and raised the hood. Then he shrugged helplessly.
Weiss swore at him, less afraid of him than of the car behind, which was nearing them by the second. Thinking the man was pretending so that he might return home to his bed, he offered more money. Again the stolid shrug. Even bribes can not move a broken connecting-rod.
The other automobile was now so near that he could hear the whine of its engine. He visioned it as full of men with guns, searching for him. Dead or alive. The phrase came to him from some dimly remembered reading. Dead or alive! They probably had orders to take him that way.
With a last helpless look at the stalled car and the wooden-faced Arab bending over the motor, he turned and raced away from the road—into the dark, unfenced fields about him.
Compared to the real desert, the land
around Kairouan is a fruitful paradise.
But it is that way only by comparison.
Bare, hard-baked dirt that supports
a few scrubby olive groves and
tough dry brush, it is desolate enough.
To the man from the sleek pavements of
New York it seems like the outer
stretches of hell itself.
While the breath in his lungs lasted, he ran into the dark, staggering over loose stones and tripping in the scratchy brush. Then, when his chest was a burning ache and his heart pounded in his throat, he fell over something large and soft and warm that made a rasping bark and snapped at him with yellow teeth.
Around him were other large, dim shapes. It was several minutes before the prosaic explanation soothed his wildly jumping nerves—merely camels, hobbled to keep them from straying too far afield. He got up and walked forward, his hand pressed against his heart.
An hour before dawn, he sank down in the gritty dirt of the plain, entirely exhausted. Too done in to think, he could only lie and suffer from the cold as the sweat of his fear and effort dried on his body. If only he could find some kind of shelter that would protea him from the cold night wind, and help to hide him through the daylight hours of the morrow!
As though in answer to a prayer, he suddenly noticed an irregular triangle, darker than the surrounding darkness. It looked like the door to a very low, peak-roofed hut—some kind of shelter, probably for the herdsmen. On hands and knees he crawled toward it.
With a ragged sigh of relief he lunged into the opening. . . .
Instantly he was falling! Down he plunged, his hands scraping over smooth, damp stones as he tried to check his descent. His head hit a projecting stone and consciousness was snapped out.
It was probably not more than a few seconds before he came to his senses again; but it was long enough to force on him the feeling that he had died and been reborn—into a new and terrible world where nothing lived and light was not yet created. So strong was the impression that for minutes he lay motionless on the rock floor, without thought, without conjecture of any kind.
A sharp pain stabbed his wrist. He moved it tentatively, and cried aloud at the hùrt of, it. Probably broken. Into the welter of more poignant emotions crept the realization that he might never play the piano again.
Gently he moved his legs, finding them unhurt. He must now dismiss the crazy notion that he had been transported into another and more terrible universe,
