It was dry work, eating ship's biscuit in a fiery furnace, with a ten-pound thirst upon you and whisky and soda within reach. When he stood up again the weariness seemed to have crept upwards, leaving nothing alert save his brain. Had he ever been so tired in all his life? As tired as _she_ must have been when she fell asleep in the chair he was just passing. His hand lingered on the back of it for an instant, almost caressingly. By Jove! what a furnace it was outside! Lighter than it had been, however, because of the suggestion of a moon low down in the heat-haze. And there was the potter's lamp twinkling like a star above the domed shadow of the Hodinuggur mound. Queer old chap--queer start the whole thing--if one came to think of it. A crazy, irresponsible creator! as Dan had called him. Why not he as well as another? Who knew? who cared? He stood so for a space, looking out with sensitive, seeing eyes to the broad shadows, formless save for the pinpoint flicker of the potter's light. Face to face at last, he and Hodinuggur; between them the sliding water, mother of all things. Then came a memory. 'Hath not the Potter power over the Clay?' Ah! if that was all the light amid the shadows of life, better far were darkness! If that he turned quickly, beset by uncontrolled, passionate contempt, uncontrolled, passionate desire for action, and beneath his shaking hand the lamp on the table flared out, smokily. A poor protest; yet the dark was better. Darkness and rest--if rest could come to one so tired as he was, as it had come to her. Not that it mattered if he were tired or not---- Five minutes after, the twinkling light, could it have reached so far, would have found him asleep, peaceful as a child, among the red cushions where _she_ had slept. But even Azîzan's eyes, set keen as they were by devotion, could not pierce the darkness. For the light George had seen was in her hand, as she stood looking out from the yard towards the other bank of the canal. 'It hath gone out again,' she murmured; 'a servant likely, on no good errand; and the old man tells me the truth, I think. Another week ere he returns. I would it had been sooner, so that I might warn him. But there! 'tis the same! The task is mine in the end.' As she crossed back to the hut, she paused an instant to look, by the light of the cresset she shaded with her thin fingers, on the figure of old Fuzl Elâhi asleep in the open beside his wheel. 'Poor fool,' she said softly, as if to the sleeper. And after that even the potter's light disappeared, leaving both sides of the sliding water to darkness. The dawn came and went; the sun climbing into the sky turned it to brass--a brazen dome in which the sun itself seemed merged and lost. Yet still George slept on, undisturbed even by the water-carrier's cautious peepings through the chick.