His course lay some twenty miles into the desert behind
El-Chobak and towards the limestone hills of Guebel Haidi, and he went
alone, carrying lunch and tea, for it was the weekly holiday of Friday,
and the men were not at work. The accident was ordinary enough. On his way back in the heat of early
afternoon his pony stumbled against a boulder on the treacherous desert
film, threw him heavily, broke the girth, bolted before he could seize
the reins again, and left him stranded some ten or twelve miles from
home. There was a pain in his knee that made walking difficult, a
buzzing in his head that troubled sight and made the landscape swim,
while, worse than either, his provisions, fastened to the saddle, had
vanished with the frightened pony into those blazing leagues of sand. He was alone in the Desert, beneath the pitiless afternoon sun, twelve
miles of utterly exhausting country between him and safety. Under normal conditions he could have covered the distance in four
hours, reaching home by dark; but his knee pained him so that a mile
an hour proved the best he could possibly do. He reflected a few
minutes. The wisest course was to sit down and wait till the pony
told its obvious story to the stable, and help should come. And this
was what he did, for the scorching heat and glare were dangerous;
they were terrible; he was shaken and bewildered by his fall, hungry
and weak into the bargain; and an hour's painful scrambling over the
baked and burning little gorges must have speedily caused complete
prostration. He sat down and rubbed his aching knee. It was quite a
little adventure. Yet, though he knew the Desert might not be lightly
trifled with, he felt at the moment nothing more than this--and the
amusing description of it he would give in his letter, or--intoxicating
thought--by word of mouth. In the heat of the sun he began to feel
drowsy. A soft torpor crept over him. He dozed. He fell asleep. It was a long, a dreamless sleep ... for when he woke at length the
sun had just gone down, the dusk lay awfully upon the enormous desert,
and the air was chilly. The cold had waked him. Quickly, as though on
purpose, the red glow faded from the sky; the first stars shone; it
was dark; the heavens were deep violet. He looked round and realised
that his sense of direction had gone entirely. Great hunger was in
him. The cold already was bitter as the wind rose, but the pain in
his knee having eased, he got up and walked a little--and in a moment
lost sight of the spot where he had been lying. The shadowy desert
swallowed it. "Ah," he realised, "this is not an English field or
moor. I'm in the Desert!" The safe thing to do was to remain exactly
where he was; only thus could the rescuers find him; once he wandered
he was done for. It was strange the search-party had not yet arrived. To keep warm, however, he was compelled to move, so he made a little
pile of stones to mark the place, and walked round and round it in a
circle of some dozen yards' diameter. He limped badly, and the hunger
gnawed dreadfully; but, after all, the adventure was not so terrible. The amusing side of it kept uppermost still. Though fragile in body,
his spirit was not unduly timid or imaginative; he _could_ last out
the night, or, if the worst came to the worst, the next day as well. But when he watched the little group of stones, he saw that there were
dozens of them, scores, hundreds, thousands of these little groups of
stones. The desert's face, of course, is thickly strewn with them. The
original one was lost in the first five minutes. So he sat down again. But the biting cold, and the wind that licked his very skin beneath the
light clothing, soon forced him up again. It was ominous; and the night
huge and shelterless. The shaft of green zodiacal light that hung so
strangely in the western sky for hours had faded away; the stars were
out in their bright thousands; no guide was anywhere; the wind moaned
and puffed among the sandy mounds; the vast sheet of desert stretched
appallingly upon the world; he heard the jackals cry....

And with the jackals' cry came suddenly the unwelcome realisation that
no play was in this adventure any more, but that a bleak reality stared
at him through the surrounding darkness. He faced it--at bay. He was
genuinely lost. Thought blocked in him. "I must be calm and think," he
said aloud. His voice woke no echo; it was small and dead; something
gigantic ate it instantly. He got up and walked again. Why did no
one come? Hours had passed. The pony had long ago found its stable,
or--had it run madly in another direction altogether? He worked out
possibilities, tightening his belt. The cold was searching; he never
had been, never could be warm again; the hot sunshine of a few hours
ago seemed the merest dream. Unfamiliar with hardship, he knew not
what to do, but he took his coat and shirt off, vigorously rubbed his
skin where the dried perspiration of the afternoon still caused clammy
shivers, swung his arms furiously like a London cabman, and quickly
dressed again. Though the wind upon his bare back was fearful, he felt
warmer a little. He lay down exhausted, sheltered by an overhanging
limestone crag, and took snatches of fitful dog's-sleep, while the wind
drove overhead and the dry sand pricked his skin. One face continually
was near him; one pair of tender eyes; two dear hands smoothed him;
he smelt the perfume of light brown hair. It was all natural enough. His whole thought, in his misery, ran to her in England--England
where there were soft fresh grass, big sheltering trees, hemlock and
honeysuckle in the hedges--while the hard black Desert guarded him,
and consciousness dipped away at little intervals under this dry and
pitiless Egyptian sky.... It was perhaps five in the morning when a voice spoke and he started
up with a horrid jerk--the voice of that clairvoyante woman. The
sentence died away into the darkness, but one word remained: _Water!_
At first he wondered, but at once explanation came. Cause and effect
were obvious. The clue was physical. His body needed water, and so the
thought came up into his mind. He was thirsty. This was the moment when fear first really touched him. Hunger was
manageable, more or less--for a day or two, certainly. But thirst! Thirst and the Desert were an evil pair that, by cumulative suggestion
gathering since childhood days, brought terror in. Once in the mind
it could not be dislodged. In spite of his best efforts, the ghastly
thing grew passionately--because his thirst grew too. He had smoked
much; had eaten spiced things at lunch; had breathed in alkali with
the dry, scorched air. He searched for a cool flint pebble to put into
his burning mouth, but found only angular scraps of dusty limestone. There were no pebbles here. The cold helped a little to counteract, but
already he knew in himself subconsciously the dread of something that
was coming. What was it? He tried to hide the thought and bury it out
of sight.