to invalids who have plenty on shore, added to the intensity of their sufferings with this strictly enforced abstinence. They had endured during these twenty days a hell of agony, which the starvation diet and limited drink only intensified.
Often had they been inclined to say "Let us eat, drink and die"; but the desire to escape helped them to overcome that mad craving of nature. Yet they seemed no nearer escape, and the provisions were exhausted. The last meat tin had been licked, the last biscuit munched, and the last drain of water emptied out. Now only the two bottles of fiery spirits remained, while the water-cask had opened and was like tinder inside and out.
They were all as attenuated as saints in the desert. The hair of the baroness had grown dry and grey, her cheeks were like parchment drawn tightly over the cheek bones with great hollows, her brown eyes were dim and quenched, and her arms, breasts and limbs, which she had once been so proud of, were shrunken and dry almost as those of an Egyptian mummy. So she lay at the bottom of the boat passive and hopeless, while the two men sat in the stern and sucked their thumbs in a wolfish manner.
The doctor was a skeleton; he had always been gentlemanly in his figure and slender, now he was like a ghoul, unwashed, with tangled beard and matted hair, and black eyes that glared with ravenous and hellish discontent out from fissures of bone.
Dennis had been fleshy and gross, he was now large-boned and ferocious, like the starved boar that he was, his little blue eyes blazing like sapphires set within rubies, his white and bushy eyebrows overhanging those angry caverns, the cheek bones protruding, and the
