to hide from the other his own dismay.

They could never tell afterward how long they remained at the oasis. It
seemed years, but I suppose it could not have been more than weeks. All
day long they looked wistfully toward the horizon, in hopes of a
caravan, but the caravan never came. Slowly the dates dwindled in the
bag; slowly the precious water dimini