第78章 Barrels!...Barrels!..(3)

Over this skin he tied a string of catgut, which was fastened at the middle to another similar string passing through the whole length of the tabour.Erik had only to rub this string with a glove smeared with resin and, according to the manner in which he rubbed it, he imitated to perfection the voice of the lion or the leopard, or even the buzzing of the tsetse fly.

The idea that Erik was probably in the room beside us, working his trick, made me suddenly resolve to enter into a parley with him, for we must obviously give up all thought of taking him by surprise.

And by this time he must be quite aware who were the occupants of his torture-chamber.I called him: "Erik! Erik!"I shouted as loudly as I could across the desert, but there was no answer to my voice.All around us lay the silence and the bare immensity of that stony desert.What was to become of us in the midst of that awful solitude?

We were beginning literally to die of heat, hunger and thirst...

of thirst especially.At last, I saw M.de Chagny raise himself on his elbow and point to a spot on the horizon.He had discovered an oasis!

Yes, far in the distance was an oasis...an oasis with limpid water, which reflected the iron trees!...Tush, it was the scene of the mirage....I recognized it at once...the worst of the three!...No one had been able to fight against it...no one.

...I did my utmost to keep my head AND NOT TO HOPE FOR WATER, because I knew that, if a man hoped for water, the water that reflected the iron tree, and if, after hoping for water, he struck against the mirror, then there was only one thing for him to do:

to hang himself on the iron tree!

So I cried to M.de Chagny:

"It's the mirage!...It's the mirage!...Don't believe in the water!...It's another trick of the mirrors!..."Then he flatly told me to shut up, with my tricks of the mirrors, my springs, my revolving doors and my palaces of illusions!

He angrily declared that I must be either blind or mad to imagine that all that water flowing over there, among those splendid, numberless trees, was not real water!...And the desert was real!

...And so was the forest!...And it was no use trying to take him in...he was an old, experienced traveler...he had been all over the place!

And he dragged himself along, saying: "Water! Water!"And his mouth was open, as though he were drinking.

And my mouth was open too, as though I were drinking.

For we not only saw the water, but WE HEARD IT!...We heard it flow, we heard it ripple!...Do you understand that word "ripple?"...IT IS A SOUND WHICH YOU HEAR WITH YOUR TONGUE!

...You put your tongue out of your mouth to listen to it better!

Lastly--and this was the most pitiless torture of all--we heard the rain and it was not raining! This was an infernal invention.

...Oh, I knew well enough how Erik obtained it! He filled with little stones a very long and narrow box, broken up inside with wooden and metal projections.The stones, in falling, struck against these projections and rebounded from one to another;and the result was a series of pattering sounds that exactly imitated a rainstorm.

Ah, you should have seen us putting out our tongues and dragging ourselves toward the rippling river-bank! Our eyes and ears were full of water, but our tongues were hard and dry as horn!

When we reached the mirror, M.de Chagny licked it...and Ialso licked the glass.

It was burning hot!

Then we rolled on the floor with a hoarse cry of despair.

M.de Chagny put the one pistol that was still loaded to his temple;and I stared at the Punjab lasso at the foot of the iron tree.