ted villages had been
covered by desert storms, and the clear blue sky and ardent sun were
over all, joyous and immaculate. Out in the desert there was only the
life-giving air, the opal sands, the plaintive evening sky, the eager
morning breeze, the desolated villages, and now and then in the vast
expanse, stretching hundreds and hundreds of miles south, an oasis as a
gem set in a cloth of faded gold.

It would have seemed to any natural man better to die in the desert
than to live in Omdurman. So thought a fugitive who fled day and night
through the Bayuda desert, into the sandy wastes, beyond whose utmost
limits lay Wady Halfa, where the English were.

Macnamara had conquered. He had watched his chance when two of the
black guard were asleep, and the Khalifa was in a stupor of opium in
the harem, had looted Abdullah's treasure, and carried the price of the
camels and the pay of the guides to Mahommed Nafar the shoemaker.

His great sprawling camel, the best that Mahommed Nafar could buy of Ebn
Haraf, the sheikh in the Gilif Hills, swung down the wind with a long,
reaching stride, to the point where the sheikh would meet him, and send
him on his way with a guide. If he reached the rendezvous safely, there
was a fair chance of final escape.

Moonlight, and the sand swishing from under the velvet hoofs of the
camel, the silence like a filmy cloak, sleep everywhere, save at the
eyes of the fugitive. Hour after hour they sprawled down the waste, and
for numberless hours they must go on and on, sleepless, tireless, alert,
if the man was to be saved at all. As morning broke he turned his eye
here and there, fearful of discovery and pursuit. Nothing. He was alone
with the sky and the desert and his fate. Another two hours and he would
be at the rendezvous, in the cover of the hills, where he would be safe
for a moment at least. But he must keep ahead of all pursuit, for if
Abdullah's people should get in front of him he would be cut off from
all hope. There is little chance to run the blockade of the desert where
a man may not hide, where there is neither water, nor feed, nor rest,
once in a hundred miles or more.

For an hour his eyes were fixed, now on the desert behind him, whence
pursuit should come, now on the golden-pink hills before him, where was
sanctuary for a moment, at least.... Nothing in all the vast space but
blue and grey-the sky and the sand, nothing that seemed of the world he
had left; nothing save th