Landed at the other side of the gulf he had even a worse experience of travel before him than on the previous day. For the next stage of the journey was forty miles across a salt desert in a tram drawn by a camel. The car was open on all sides and covered by a cardboard roof; and its wooden seats were uncomfortably hard for long hours of sitting. The heat was appalling. It struck up from the baked ground and seemed to scorch the body through the clothes. The glare from the white sand and even whiter patches of salt was blinding and penetrated through the closed eyelids. A hot wind blew over the hazy, shimmering desert, setting the whirling dust-devils dancing and striking the face like the touch of a heated iron. Wargrave's small store of ice and mineral water was exhausted, and he felt that he was likely to die of thirst. For in the villages where they changed camels cholera was raging; and he dared not drink the water from their wells. The tram slid easily along the shining rails that stretched away out of sight over the monotonous plain, the camel loping lazily along, its soft, sprawling feet falling noiselessly on the sand. The last ten miles of the way lay through less sterile country; and the tram passed herds of black buck--the pretty, spiral-horned antelope. Used to its daily passage, the graceful animals, which were protected by the game-laws of the native State through which the line ran, barely troubled to move out of its way. They stood about in hundreds, staring lazily at it, some not ten yards off, the bucks turning their heads away to scratch their sides with the points of their horns or rubbing their noses with dainty hoofs. That night Wargrave slept at a dâk-bungalow near the terminus in a little native town with a small branch-railway connecting it with a main line. Then for four days he travelled across the scorching plains of India, shut up in stuffy carriages with violet-hued glass windows and Venetian wooden shutters meant to exclude the heat and glare. Over bare plains broken by sudden flat-topped rocky hills, through closely-cultivated fields and stretches of scrub-jungle, by mud-walled villages, he journeyed day and night. The train crossed countless wide river-beds in which the streams had shrunk to mean rivulets; but when it clattered over the Ganges at Allahabad the sacred flood rolled a broad and sluggish current under the bridge on its way to the far-distant Bay of Bengal.