, and she did not answer. His
eyelids drooped, and presently he slept again. Hours later, when he
woke, she was still there. It seemed to the girl that the world had
fallen to pieces, leaving only her and this man in the ruins. All around
them lay the vast desert. To go back whence they had come was
impossible. To go on seemed equally impossible. There was nowhere to go.
But they were together. She knew that nothing could part them now, not
life, and even less death, yet she could see no future. Everything had
come to a standstill, and their souls might as well be out of their
bodies. It would be so much simpler!

She gave Max tea that she had made; and when she had looked at his hand
and bandaged it again, she told him all that had happened. How the
Senegalese, whose brother Stanton had shot for pilfering, a month ago,
had stabbed Stanton in the breast, and fifty others in blood-madness had
rushed to finish his work. How Ahmara had run shrieking to the village,
and the men, still in madness, had stolen the camels and gone off into
the desert; not the murderers only, but their friends who saw that it
was well to disappear, that it might never be known who were the men
that saw Richard Stanton die.

Two months and more ago, when the caravan left Touggourt, there were
over a hundred men who marched with it. Between that time and reaching
Dardai thirty had deserted, and a few had died. Now all had flown
except a dozen of the oldest and most responsible who refused to be
carried away by their comrades' vague fear of reprisals. Just these
twelve were left with fifteen camels and a small store of arms and
provisions. There was money also, untouched in Stanton's tent, and some
bales of European rugs, clocks, and musical boxes, which the explorer
had brought as gifts for native rulers. The question pressed: what was
to be done? Sanda could find no answer; but Max had two. They might turn
back and go the way they had come. Or they might go on, not trying to
cross the Libyan desert in the direction of Assouan, as Stanton had
hoped to do, but skirting southward by a longer route where the desert
was charted and oases existed. After a journey of seventy or eighty days
they might hope to find their way through Kordofan to Omdurman, and then
across the Nile to civilized Khartoum. It was this idea that the leading
mutineers, frightened by tales of the terrible Libyan desert, had meant
to suggest to Stanton; and if he refused their in