s that flocked joyously through the
holes in the gauze curtains to feast on him slept the profound sleep of
utter exhaustion.

He was up at daybreak; for the tide served in the early morning and only
at its height could the launch approach the shore, which at low water
was bordered with the filthy slime of mangrove swamps.

Landed at the other side of the gulf he had even a worse experience of
travel before him than on the previous day. For the next stage of the
journey was forty miles across a salt desert in a tram drawn by a camel.
The car was open on all sides and covered by a cardboard roof; and its
wooden seats were uncomfortably hard for long hours of sitting. The heat
was appalling. It struck up from the baked ground and seemed to scorch
the body through the clothes. The glare from the white sand and even
whiter patches of salt was blinding and penetrated through the closed
eyelids. A hot wind blew over the hazy, shimmering desert, setting the
whirling dust-devils dancing and striking the face like the touch of a
heated iron. Wargrave's small store of ice and mineral water was
exhausted, and he felt that he was likely to die of thirst. For in the
villages where they changed camels cholera was raging; and he dared not
drink the water from their wells.

The tram slid easily along the shining rails that stretched away out of
sight over the monotonous plain, the camel loping lazily along, its
soft, sprawling feet falling noiselessly on the sand. The last ten miles
of the way lay through less sterile country; and the tram passed herds
of black buck--the pretty, spiral-horned antelope. Used to its daily
passage, the graceful animals, which were protected by the game-laws of
the native State through which the line ran, barely troubled to move out
of its way. They stood about in hundreds, staring lazily at it, some not
ten yards off, the bucks turning their heads away to scratch their sides
with the points of their horns or rubbing their noses with dainty hoofs.

That night Wargrave slept at a dak-bungalow near the terminus in a
little native town with a small branch-railway connecting it with a main
line. Then for four days he travelled across the scorching plains of
India, shut up in stuffy carriages with violet-hued glass windows and
Venetian wooden shutters meant to exclude the heat and glare. Over bare
plains broken by sudden flat-topped rocky hills, through
closely-cultivated fields and stretches of scrub-jungle