There being no shelter near, the husband fixed the handle of his umbrella into the ground, and throwing over it a thin palampore,[33] formed a kind of rude tent, under which his wife might repose without immediate exposure to the unwholesome night air. She was exhausted with fatigue; her tongue was parched with thirst, and the rapid increase of circulation too plainly told that fever was fast coming on. To attempt to depict the husband’s agony were a vain endeavour. Without food--without water--his wife actually in the pains of labour--with no hope of relief--in the midst of a vast wilderness, which even the wild beasts shunned as a solitude where only death and desolation reigned--he had no thought but that both must lie down and die. The sufferings of his hapless companion were appalling, yet she bore them without a murmur. The severity of her pangs aggravated that thirst by which she had been so long and so grievously oppressed. He had but one alternative, and did not hesitate to adopt it in such a trying emergency. His wife’s agonies were every moment increasing. He quitted the insecure canopy which he had erected for her temporary accommodation, seized his dagger, ran to the pony, and, in a paroxysm of tumultuous anxiety to save the life of the object dearest to him upon earth, plunged it desperately into the animal’s throat. Having caught the blood in a wooden trencher, he bore it to the tent. During his short absence, his wife had become a mother. The cry of the poor babe raised within him, at this moment, emotions of parental joy; but these were in an instant stifled by the consciousness of those awful perils by which he was surrounded. He put the bowl to the lips of the suffering mother; she took a small quantity, and was in a slight degree refreshed. He now kindled a fire upon the wide blasted desert, and broiled some flesh of the animal which he had just slaughtered. It was tough and rank. The juices, however, of this unpalatable repast subdued in a degree the yearnings of hunger and the dreadful pangs of thirst.