“And the opal,” he ended, as the blue light of evening began to fall. “It is the bead for those who have told a lie. All you have to do is to hold it under your tongue for half an hour and the lie you have told becomes the truth.”
“Ah, there’s the oasis at last!” his mother cried out. The youngest camel lowered his head and peered through her legs, and there on the horizon, which had not altered the entire day, he saw the distant dark points which must be the oasis trees growing. “The time passed very quickly, although I was so impatient to see the necklace every minute,” his mother said. “But now in no time at all we can settle down and undo our packs and then we can try the magic beads. The first one I’m going to try is the sapphire, so I need not be old any longer, and then the amethyst, so that all the nice things that happened to me before will come true again, and your father will be alive with us, and then--”
Strangely enough, the little camel said nothing at all, but simply followed in her footsteps, and once they had reached the green island in the vast white sea of sand, the mother camel turned eagerly to her son.
[Illustration: _The little camel said nothing at all, but simply followed in her footsteps_]
“Quickly now, darling, come with me behind the trees here and show me the necklace,” she whispered, and she hurried him off out of sight of the others. But now that they were quite alone, the youngest camel only hung his head. “Quickly, quickly, where is it? I’ve never been so anxious to see anything in my life--”
“Mother,” said her child miserably, “there is no necklace.”
“What?” she cried, tottering back under the tamarisk trees. “Do you mean to say--oh, can it be possible--oh, good heavens, it can’t be all a lie?”
“I don’t know if it’s a lie or not,” said the little camel, and he turned unhappily away from the sight of her grief and fingered the tall grasses absent-mindedly. “I made it up so you would forget about the heat, so perhaps that isn’t quite so bad as lying. I kept thinking perhaps the necklace was really there, although I couldn’t see it, like the caravan of white camels that girdles the earth, and like Mohammed--”
“Oh, this is too much!” moaned his mother, covering her face with her arms. “I never would have thought you could--I never dreamed--oh dear, oh dear--”