upon the ground that they
might themselves have been branches strewn there on some past day by a
storm. The only sounds that were audible were the sharp clank of
weapons, the soft ceaseless padding of the camels' feet, and at times
the whirr of a flight of pigeons disturbed by the approaching cavalcade.
Yet there was life on the plateau, though of a noiseless kind. For as
the leaders rode along the curves of sand, trim and smooth between the
shrubs like carriage drives, they would see from time to time, far ahead
of them, a herd of gazelle start up from the ground and race silently, a
flash of dappled brown and white, to the enclosing hills. It seemed that
here was a country during this last hour created.

"Yet this way the caravans passed southwards to Erkoweet and the Khor
Baraka. Here the Suakis built their summer-houses," said Durrance,
answering the thought in his mind.

"And there Tewfik fought, and died with his four hundred men," said
Mather, pointing forward.

For three hours the troops marched across the plateau. It was the month
of May, and the sun blazed upon them with an intolerable heat. They had
long since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in their
saddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. For
three hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirking
motions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards ahead
Durrance saw a broken wall with window-spaces which let the sky through.

"The fort," said he.

Three years had passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it,
but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained another
siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so
closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to
the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Roland
upon the Dark Tower in the plain. In the front, however, the sand still
stretched open to the wells, where three great Gemeiza trees of dark and
spreading foliage stood spaced like sentinels.

In the shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringed
the open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiers
unsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and Captain
Mather walked round the fort, and as they came to the southern corner,
Durrance stopped.

"Hallo!" said he.

"Some Arab has camped here," said Mather, stopping in his turn. The grey
ashes of a wood fire