aggering. A
little more effort; he must be nearing it, though it did not seem so;
another ten minutes, say, and he would be able to plunge into that
delicious water! And so he fought on, when suddenly all vanished.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Had sudden blindness fallen upon
him? No, he could see the sand-hills as plainly as possible. But the
city, the fortifications, the minarets, the water, which were so
distinct a minute ago, where were they? All turned to sand? That could
not be. He was giddy, and must have altered his course without knowing
it.

He looked all round him, bewildered. Sand, sand, sand, and nothing
else. Then the truth flashed across his memory: the mirage! Towers and
water were as unreal as the magician's money in the "Arabian Nights'
Entertainments," which turned to paper in the drawer where it was. For
the first time Harry was stricken with utter despair; without water,
without food, alone in the trackless desert, exposed to a fierce sun, he
fell, and lay motionless for awhile. Then up and on blindly, in what
direction he knew not. His tongue swelled; his throat seemed choked and
breathing was difficult.

Soon he lost consciousness of everything but a sense of distress and
pain; and after awhile even that left him, and he fell senseless.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

ABDUL ACHMET.

A body of twenty Arab warriors mounted on camels was crossing the
desert, and as they rode in Indian file, and from ten to twenty paces
apart, the string was a long one. Probably they did not belong to a
tribe that had taken part in any of the numerous routs, assaults on
strong places, and massacres, which had supplied so large a portion of
the Mahdi's troops with modern arms of precision, for those of them who
carried guns had those long-barrelled, short-stocked weapons, which are
familiar to us in pictures, and which are so admirable from an artistic,
and so worthless from the Wimbledonian, point of view. But the majority
carried spears instead of guns, and they were all armed with swords and
pistols.

Whatever the actual number of days and hours which elapse between the
dates of an Arab's birth and death, his life seems a short one reckoned
by sensations and incidents, for he spends so very large a proportion of
it in sitting on the hump of a camel as it toils across a country of
maddening sameness. The distances he has to travel are so vast, and his
means of progression so limited!

Perha