easy
to feel strong and self-confident in the comfortable deck-chair, with
the slippered Arab handing round the coffee and liqueurs. But they had
been swept out of that placid stream of existence, and dashed against
the horrible, jagged facts of life. Battered and shaken, they must have
something to cling to. A blind, inexorable destiny was too horrible a
belief. A chastening power, acting intelligently and for a purpose,--a
living, working power, tearing them out of their grooves, breaking down
their small sectarian ways, forcing them into the better path,--that
was what they had learned to realise during these days of horror.
Great hands had closed suddenly upon them and had moulded them into new
shapes, and fitted them for new uses. Could such a power be deflected
by any human supplication? It was that or nothing,--the last court of
appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed, as lover
loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls, and
they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and
satisfaction which prayer only can give.

"Hush!" said Cochrane. "Listen!" The sound of a volley came crackling up
the narrow khor, and then another and another. The Colonel was fidgeting
about like an old horse which hears the bugle of the hunt and the
yapping of the pack. "Where can we see what is going on?" "Come this
way! This way, if you please! There is a path up to the top. If the
ladies will come after me, they will be spared the sight of anything
painful."

The clergyman led them along the side to avoid the bodies which were
littered thickly down the bottom of the khor. It was hard walking over
the shingly, slaggy stones, but they made their way to the summit at
last. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the rolling desert, and in
the foreground such a scene as none of them are ever likely to forget.
In that perfectly dry and clear light, with the unvarying brown tint of
the hard desert as a background, every detail stood out as clearly as
if these were toy figures arranged upon a table within hand's touch of
them.

The Dervishes--or what was left of them--were riding slowly some
little distance out in a confused crowd, their patchwork jibbehs and red
turbans swaying with the motion of their camels. They did not present
the appearance of men who were defeated, for their movements were very
deliberate, but they looked about them and changed their formation as
if they were u