ke it.

Narayan Singh got to his feet with a laugh and a yawn, and went
to dance attendance on Ayisha, while Grim reinstructed Yussuf
regarding the ease with which the British could impound his Jaffa
property; but though I listened to all that, and heard Yussuf's
vows of fidelity--heard him promise to reverse his former report
and spread rumors in Ali's camp of a British army getting ready
to advance--the prospect to me looked gloomier and gloomier.

"You can only die once," Grim laughed after a quick glance at my
face, "and we may save a hundred thousand people from the sword."

But I suppose I wasn't cut out to be a willing martyr. It was a
case of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and though
I did go forward on that mad escapade it was fear that drove
me--fear of the Sikh's and Grim's contempt, and of my own
self-loathing afterward.

Grim and Narayan Singh are made of the real hero stuff. I wonder
how many others there are like me, who face the music simply
because one or two others have got guts enough to lead us
up to it.

We didn't move far that night, for there was no need, and Grim
was careful not to go where Ali Baba could not find him. We
passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles
wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red
sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight. It was like the mouth of
hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the
heat they had sucked up through the day.

The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or
seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the
ravine. Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us. Even the
great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and
suffered one of his worst defeats there. The Turks made the same
mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he
simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed
Bedouins and women.

Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet
above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track
leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there,
making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and
grumble to one another--safe enough until daylight, unless they
should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the
women and Ayisha's four men up to the caves with only Narayan
Singh to watch them, for there was no way of escape, except by
that twelve-inch