“So I told Sadiq, my head camel fellow, and another man that I wanted to look at the desert a bit, and left old Firoz--you remember him in my company in France: he’s with me now as sort of orderly since he left the army--to look after the camp. “We went out two days in the direction I figured out that my old relative must have taken. “By the way, the most extraordinary thing was that the moment I gave my orders to Sadiq, the feeling of some one wanting me suddenly vanished. “We found nothing either day, absolute dead desert. The third morning, while the men were roping up things for our return, the feeling suddenly came on again. Only this time, for some unaccountable reason, it seemed as if the thing or person were close at hand. It worried me a lot. I couldn’t go on, of course; we had only enough water to see us back. “There was a particularly high dune about six hundred or seven hundred yards from the camp, and finally I said to myself that I’d go up and have a last look from the top with my glasses. I told the men to finish loading up and then wait for me. “The feeling was very strong as I trudged over the sand, and then, just as I got to the top, it absolutely disappeared again. It never came back either. “But as I looked down from the top I knew why the feeling had left me. There, in the dip of the sand below me on the far side, lay a man, curled up as though asleep. I knew then that I had not been asleep that first day. “I ran down the dune to his side hoping that he was only asleep, though somehow at heart I doubted it. Then, as I bent over him, I knew he was not sleeping, or rather that he had gone to sleep for good and all. “There was nothing much in that; one had seen plenty of dead men before. Besides, it was the ’flu-time still in those parts, and I had picked up people dying or dead along the roadside more than once. But the point was that this was not the roadside, and it puzzled me as to what the man could have been doing in this out-of-the-way corner miles and miles away from any road, even what Central Asia calls a road. “I examined him closely, and then I sat down and thought quick and hard. Remember that at that time I had been reading the old diary rather a lot, and this man was a shock to me apart from the way I had located him. “He was gaunt and haggard, and by the look of him had suffered from hunger and thirst before he pegged out; in fact, I rather thought he had died of thirst. “But that was nothing much; it was first his colour, for as I lifted his arm the loose sleeve slipped back, and the arm was nearly as white as mine. I don’t think he can have been dead more than a couple of days at most. And his type of features was quite unlike the average man in those parts, far too straight and regular. However, fair-skinned people are common enough in North Asia, though not as a rule quite as fair as this man.