THE TWO CAPTAINS.
Page: 24

and casting aside their heavy riding boots they plunged like two
courageous swimmers into the trackless waste.




CHAPTER X.



With no other guide than the sun by day, and by night the host of
stars, the two captains soon lost sight of each other, and all the
sooner, as Fadrique avoided intentionally the object of his aversion.
Heimbert, on the other hand, had no thought but the attainment of his
aim; and, full of joyful confidence in God's assistance, he pursued
his course in a southerly direction.

Many nights and many days had passed, when one evening, as the
twilight was coming on, Heimbert was standing alone in the endless
desert, unable to descry a single object all round on which his eye
could rest. His light flask was empty, and the evening brought with
it, instead or the hoped-for coolness, a suffocating whirlwind of
sand, so that the exhausted wanderer was obliged to press his burning
face to the burning soil in order to escape in some measure the fatal
cloud. Now and then he heard something passing him, or rustling over
him as with the sound of a sweeping mantle, and he would raise
himself in anxious haste; but he only saw what he had already too
often seen in the daylime--the wild beasts of the wilderness roaming
at liberty through the desert waste. Sometimes it was an ugly camel,
then it was a long-necked and disproportioned giraffe, and then again
a long-legged ostrich hastening away with its wings outspread. They
all appeared to scorn him, and he had already taken his resolve to
open his eyes no more, and to give himself up to his fate, without
allowing these horrible and strange creatures to disturb his mind in
the hour of death.

Presently it seemed to him as if he heard the hoofs and neighing of a
horse, and suddenly something halted close beside him, and he thought
he caught the sound of a man's voice. Half unwilling, he could not
resist raising himself wearily, and he saw before him a rider in an
Arab's dress mounted on a slender Arabian horse. Overcome with joy
at finding himself within reach of human help, he exclaimed,
"Welcome, oh, man, in this fearful solitude! If thou canst, succor