rough fear
of offending one so powerful if I refused to do so--what were the
properties of gunpowder, and he instantly suggested that I should
illustrate what I said by operating on the person of one of the
prisoners. One, he said, never would be counted, and it would not only
be very interesting to him, but would give me the opportunity of an
instalment of revenge. He was greatly astounded when I told him that it
was not our custom to avenge ourselves in cold blood, and that we left
vengeance to the law and a higher power, of which he knew nothing. I
added, however, that when I recovered I would take him out shooting
with us, and he should kill an animal for himself, and at this he was as
pleased as a child at the promise of a new toy.

Just then Leo opened his eyes beneath the stimulus of some brandy (of
which we still had a little) that Job had poured down his throat, and
our conversation came to an end.

After this we managed to get Leo, who was in a very poor way indeed, and
only half conscious, safely off to bed, supported by Job and that brave
girl Ustane, to whom, had I not been afraid that she might resent it, I
would certainly have given a kiss for her splendid behaviour in saving
my boy's life at the risk of her own. But Ustane was not the sort of
young person with whom one would care to take liberties unless one were
perfectly certain that they would not be misunderstood, so I repressed
my inclinations. Then, bruised and battered, but with a sense of safety
in my breast to which I had for some days been a stranger, I crept off
to my own little sepulchre, not forgetting before I laid down in it to
thank Providence from the bottom of my heart that it was not a sepulchre
indeed, as, save for a merciful combination of events that I can only
attribute to its protection, it would certainly have been for me that
night. Few men have been nearer their end and yet escaped it than we
were on that dreadful day.

I am a bad sleeper at the best of times, and my dreams that night when
at last I got to rest were not of the pleasantest. The awful vision of
poor Mahomed struggling to escape the red-hot pot would haunt them, and
then in the background, as it were, a veiled form was always hovering,
which, from time to time, seemed to draw the coverings from its body,
revealing now the perfect shape of a lovely blooming woman, and now
again the white bones of a grinning skeleton, and which, as it veiled
and unveiled, uttered