We've got our passports and our orders,
and he'll be a bold man that will stop us once we get into the German
zone. Therefore I'm going to hurry as fast as God will let me.'

It was a ride that deserved to have an epic written about it. The car
was good, and I handled her well, though I say it who shouldn't. The
road in that big central plain was fair, and often I knocked fifty
miles an hour out of her. We passed troops by a circuit over the veld,
where we took some awful risks, and once we skidded by some transport
with our off wheels almost over the lip of a ravine. We went through
the narrow streets of Siwas like a fire-engine, while I shouted out in
German that we carried despatches for headquarters. We shot out of
drizzling rain into brief spells of winter sunshine, and then into a
snow blizzard which all but whipped the skin from our faces. And
always before us the long road unrolled, with somewhere at the end of
it two armies clinched in a death-grapple.

That night we looked for no lodging. We ate a sort of meal in the car
with the hood up, and felt our way on in the darkness, for the
headlights were in perfect order. Then we turned off the road for four
hours' sleep, and I had a go at the map. Before dawn we started again,
and came over a pass into the vale of a big river. The winter dawn
showed its gleaming stretches, ice-bound among the sprinkled meadows.
I called to Blenkiron:

'I believe that river is the Euphrates,' I said. 'So,' he said, acutely
interested. 'Then that's the waters of Babylon. Great snakes, that I
should have lived to see the fields where King Nebuchadnezzar grazed!
Do you know the name of that big hill, Major?'

'Ararat, as like as not,' I cried, and he believed me.

We were among the hills now, great, rocky, black slopes, and, seen
through side glens, a hinterland of snowy peaks. I remember I kept
looking for the _castrol_ I had seen in my dream. The thing had never
left off haunting me, and I was pretty clear now that it did not belong
to my South African memories. I am not a superstitious man, but the
way that little _kranz_ clung to my mind made me think it was a warning
sent by Providence. I was pretty certain that when I clapped eyes on
it I would be in for bad trouble.

All morning we travelled up that broad vale, and just before noon it
spread out wider, the road dipped to the water's edge, and I saw before
me the white roofs of a town. The snow was deep now,