thus
to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive
engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had nothing to
lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They might be driven into
the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they
would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now far and wide over
the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them;
they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy,
they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a
flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as
he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty
miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique must cover
ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course
lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and
sprung.

They had reached the center of the plain when the sound they had long
looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, breathless stillness
of the night. It was the Allah-il-Allah of their foes, the war-cry of
the Moslem. Out of the gloom--whether from long pursuit or some near
hiding-place they could not tell--there broke suddenly upon them the
fury of an Arab onslaught. In the darkness all they could see were the
flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white
steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snorting
nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas--whether two, or
twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not know--they
never did know. All of which they were conscious was that in an instant,
from the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked space,
they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing,
horrible entanglement of conflict, without the power to perceive or to
number their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts
of attack and of defense. All they were sensible of was one of those
confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and
din--an eternity in semblance, a second in duration--that can never be
traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that
which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis
of Gaul.

How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they struck, how they
were encompassed, how they thrust back t