How I got away from her I do not know, but I came to myself lying beyond her reach.

It was then morning, and immediately I set about our departure.
Choosing twelve Little Ones, not of the biggest and strongest, but of the sweetest and merriest, I mounted them on six elephants, and took two more of the wise CLUMSIES, as the children called them, to bear the princess.

I still rode Lona's horse, and carried her body wrapt in her cloak before me.

As nearly as I could judge I took the direct way, across the left branch of the river-bed, to the House of Bitterness, where I hoped to learn how best to cross the broader and rougher branch, and how to avoid the basin of monsters: I dreaded the former for the elephants, the latter for the children.
I had one terrible night on the way--the third, passed in the desert between the two branches of the dead river.
We had stopped the elephants in a sheltered place, and there let the princess slip down between them, to lie on the sand until the morning.
She seemed quite dead, but I did not think she was.

I laid myself a little way from her, with the body of Lona by my other side, thus to keep watch at once over the dead and the dangerous.