It did not greatly matter which direction he took; he had no particular objective in view: he wanted chiefly to shake off this annoying sense of unfitness. He had never been ill in his life before: he did not understand it. It had seemed to him that if he could walk he would be all right, and instead he felt worse. He was giddy, and he could not make any pace. He took a bush for a landmark and noted how long he was in reaching it. It amazed him. He became angrily impatient with his own laggard steps: he wasn't walking, he was crawling--crawling like a sick animal, with a sick animal's instinct to find some hole to creep into. He looked about him vaguely, with tired eyes. That was what he wanted, all he wanted,--some quiet shelter into which to crawl and rest. He stumbled on, tripping over the dry scrub, lurching heavily like a drunken man, and clinging tightly to his gun-case, as to something from which he would not be separated, though the weight of it was too great for his failing strength. Twice he came to his knees; but each time he rose again and stumbled blindly on as before. The sun rose higher in the heavens. It poured its warmth like some molten stream upon the gaping ground. For miles around the veld stretched in unbroken sameness, blackened from the long drought, sparse and scrubby, with never a sign of any living thing, save the solitary man's figure, moving slowly, with heavy uncertain gait, in quest of some temporary shelter from the sun's burning rays. It seemed to Hallam that he walked many miles and for many hours before, a long way off like some wonderful oasis amid the arid waste, he descried signs of water, and the wooded banks of a river which meandered like a green irregular wall across the stark nakedness of the land. The sight of this unexpected fertility gave him fresh heart and stimulated his failing energies to further effort. By sheer force of will he dragged his lagging feet over the uneven ground. He desired only to reach the river and lie down beside it and rest. He longed simply to get to the water, to feel it, to lave his burning brow in its coolness, to moisten his parched lips. Again he fell, and again he rose and staggered on, covering the intervening space painfully and slowly. When he was quite close to the bank he fell once more, and this time he failed to rise, despite his persistent efforts. For the first time his hold on his gun-case relaxed. He stared at it regretfully; but he knew that he was powerless to drag it further. He left it lying where it was, and crawled on his hands and knees painfully towards the bushes, crawled between them, and reached the shallow river which had been his goal. Book 3--CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.