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.
It appeared to be somewhat too heavy for his strength, for in lowering it, it came down on the ground with some little violence.
Instantly there broke from the grey parcel a little moaning cry, and from it there protruded a small, scared face, with very bright brown eyes, and two little speckled, dimpled fists.