When I realised that my back was getting really overdone I turned over and exposed in turn each side, and eventually the front of my body, to the sun. Then I felt overdone all round. Moreover the vestige of shadow in which my head cowered--that cast by the sparse top of the taaibosch, through which the sunlight leaked freely--grew more and more scanty. Oh! I breathed, for a return of that blessed coolness of morning which my frame, softened by years of a semi-sedentary life, had been unable to sustain without discomfort. Oh! for the gentle, healing hand of the dew, which I so ungratefully contemned. If these desert plants can feel and think, how they must long for the night,--for the miracle of cool moisture which, perhaps, a beneficent planet distils in some grove-garden of the asteroids and seals up in the crystal vats of some celestial tavern known only to its sister spheres and the moon. Surely there is some hostel of mercy in whose cool cellars the precious vintage lies hidden from the rapacity of the cruel sun,--held in readiness to be poured out from the etherial beakers of the firmament on the tortured tongues of the leaves and grass-blades, when the tyrant of the skies departs for a season. My physical condition had become acutely serious on account of the increasing heat and the more nearly vertical vantage of the sun's arrows. The actual, immediate pain was bad enough,--but how about consequences. Saint Lawrence no doubt ascended to Paradise from his gridiron, but I should have to toil on foot over miles of desert after arising from mine. Even if I thereafter soaked myself in olive oil, days of blistered misery might have been in store for me. Oh! for a cloud or for Hendrick. If he only had arrived within sight I might have vacated my couch of anguish without forfeiting his respect or my own. The loss of expected sport became unimportant. Ostrich shooting in the desert from a scherm was far more than my fancy had painted it. Hist! What was that? It was not a sound; hardly was it a tremor. It was rather a thrill not perceptible to any one sense; something apprehended by the nameless perceptions of the noumenon-area lying deep beneath the phenomena of sensation. I risked sunstroke by discarding my hat; then I slowly lifted my head until I could look over the edge of the scherm. At what I saw misery hid her face; mind once more assumed command of body.