Onward they crawled, now over sand, now over cracked mud-flakes of saline deposit where water had dried at the bottom of a _ghadir_.

All was calm as if the spirit of rest were hovering over the hot, fevered earth, still quivering from the kiss of its great enemy, the sun.
"Peace, it is peace until the rising of the morn!" a thought came to the Master's mind, a line from the chapter Al Kadr, in the Koran.

He smiled to himself.

"False peace," he reflected.

"The calm before the storm!" Prophetic thought, though not as he intended it! On and on the trio labored, soundlessly.