She seemed to be drinking, but only seemed. Frowning, as she finished, he once more squinted into the jar with bleared eyes. His voice was even, dull, ominous as he accused: "You drank nothing. You are trying to save water for me!" She shook her head in negation, but he penetrated the lie. His teeth gleamed through his stubble of beard, and his eyes glinted redly under the hood of his ragged burnous as he cried: "Will you drink?" "I tell you--I have drunk!" Slowly he tilted the jar toward the thirsty sands. "Drink, now, or I pour all this on the ground!" Beaten, she extended a quivering hand. They shared the last of the water. The man took less than a third. Then they set out again on the endless road of pain. Was it that same day, or the next, that the man fell and could not rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray scorpion, too--but no, _that_ had been crushed to a pulp by the man's heel. Or had it not? Well-- The man! Was there a man? Where was he? Here, of course, on the baked earth. As she cradled his head up into her lap and drew the shelter of her burnous over it, she became rational again. Her hot, dry hand caressed his face. After a while he was blinking up at her. "Bara Miyan! Violator of the salt!" he croaked, and struck at her feebly. And after another time, she perceived that they were staggering on and on once more. The woman wondered what had happened to her head, now that the sun had bored quite through. Surely that must make a difference, must it not? A jackal barked. But this, they knew, must be illusion. No jackals lived so far from any habitation of mankind. The man blinked into the glare, across which sand-devils of whirlwinds were once more gyrating over a whiteness ending in dunes that seemed to be peppered with camel-grass. Another mirage! Grass could grow only near the coast. And now that they had both been tortured to death by Jannati Shahr men and been flung into Jehannum, how could there be any coast? It seemed so preposterous. It was all so very simple that the man laughed--silently. Where had that woman gone to? Why, he thought there surely had been a woman with him! But now he stood all alone. This was very strange. "I must remember to ask them if there wasn't a woman," thought he. "This is an extraordinary place! People come and go in such a manner!" The man felt a dull irritation, and smeared the sand out of his eyes. How had that sand got there? Naturally, from having laid on one of those dunes. There seemed to be no particular reason for lying on a dune, under the fire-box of an engine, so the man sat up and kept blinking and rubbing his eyes. "This is the best mirage, yet," he reflected. "The palms look real. And the water--it sparkles. Those white blotches--one would say they were houses!"