an again, louder than before it seemed
to me. They were using a battering-ram. But they were too late.
After what seemed like a long-drawn hour we saw shadowy arms
below reach up and seize our prisoner. Then the loose rope came
up again hand over hand.

"You next!" said Grim quietly. He pushed me forward, after
carefully examining the loop Mahommed ben Hamza tied in the end
of the rope.

Chapter Ten

"Money doesn't weigh much!"

Well--you don't stand on precedence or ceremony at times like
that. Over I went in the bight of the rope. They let me fall
about fifteen feet before they seemed to realize that I had let
go of the parapet. Added to all that had gone before, that made
about the climax of sensation. The pain of barking the skin of
knees and elbows against projecting angles of stone was a relief.

I am no man of iron. I haven't iron nerves. Not one second of
that descent was less than hell. I could hear the thunder of
some kind of battering-ram on the door at the foot of the stair.
I could imagine the rope chafing against the sharp edge of the
parapet as they paid it out hand over hand. The only thing that
made me keep my head at all was knowledge that Abdul Ali had had
to do the trip feet-upward, with his head in a bag. When they
let go too fast it was rather like the half-way stage of taking
chloroform. When they slowed up, there was the agonizing dread
of pursuit. And through it all there burned the torturing
suggestion that the rope might break.

Mother Earth felt good that night, when strong hands reached up
and lifted me out of the noose that failed of reaching the bottom
by about a man's height. Come to think of it, it wasn't mother
earth at that. It was the stinking carcass of a camel only half
autopsied by the vultures, that my feet first rested on--brother,
perhaps, to the beast I had put out of his agony that afternoon.

The others came down the rope hand-over-hand, Grim last. I
suppose he stayed up there with his pistol, ready for contingencies.
He had his nerve with him, for he had fastened the upper end of
the rope to a piece of broken stone laid across a gap that the
crusaders had made in the ramparts, centuries ago, for the Christian
purpose of pouring boiling oil and water on their foes. It did not
take more than a minute's violent shaking after he got down to bring
the rope tumbling on our heads.

Then the next thing he did was to take a look at the prisone