essity, bow themselves in
submission, or perish of famine and of thirst; they had recovered their
ardor, their strength, their resistance, their power to harass without
ceasing, if they could never arrest, the enemy. They had cast the torch
of war afresh into the land, and here, southward, the flame burned
bitterly, and with a merciless tongue devoured the lives of men, licking
them up as a forest fire the dry leaves and the touchwood.

Circling, sweeping, silently, swiftly, with that rapid spring, that
marvelous whirlwind of force, that is of Africa, and of Africa alone,
the tribes had rushed down in the darkness of night, lightly as a kite
rushes through the gloom of the dawn. For once the vigilance of the
invader served him naught; for once the Frankish camp was surprised off
its guard. While the air was still chilly with the breath of the night,
while the first gleam of morning had barely broken through the mists of
the east, while the picket-fires burned through the dusky gloom, and
the sentinels and vedettes paced slowly to and fro, and circled round,
hearing nothing worse than the stealthy tread of the jackal, or the
muffled flight of a night-bird, afar in the south a great dark cloud had
risen, darker than the brooding shadows of the earth and sky.

The cloud swept onward, like a mass of cirrhi, in those shadows
shrouded. Fleet as though wind-driven, dense as though thunder-charged,
it moved over the plains. As it grew nearer and nearer, it grew grayer,
a changing mass of white and black that fused, in the obscurity, into a
shadow color; a dense array of men and horses flitting noiselessly like
spirits, and as though guided alone by one rein and moved alone by one
breath and one will; not a bit champed, not a linen-fold loosened, not a
shiver of steel was heard; as silently as the winds of the desert sweep
up northward over the plains, so they rode now, host upon host of the
warriors of the soil.

The outlying vedettes, the advancing sentinels, had scrutinized so
long through the night every wavering shade of cloud and moving form
of buffalo in the dim distance, that their sleepless eyes, strained
and aching, failed to distinguish this moving mass that was so like the
brown plains and starless sky that it could scarce be told from them.
The night, too, was bitter; northern cold cut hardly chillier than this
that parted the blaze of one hot day from the blaze of another. The
sea-winds were blowing cruelly keen,