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 quicker, making the noise in its throat almost continuously.

Was she coming to water at last? Tom pulled himself together once more, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and looked about him. He saw lakes and rivers and plashing cascades whose waters made no sound; but he had seen those every day—every hour almost—since the thirst-madness began, ever in the skies, not on the earth, and he was not quite mad enough yet not to know that.

But stop—if there was no water on earth there surely had been some here once. He rubbed his eyes harder, till he even brought a little moisture into them. That cleared his sight, and he saw that the mule had brought him to a little shallow valley, and that along the middle of it there ran a string of patches of sand, broken by worn boulders and lumps of dry-baked, grey-blue earth that had once been mud.