Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sand-pillars--wind-_jinnee_ of the Empty Abodes--that danced and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming lakes, afar. But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the same lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slain Bohannan. Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoning waters which were but air. At nightfall, toiling up over the lip of a parched, chalky _nullah_ that sunset turned to amethyst, a swarm of howling Arabs suddenly attacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away all his ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, did likewise. No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man's sight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, he discovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint. Nothing was there but a clump of acacias, their twisted thorns parched white. They had been shooting at only fantasms of their own brains. Now, even the mercy-bullets were gone. Bitterly the man cursed himself, as he thrust the now useless pistol back into its holster. The woman, however, smiled with dry lips, and from her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead--the bullet which, fired at _Nissr_ from near the Ka'aba, had fallen at her feet and been picked up by her as a souvenir. "Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two and shape it. We can reload two shells with some of the Arab powder. It will do!" They laughed irrationally. More than half mad as they now were, neither one thought of the fact that they had no percussion-caps. Still laughing, they sat down in the hot sand, near the clawlike distortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. The sun's anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky. Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet--toying with them for its own delectation--respited them a little while by stumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this only after a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could both see the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees--trees they could touch and feel--gave them fresh courage. Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle of blind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean some time ago by the passage of a swarm of those voracious locusts known as _jarad Iblis_ (the locusts of Satan).