or to sixty. His face was lean and haggard, and the brown
parchment-like skin was drawn tightly over the projecting
bones; his long, brown hair and beard were all flecked and
dashed with white; his eyes were sunken in his head, and
burned with an unnatural lustre; while the hand which grasped
his rifle was hardly more fleshy than that of a skeleton.
As he stood, he leaned upon his weapon for support, and yet his
tall figure and the massive framework of his bones suggested
a wiry and vigorous constitution. His gaunt face, however,
and his clothes, which hung so baggily over his shrivelled
limbs, proclaimed what it was that gave him that senile and
decrepit appearance. The man was dying -- dying from hunger
and from thirst.

He had toiled painfully down the ravine, and on to this
little elevation, in the vain hope of seeing some signs of
water. Now the great salt plain stretched before his eyes,
and the distant belt of savage mountains, without a sign
anywhere of plant or tree, which might indicate the presence
of moisture. In all that broad landscape there was no gleam
of hope. North, and east, and west he looked with wild
questioning eyes, and then he realised that his wanderings
had come to an end, and that there, on that barren crag,
he was about to die. "Why not here, as well as in a feather
bed, twenty years hence," he muttered, as he seated himself
in the shelter of a boulder.

Before sitting down, he had deposited upon the ground his
useless rifle, and also a large bundle tied up in a grey
shawl, which he had carried slung over his right shoulder.