The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained its beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips, protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others, they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously tied into some semblance of _cherchias_. Above all, the Legionaries knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the desert sun. In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in reality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizing effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been true. For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair was first to utter words. "Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoarse, choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events, until that cursed sun has set!" In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now toiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon the hot earth. Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they had soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; very different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward. The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek, was strangling the life out of them. For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized by fatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of what was yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live to behold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested by pursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes of the Black Tent People, what hope could there be? Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up, painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lying beside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master's face drew into lines of anguish as he looked at her. With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, and tore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a little of the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tight again, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman's face, brow, and throat.