An inquisitive sand-lizard, poking at his spear with its horny nose, awoke him before dawn. Not hungry enough to destroy the little monstrosity, Thorne shooed it away and scrambled up. There was a thirst inside him blurring his vision ... but not for the water he was abandoning. Again, as so often in the recent past, he would have sold what remained of his soul for a bottle of the dreadful, numbing t'ang. But here one was as remote as the other. He gritted his teeth and moved slowly down the ridge toward the distant south. Hour after hour plodded wearily on as the dull-eyed Earthling lurched in a slow, dreadful stride farther and farther into the blazing Martian desert. The hot sunlight glanced and blazed in glittering splendor from his keen spearblade, slung across his back with a strip torn from his ragged tunic. It scorched fiercely and persistently at the hat he had made from a withered desert plant's dun leaf. It burned the reddening sands to blister the man's half-bare soles through the torn pilot's boots. It crisped the thin atmosphere to nostril-tingling flame.... From time to time he came on bushes, tiny, low-squatting bushes with yellow pads for leaves and deadly stings for thorns. Their flesh was death. Twice he passed a thin-stalked t'ang bush, hiding in the lee of some crested dune, flaunting its crimson and black fruit at the weary, shuddering traveler. There, too, was death. Thorne grinned. And what else but the slower death and decay brewed from these devil-berries drove him thus hopeless into the wastes to be at peace and die? The second day he found a body. Perhaps one of the old men of Hanu's wise, grave tribe, setting out into the sunset like Ulysses to seek one last wonder before the long night overtook him. Perhaps a condemned man sent gravely forth to wander and seek repentance before suffering his natural penalty. Thorne could not tell. It was a skeleton by now. A polished spear lay across the arching ribs and the bony hands were clasped upon it in a strange gesture of resignation, as though the man had laid himself down at last to rest. He found two more such skeletons before night. The spear of one lay through the broken ribs, and he shuddered. The man had not waited. Although his body, numbed and ravaged by the fires of t'ang, required little now to sustain its life, it was weakening fast and a deeper lethargy was creeping over him. He wondered when it would be that he, too, must lie down at last, folding his hands on his breast, and watch the sun go down or rise for the last time. Well, it would find him ready.