on
the King's back, and the tents glistened, just as whitewashed houses
glisten in a bright night. The world sank into silence and sleep
encompassed the earth.

And in the presence of this stillness and this quiet of nature the
people howled from pain and waited for death. On the silvery background
of the darkness the gigantic black form of the elephant was strongly
outlined. The moon's beams illuminated besides the tents, Stas' and
Nell's dresses and, amid tufts of heather, the dark, shriveled bodies
of the negroes and, scattered here and there, piles of packages. Before
the children sat, propped on his fore legs, Saba, and, raising his head
towards the moon's shield, he howled mournfully.

In Stas' soul oscillated only the remnants of thought, changed into a
gloomy and despairing feeling that this time there was no help and that
all those prodigious toils and efforts, those sufferings, those acts of
will and courage, which he had performed during the terrible
journey--from Medinet to Khartum, from Khartum to Fashoda, and from
Fashoda to the unknown lake--would avail naught, and that an inexorable
end of the struggle and of life was approaching. And this appeared to
him all the more horrible because this end came during the time of the
final journey, at the termination of which lay the ocean. Ah! He would
not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a
steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he
himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from
his lips that he had acted like a brave boy and like a true Pole! The
end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless
bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those
mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt.

From torture and fever his mind began to get confused. Ante-mortem
visions and delusions of hearing crowded upon him. He heard distinctly
the voices of the Sudanese and Bedouins yelling "Yalla! Yalla!" at the
speeding camels. He saw Idris and Gebhr. The Mahdi smiled at him with
his thick lips, asking: "Do you want to drink at the spring of
truth?"--Afterwards the lion gazed at him from the rock; later Linde
gave him a gallipot of quinine and said: "Hurry, hurry, for the little
one will die." And in the end he beheld only the pale, very dear little
face and two little hands stretched out towards him.

Suddenly he trembled and consciousness r