a swaying branch like a floating flower, caught his breath in wonderment.
"My God!" cried Northrup sharply. "Have I gone mad?"
He knew the way in which the thirst-torment ends: in forgetfulness of what one has suffered, in delicious delirium, in fancies like this thing which his two eyes told him was physical fabric.
His eyes had followed the gaudy flight of the parrot. And so they came to see what he had not seen before, to trick him into thinking he saw what he would not believe existed.
A hand had been thrown out—never mirage like this if this in sober truth were not magic's masterpiece—a slow-moving, graceful hand, a bare arm of rare perfection. The parrot had perched upon a finger, seeming to cock a suspicious, jealous head toward Northrup. So Northrup had seen the hand, the arm, the maiden herself.
She was lying upon her side, an arm flung out, an arm under her head. He saw the loose hair about her face, saw—or fancied he saw, for his senses were reeling—the face itself, the lips curving to languid laughter, saw the white robe girt about with a broad band of blue, saw the crimson flower set close to the brown throat, saw the little bare feet from which the white moccasins had fallen. And then——
Then the air had wavered and shimmered and clouded and cleared, and Sax Northrup found himself staring out across an empty stretch of white sand, drifted here and there by the desert winds.
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