neously, we should
think no more of it than of changing our house."

"If the worst comes to the worst, we won't be lonely," said her husband.
"We'll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart
waiting on the other side."

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He had no belief in survival after
death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they took
things for granted. He chuckled to think of what his friends in the Cafe
Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life for the
Christian faith. Sometimes it amused and sometimes it maddened him, and
he rode onwards with alternate gusts of laughter and of fury, nursing
his wounded wrist all the time like a mother with a sick baby.

Across the brown of the hard, pebbly desert there had been visible for
some time a single long, thin, yellow streak, extending north and south
as far as they could see. It was a band of sand not more than a few
hundred yards across, and rising at the highest to eight or ten feet.
But the prisoners were astonished to observe that the Arabs pointed at
this with an air of the utmost concern, and they halted when they came
to the edge of it like men upon the brink of an unfordable river. It
was very light, dusty sand, and every wandering breath of wind sent it
dancing into the air like a whirl of midges. The Emir Abderrahman tried
to force his camel into it, but the creature, after a step or two, stood
still and shivered with terror.

[Illustration: The creature, stood still p171]

The two chiefs talked for a little, and then the whole caravan trailed
off with their heads for the north, and the streak of sand upon their
left.

"What is it?" asked Belmont, who found the dragoman riding at his elbow.
"Why are we going out of our course?"

"Drift sand," Mansoor answered. "Every sometimes the wind bring it all
in one long place like that. To-morrow, if a wind comes, perhaps there
will not be one grain left, but all will be carried up into the air
again. An Arab will sometimes have to go fifty or a hundred miles to go
round a drift. Suppose he tries to cross, his camel breaks its legs, and
he himself is sucked in and swallowed."

"How long will this be?"

"No one can say."

"Well, Cochrane, it's all in our favour. The longer the chase the better
chance for the fresh camels!" and for the hundredth time he looked
back at the long, hard skyline behind them. There was the great, empty,
dun-colou