"I know a few words."

"Where did you learn them?"

"In Khartum."

Thereafter he was left alone with Durrance on the glacis, and the two men talked together for the best part of an hour. At the end of that time the Arab was seen to descend the glacis, cross the trench, and proceed toward the hills. Durrance gave the order for the resumption of the march.

The water-tanks were filled, the men replenished their zamshyehs, knowing that of all thirsts in this world the afternoon thirst is the very worst, saddled their camels, and mounted to the usual groaning and snarling. The detachment moved northwestward from Sinkat, at an acute angle to its morning's march. It skirted the hills opposite to the pass from which it had descended in the morning. The bushes grew sparse. It came into a black country of stones scantily relieved by yellow tasselled mimosas.

Durrance called Mather to his side.

"That Arab had a strange story to tell me. He was Gordon's servant in Khartum. At the beginning of 1884, eighteen months ago in fact, Gordon gave him a letter which he was to take to Berber, whence the contents were to be telegraphed to Cairo. But Berber had just fallen when the messenger arrived there. He was seized upon and imprisoned the day after his arrival. But during the one day which he had free he hid the letter in the wall of a house, and so far as he knows it has not been discovered."

"He would have been questioned if it had been," said Mather.

"Precisely, and he was not questioned. He escaped from Berber at night, three weeks ago. The story is curious, eh?"

"And the letter still remains in the wall? It is curious. Perhaps the man was telling lies."

"He had the chain mark on his ankles," said Durrance.

The cavalcade turned to the left into the hills on the northern side of the plateau, and climbed again over shale.

"A letter from Gordon," said Durrance, in a musing voice, "scribbled perhaps upon the roof-top of his palace, by the side of his great telescope—a sentence written in haste, and his eye again to the lens, searching over the palm trees for the smoke of the steamers—and it comes down the Nile to be buried in a mud wall in Berber. Yes, it's curious," and he turned his face to the 

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