and smooth between the shrubs like carriage drives, they would see from time to time, far ahead of them, a herd of gazelle start up from the ground and race silently, a flash of dappled brown and white, to the enclosing hills. It seemed that here was a country during this last hour created.

"Yet this way the caravans passed southwards to Erkoweet and the Khor Baraka. Here the Suakis built their summer-houses," said Durrance, answering the thought in his mind.

"And there Tewfik fought, and died with his four hundred men," said Mather, pointing forward.

For three hours the troops marched across the plateau. It was the month of May, and the sun blazed upon them with an intolerable heat. They had long since lost their alertness. They rode rocking drowsily in their saddles and prayed for the evening and the silver shine of stars. For three hours the camels went mincing on with their queer smirking motions of the head, and then quite suddenly a hundred yards ahead Durrance saw a broken wall with window-spaces which let the sky through.

"The fort," said he.

Three years had passed since Osman Digna had captured and destroyed it, but during these three years its roofless ruins had sustained another siege, and one no less persistent. The quick-growing trees had so closely girt and encroached upon it to the rear and to the right and to the left, that the traveller came upon it unexpectedly, as Childe Roland upon the Dark Tower in the plain. In the front, however, the sand still stretched open to the wells, where three great Gemeiza trees of dark and spreading foliage stood spaced like sentinels.

In the shadow to the right front of the fort, where the bushes fringed the open sand with the level regularity of a river bank, the soldiers unsaddled their camels and prepared their food. Durrance and Captain Mather walked round the fort, and as they came to the southern corner, Durrance stopped.

"Hallo!" said he.

"Some Arab has camped here," said Mather, stopping in his turn. The grey ashes of a wood fire lay in a little heap upon a blackened stone.

"And lately," said Durrance.

Mather walked on, mounted a few rough steps to the crumbled archway of the entrance, and passed into the unroofed corridors and rooms. Durrance turned the ashes over with his boot. The stump of a charred and whitened twig 

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