nate had greeted
him in excellent English, and he had fairly entered into his own.
It was not an exhilarating place for a lengthy residence. There was one
large, bowl-shaped, grassy depression sloping down to the three pits of
brown and brackish water. There was the grove of palm trees also,
beautiful to look upon, but exasperating in view of the fact that Nature
has provided her least shady trees on the very spot where shade is
needed most. A single wide-spread acacia did something to restore the
balance. Here Hilary Joyce slumbered in the heat, and in the cool he
inspected his square-shouldered, spindle-shanked Soudanese, with their
cheery black faces and their funny little pork-pie forage caps.
Joyce was a martinet at drill, and the blacks loved being drilled, so
the Bimbashi was soon popular among them. But one day was exactly like
another. The weather, the view, the employment, the food--everything
was the same. At the end of three weeks he felt that he had been there
for interminable years. And then at last there came something to break
the monotony.

One evening, as the sun was sinking, Hilary Joyce rode slowly down the
old caravan road. It had a fascination for him, this narrow track,
winding among the boulders and curving up the nullahs, for he
remembered how in the map it had gone on and on, stretching away into
the unknown heart of Africa. The countless pads of innumerable camels
through many centuries had beaten it smooth, so that now, unused and
deserted, it still wound away, the strangest of roads, a foot broad, and
perhaps two thousand miles in length. Joyce wondered as he rode how
long it was since any traveller had journeyed up it from the south, and
then he raised his eyes, and there was a man coming along the path.
For an instant Joyce thought that it might be one of his own men, but a
second glance assured him that this could not be so. The stranger was
dressed in the flowing robes of an Arab, and not in the close-fitting
khaki of a soldier. He was very tall, and a high turban made him seem
gigantic. He strode swiftly along, with head erect, and the bearing of
a man who knows no fear.

Who could he be, this formidable giant coming out of the unknown?
The precursor possibly of a horde of savage spearmen. And where could
he have walked from? The nearest well was a long hundred miles down the
track. At any rate the frontier post of Kurkur could not afford to
receive casual visitors.