Water became more scarce.

The Kur began to move more slowly, and drank more. I think its wounds had begun to tell upon it. No longer did it seem willing to risk leaving the trail to hunt for water. It was becoming a desperate beast. It feared, I gathered, missing its rendezvous. It had not counted on its own weakness. The leather I wore about my feet was in tatters, but in the footprints of the Kur there was blood. It moved on, indomitably.

Then the water was gone.

That morning the Kur had pointed to the sun and held up four fingers.

We went a day without water.

In a place, on the next day, we found flies, swarming, over parched earth.

There, with his great paws, slowly, painfully, the Kur dug. More than four feet below the surface be found mud. We strained this through the silk I had had tied to my wrist, into his cupped paws. He gave me almost all of this water. He licked from his moistened palms only what I had left, In another place, that night, we found a narrow channel of baked mud, the dried bed of a tiny, vanished stream, of the sort which in the winter, should it rain, carries water for a few days. We followed this to a shallow, dried pool. Digging here we found dormant snails. In the moonlight we cracked, the shells, sucking out the fluid. It stank. Only at first did I vomit. Again the Kur gave me almost the entire bounty of this find. Then we could find no more.

We retraced our steps to the point at which we had left the trail, and continued our journey.

The next morning the Kur pointed to the sun, and held up three fingers.

The water bag, in my hands, hung limp, dry.

“Let us rest,” I said to the Kur.

He pressed on. I followed the footprints. There was blood in them. I shut my eyes against the glare of the terrain.

I put one foot in front of the other, again and again. The Kur began to limp.

I felt weak, sleepy. I was not much interested in eating. I began to feel strangely hot. I felt my forehead. It was dry, and seemed unnaturally warm. I felt sick to my stomach, nauseous. That is strange, I thought. I have had little to cat. “We must rest,” I told the Kur. But he continued to press ahead. I tumbled after him, the water bag in my hand. I looked at it. It had cracked in the sun. I clung to it, irrationally. I would not release it. When the sun was high, I fell. The Kur waited until I regained my feet and then he limped on, ahead of me. “I’m dizzy,” I told him. “Wait!” I stood still, and waited for the dizziness to pass. The Kur waited. Then we went on again. I had a headache. I shook my head. The pain was severe. I put one foot before the other, continuing to follow the Kur. I began to itch. I scratched at my arms and body. I stumbled.

The Kur moved on ahead of me. It was odd to feel no saliva in one’s mouth. My eyes were dry. Bits of sand seemed to lie between the eye and the lid; I felt, too, the grit of sand in my mouth, I could not spit it out; my eyes would not form tears. My lips became sore and began to ache. My tongue felt large. I felt skin on my tongue peeling. I began to feel cramps in my stomach, and in my arms and legs. I looked about. There seemed much water here and there, in flat places, in the distance, rippling, stirring. Sometimes our path took us toward it, but when we reached it, it was sand, the air above it rippling and troubled in the desert’s heat.

“I can go no further,” I told the Kur.

He turned to face me, crouched over, He pointed now to his right, for the first time. He pointed directly eastward, toward the dunes. It was at this point, I understood, that he would enter the dunes for his overland trek.

I looked at the dunes to my left, shimmering with beat, rippled in the wind, the tops like bright, tawny smoke in the light.

It would be madness and death to enter them.

He pointed to his right, with the long arm, to the dunes.

“I can go no further,” I told him.

He approached me. I regarded him. He took me by the arms and threw me to his feet in the dirt. I heard him take the water bag, and heard it being ripped. My hands were jerked behind me and tied. My ankles were crossed and tied. With portions of the water bag and shreds from it, the Kur bound his feet, to protect them from the sand. He twisted a rope from other strips of the bag. I felt this, as I lay in the sand and grit, knotted about my throat. With his teeth he severed the leather that had bound my ankles. I almost strangled. I was jerked to my feet. The Kur turned toward the dunes, the rope of twisted leather in his right paw. Then he led me, tethered behind him, his human prisoner, climbing, slipping, up the first long, sloping crest, into the dunes.

“You are mad, mad!” I wanted to scream at him. But I could only whisper, and scarce could heir my own voice.

He continued on, and I, tethered, followed him.

The wind whipped across the sand.

I have marched to Klima, I told myself. I march again to Klima. I march again to Klima. But on the march to Klima I had had water, salt.

Sometime in the late afternoon I must have fallen unconscious in the sand. I dreamt of the baths of Ar and Turia. I awakened in the night. No longer was I bound. I was carried in the arms of the Kur, over the silvered dunes. He moved slowly. He was lame in his right foot. I lay against wounds in his upper chest.

They were open. But they did not bleed.

Again I fell asleep. The next time I awakened it was shortly before dawn. The Kur, near me, half covered with sand, stirred by the wind, slept. I rose to my feet, unsteadily. Then I fell. I could not stand.

I sat in the sand, my back against a dune. I watched the Kur. It had been an admirable, mighty beast. But now the deserts, and its wounds, were killing it.

It was now weak, and drawn. Its flesh seemed to hang upon its huge frame, a shrunken reminiscence of the former mightiness of the beast. I regretted, strangely, seeing its decline. I wondered at what drove it, why it strove so relentlessly in its mission, whatever that might be. It dared to pit itself against the desert. I noted its fur. No longer was it sleek, but now it seemed lifeless, brittle; it was dry; it was coated with sand. The leather of its snout, with the two nostrils, was cracked and, now, oddly gray. Its mouth and lips were dry, like paper. About the snout, the nostrils, the mouth and lips, were tiny fissures, broken open, filled with sand. Sand, too, rimmed the nostrils and eyes, and the mouth and lips. It lay in the sand, curled, its head facing away from the wind, like something discarded, needed no longer, cast aside. It, proud beast, had pitted itself against the desert. It had lost. What prize, I wondered, could be worth the risk the beast had been willing to take, the price it had been willing to pay, its own life. I wondered if it could rise again to its feet. I did not think either of us would survive the day.

The sun was rising.

The beast rolled to its feet, and shook the sand from its fur. It stood unsteadily.

“Go without me,” I said. “I cannot walk. You can no longer carry me.”

The beast lifted its long arm and pointed to the sun. It lifted two fingers.

It approached me. “I cannot go with you,” I said. “What is so important”‘ I asked.

The beast, with one of his digits, rubbed about its lips and tongue. It thrust the finger against my lips. I tasted sand, and salt.

“I cannot swallow,” I said.

The beast regarded me for a long time. Its corneas were no longer yellow, but pale and whitish. There seemed no moisture in the eyes. At the corners the tiny cracks about the eyes were coated with sand. My own eves stung. I no longer attempted to remove particles from them.

The beast turned away from me and bent his head over his cupped hands. When he again turned to face me I saw, in the black cup of his paws, a foul fluid. I thrust my face to his hands, and, my own hands trembling, holding his cupped hands, drank. Four times did the beast do this. It was water from the last large water hold we had visited, where the half-eaten tabuk had been found, held for days in the beast’s storage stomach. It was water, in a sense, from his own tissues he gave me, releasing it now, not into his own system, but yielding it to me, that I might not die. Again did the beast try to give me water, but then there was none left. He had given me the last of his water. Now again, from his mouth and lips, and body, he scraped salt. He took it, too, from the bloody crusts of his wounds. I took it, with the sand, licking at it, now able to swallow it. He had given me; it seemed an inexplicable gift, water and salt from his own body.