-ropes
to prevent them from lying down. From horizon to horizon stretched that
one huge arch of speckless blue, and up its monstrous concavity crept
the inexorable sun, like some splendid but barbarous deity, who claimed
a tribute of human suffering as his immemorial right.

Their course still lay along the old trade route, but their progress was
very slow, and more than once the two Emirs rode back together, and
shook their heads as they looked at the weary baggage-camels on which
the prisoners were perched. The greatest laggard of all was one which
was ridden by a wounded Soudanese soldier. It was limping badly with a
strained tendon, and it was only by constant prodding that it could be
kept with the others. The Emir Wad Ibrahim raised his Remington, as the
creature hobbled past, and sent a bullet through its brain. The wounded
man flew forwards out of the high saddle, and fell heavily upon the hard
track. His companions in misfortune, looking back, saw him stagger to
his feet with a dazed face. At the same instant a Baggara slipped down
from his camel with a sword in his hand.

"Don't look! don't look!" cried Belmont to the ladies, and they all rode
on with their faces to the south. They heard no sound, but the Baggara
passed them a few minutes afterwards. He was cleaning his sword upon
the hairy neck of his camel, and he glanced at them with a quick,
malicious gleam of his teeth as he trotted by. But those who are at the
lowest pitch of human misery are at least secured against the future.
That vicious, threatening smile which might once have thrilled them left
them now unmoved--or stirred them at most to vague resentment.
There were many things to interest them in this old trade route, had
they been in a condition to take notice of them. Here and there along
its course were the crumbling remains of ancient buildings, so old that
no date could be assigned to them, but designed in some far-off
civilisation to give the travellers shade from the sun or protection
from the ever-lawless children of the desert. The mud bricks with which
these refuges were constructed showed that the material had been carried
over from the distant Nile. Once, upon the top of a little knoll, they
saw the shattered plinth of a pillar of red Assouan granite, with the
wide-winged symbol of the Egyptian god across it, and the cartouche of
the second Rameses beneath. After three thousand years one cannot get
away from the ineffac