Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/434

 426 and closed them with difficulty. His throat was dry, burning; there was no saliva in his mouth; the tongue was as though wooden. And of course this was but the beginning of the torture for him and for the caravan.

The thunder announcing the drought resounded incessantly on the horizon's border. About three o'clock, when the sun passed to the western side of the heavens, Stas ordered the caravan to rise and started at its head towards the east. But now hardly seventy men followed him, and every little while some one of them lay down beside his pack to rise nevermore. The heat decreased a few degrees but was still terrible. The still air was permeated as though with the gas of burning charcoal. The people had nothing to breathe and the animals began to suffer no less. In an hour after the start again one of the horses fell. Saba panted and his flanks heaved; from his blackened tongue not a drop of froth fell. The King, accustomed to the dry African jungle, apparently suffered the least, but he began to be vicious. His little eyes glittered with a kind of strange light. To Stas, and particularly to Nell, who from time to time talked to him, he answered still with a gurgle, but when Kali carelessly came near him he grunted menacingly and waved his trunk so that he would have killed the boy if he had not jumped aside in time.

Kali's eyes were bloodshot, the veins in his neck were inflated, and his lips cracked the same as the other negroes. About five o'clock he approached Stas and, in a hollow voice which with difficulty issued out of his throat, said:

"Great master, Kali can go no further. Let the night come here."

Stas overcame the pain in his jaws and answered with an effort:

"Very well. We will stop. The night will bring relief."