ACROSS THE DESERT TO THE END Never in the after years could Winston clearly recall the incidents of that night's ride across the sand waste.

The haze which shrouded his brain would never wholly lift.

Except for a few detached details the surroundings of that journey remained vague, clouded, indistinct.

He remembered the great, burning desert; the stars gleaming down above them like many eyes; the ponderous, ragged edge of cloud in the west; the irregular, castellated range of hills at their back; the dull expanse of plain ever stretching away in front, with no boundary other than that southern sky.

The weird, ghostly shadows of cactus and Spanish bayonet were everywhere; strange, eerie noises were borne to them out of the void--the distant cries of prowling wolves, the mournful sough of the night wind, the lonely hoot of some far-off owl.
Nothing greeted the roving eyes but desolation,--a desolation utter and complete, a mere waste of tumbled sand, by daylight whitened here and there by irregular patches of alkali, but under the brooding night shadows lying brown, dull, forlorn beyond all expression, a trackless, deserted ocean of mystery, oppressive in its drear sombreness.
He rode straight south, seeking no trail, but guiding their course by the stars, his right hand firmly grasping the pony's bit, and continually urging his own mount to faster pace.