arches the general held his lantern high,
flashing it over the surface while Yussuf swung down his sack and
knocked with the handle of his tool.

Suddenly he stopped and looked at his master, nodding cheerfully.
The general lowered his light and stepped back and Yussuf reared the
pickaxe in his powerful arms and sent it dexterously at the wall,
between two broken bits of brick.

It caught, and sent the mortar spraying; another blow and another
loosened a hole in which the black inserted a short iron and began
nervously grinding and prying.

Ryder, watching with oppressed and helpless fury, saw the bricks at
last break and tumble faster and faster in a cloud of dust, and saw
a pocket in the wall become revealed, a long, upright niche, the
size, perhaps, of a man's coffin, on end.

He tried, very suddenly, to talk. His tongue felt thick and swollen
and there seemed no words in all the world to fit his need of
overcoming this fanatic madman,--and after all, he had no chance for
them, for Yussuf, with a huge palm upon his mouth, urged him
suddenly backwards towards that horrible niche.

"Gently, Yussuf, gently," said the general, suavely and with a slow
distinctness that was for Ryder's ears. "I gave my word that I would
not hurt a hair of his head--"

Grinning, the black lifted him over the remaining wall, and set him
down into the niche, leaving him standing in there like a helpless
statue, tasting to the full fury of his heart the bitterness of his
helplessness and the ludicrous impotence of all struggle.

"Good God, sir, you must be mad," he said in a strained sharp
voice that his ears would not have known as his own. "Do you
realize--there will be an inquiry--there is such a thing as law--"

It seemed to him that he talked, in English and stammering Arabic,
for a long time. The black was kneeling, out of sight, stooping over
a basin of water and his abominable sack, and Ryder was facing that
silent, sardonic face, with its fantastic mustache, its evil,
gloating eyes....

He stopped for very shame. The man was mad. Mad and drunk--and there
was no appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.... Mad or drunk, he
had devised his vengeance shrewdly.

Upon Ryder's helpless body a cold sweat of incredulous horror broke
softly out.

At his feet he heard the black beginning to fit his bricks and
smooth his mortar.

"You do well to save your breath," said Hamdi Bey at last, as Ryder
still stood silent. "You will n