on--in each hand, Dudley leapt into the trench and scaled
the parapet before the few men who were in the vicinity were aware of
his intention. Then drawing a deep breath, like a diver about to make
a plunge, he dashed into the belt of smoke-laden air.

At every pace his boots kicked up showers of white ashes. The heat
penetrated the thick soles, it singed his hair and scorched his face
and hands. He felt himself wondering why he was such a fool as to try
conclusions with a mass of hot embers ... why wasn't he content to wait
another two hours or so, when the heat would have greatly decreased.
Supposing he lost his bearings in the smoke and couldn't find the well
after all?

These and a dozen other deprecatory thoughts flashed across his mind as
he stumbled onwards. He had had but a brief knowledge of the plan of
the kraal previous to the fire. He remembered that the well stood in
the centre of a fairly open space. There, at any rate, would he find a
comparatively safe oasis in the desert of hot embers.

"By Jove, that was a narrow one!" he soliloquised as a bullet--one of
many shot at a venture--whizzed dangerously close to his ears and
knocked up a number of small fougasses as it ricochetted in the embers.

He wanted to breathe. Already the air was on the point of being
exhausted in his lungs, yet he durst not gasp for breath. Another
twenty yards ... or was it forty? He was hardly sure of his
whereabouts.... Mentally he enquired if he had been making a detour
instead of keeping in a straight line. Maintaining direction in a haze
of smoke was far more difficult, he reflected, than in a fog,
especially when there was a time limit fixed for the performance.

Almost before he was aware of it Wilmshurst literally blundered upon an
open expanse where the short grass had been burnt off close to the
ground. Surrounded by a barrage of bluish vapour that rose from
irregular mounds of debris, the subaltern was able to breathe
comparatively fresh air.

Ahead was the well, its windlass of hard teak charred but otherwise
uninjured. It was a different case with the rope. The fibre had
smouldered badly; it would be unwise to attempt to raise the heavy
bucket by it.

Cutting adrift a length of the coir rope the subaltern bent it to the
neck of one of the jars and drew up the vessel full of liquid. The
water was loathsome in appearance, its surface being covered with ash
and fragments of charcoal of various sizes