r.
Finding him not much the worse for wear, barring some bruises and
a missing inch or two of skin, he ordered the bag pulled over his
head again and gave the order for retreat. Mahommed ben Hamza
went scouting ahead. The others picked up Abdul Ali as the
construction gangs handle baulks of timber--horizontal--face-
downward. When he wriggled they cuffed him into good behaviour.

You have to get down into an Arab moat before you can realize
what the Hebrews meant by their word Gehenna. The smell of
rotting carrion was only part of it. One stumbled into, and
through, and over things that should not be. Heaps, that looked
solid in the moonlight, yielded to the tread. Whatever liquid
lay there was the product of corruption.

Yet we did not dare to climb out of the moat until we reached the
shadows at the northern angle. Though the moonlight shone almost
straight down on us it was a great deal brighter up above, and
the walls cast some shadow. There was nothing for it but to pick
our way in the comparative gloom of that vulture's paradise,
praying we might find a stream to wade in presently.

Once, looking up behind me, I thought I saw men's heads peering
over the parapet, but that may have been imagination. Grim vowed
he did not see them, although I suspected him of saying that to
avoid a panic. He shepherded us along, speaking in a perfectly
normal voice whenever he had to, as if there were no such thing
as hurry in the world. When we reached the farther corner of the
moat it was he who climbed out first to con the situation. A
look-out in a bastion on the ruined town wall promptly fired
at him.

I expected him to fire back. I climbed up beside him to lend a
hand with the pistol I had filched from Abdul Ali. But Grim
shouted something about taking away for burial the corpse of a
man who had died of small-pox. The man on the wall commanded us
to Allah's mercy and warned us to beware lest we, too, catch that
dreaded plague.

"Inshallah!" Grim answered. Then he summoned our men from
the moat.

They passed up Abdul Ali, dragging him feet-first again with one
man keeping a clenched fist ready to strike him in the mouth in
case he should forget that corpses don't cry out. He looked like
a corpse half-cold, as they carried him jerkily along a track
that roughly followed the line of the wall. I don't suppose that
anything ever looked more like an Arab funeral procession than we
did. The absence of n