With no other guide than the sun by day, and by night the host of stars, the two captains soon lost sight of each other, and all the sooner, as Fadrique avoided intentionally the object of his aversion.
Heimbert, on the other hand, had no thought but the attainment of his aim; and, full of joyful confidence in God's assistance, he pursued his course in a southerly direction.
Many nights and many days had passed, when one evening, as the twilight was coming on, Heimbert was standing alone in the endless desert, unable to descry a single object all round on which his eye could rest. His light flask was empty, and the evening brought with it, instead or the hoped-for coolness, a suffocating whirlwind of sand, so that the exhausted wanderer was obliged to press his burning face to the burning soil in order to escape in some measure the fatal cloud. Now and then he heard something passing him, or rustling over him as with the sound of a sweeping mantle, and he would raise himself in anxious haste; but he only saw what he had already too often seen in the daylime--the wild beasts of the wilderness roaming at liberty through the desert waste. Sometimes it was an ugly camel, then it was a long-necked and disproportioned giraffe, and then again a long-legged ostrich hastening away with its wings outspread. They all appeared to scorn him, and he had already taken his resolve to open his eyes no more, and to give himself up to his fate, without allowing these horrible and strange creatures to disturb his mind in the hour of death.
Presently it seemed to him as if he heard the hoofs and neighing of a horse, and suddenly something halted close beside him, and he thought he caught the sound of a man's voice. Half unwilling, he could not resist raising himself wearily, and he saw before him a rider in an Arab's dress mounted on a slender Arabian horse. Overcome with joy at finding himself within reach of human help, he exclaimed, "Welcome, oh, man, in this fearful solitude! If thou canst, succor me, thy fellow-man, who must otherwise perish with thirst!" Then remembering that the tones of his dear German mother tongue were not intelligible in this joyless region, he repeated the same words in the mixed dialect, generally called the Lingua Romana, universally used by heathens, Mohammedans, and Christians in those parts of the world where they have most intercourse with each other.
The Arab still remained silent, and looked as if scornfully laughing at his strange discovery. At length he replied, in the same dialect, "I was also in Barbarossa's fight; and if, Sir Knight, our overthrow bitterly enraged me then, I find no small compensation for it in the fact of seeing one of the conquerors lying so pitifully before me."
"Pitifully!" exclaimed Heimbert angrily, and his wounded sense of honor giving him back for a moment all his strength, he seized his sword and stood ready for an encounter. "Oho!" laughed the Arab, "does the Christian viper still hiss so strongly? Then it only behooves me to put spurs to my horse and leave thee to perish here, thou lost creeping worm!" "Ride to the devil, thou dog of a heathen!" retorted Heimbert; "rather than entreat a crumb of thee I will die here, unless the good God sends me manna in the wilderness."
And the Arab spurred forward his swift steed and galloped away a couple of hundred paces, laughing with scorn. Then he paused, and looking round to Heimbert he trotted back and said, "Thou seemest too good, methinks, to perish here of hunger and thirst. Beware! my good sabre shall touch thee."
