I had got fond of this man, as the most patient and the bravest, where all have been so patient and so brave.

He was a very silent and reserved man, and had never complained, so that I was deeply shocked on his sending for me at dinner-time, to find that he was dying.
"He asked me not to deceive him, but to tell him if there was any truth in what the gaol-chaplain had said, about there being another life after death.

I told him earnestly that I knew it as surely as I knew that the earth was under my feet; and went on comforting him as one comforts a dying man.

But he never spoke again; and we buried him in the hot sand at sundown.

The first wind will obliterate the little mound we raised over him, and none will ever cross this hideous desert again.