supplication? It was that or nothing--the last
court of appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed,
as a lover loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls,
and they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and
satisfaction which prayer only can give.

"Hush!" said Cochrane. "Listen!"

The sound of a volley came crackling up the narrow khor, and then
another and another. The Colonel was fidgeting about like an old horse
which hears the bugle of the hunt and the yapping of the pack.

"Where can we see what is going on?"

"Come this way! This way, if you please! There is a path up to the
top. If the ladies will come after me, they will be spared the sight of
anything painful."

The clergyman led them along the side to avoid the bodies which were
littered thickly down the bottom of the khor. It was hard walking over
the shingly, slaggy stones, but they made their way to the summit at
last. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the rolling desert, and in
the foreground such a scene as none of them are ever likely to forget.
In that perfectly dry and clear light, with the unvarying brown tint of
the hard desert as a background, every detail stood out as clearly as if
these were toy figures arranged upon a table within hand's-touch of
them.

The Dervishes--or what was left of them--were riding slowly some little
distance out in a confused crowd, their patchwork jibbehs and red
turbans swaying with the motion of their camels. They did not present
the appearance of men who were defeated, for their movements were very
deliberate, but they looked about them and changed their formation as if
they were uncertain what their tactics ought to be. It was no wonder
that they were puzzled, for upon their spent camels their situation was
as hopeless as could be conceived. The Sarras men had all emerged from
the khor, and had dismounted, the beasts being held in groups of four,
while the rifle-men knelt in a long line with a woolly, curling fringe
of smoke, sending volley after volley at the Arabs, who shot back in a
desultory fashion from the backs of their camels. But it was not upon
the sullen group of Dervishes, nor yet upon the long line of kneeling
rifle-men, that the eyes of the spectators were fixed. Far out upon the
desert, three squadrons of the Halfa Camel Corps were coming up in a
dense close column, which wheeled beautifully into a widespread
semicircle a