had turned out to salute him, his native subordinate had greeted him in excellent English, and he had fairly entered into his own.  It was not an exhilarating place for a lengthy residence.  There was one large, bowl-shaped, grassy depression sloping down to the three pits of brown and brackish water.  There was the grove of palm trees also, beautiful to look upon, but exasperating in view of the fact that Nature has provided her least shady trees on the very spot where shade is needed most.  A single wide-spread acacia did something to restore the balance.  Here Hilary Joyce slumbered in the heat, and in the cool he inspected his square-shouldered, spindle-shanked Soudanese, with their cheery black faces and their funny little pork-pie forage caps.  Joyce was a martinet at drill, and the blacks loved being drilled, so the Bimbashi was soon popular among them.  But one day was exactly like another.  The weather, the view, the employment, the food—­everything was the same.  At the end of three weeks he felt that he had been there for interminable years.  And then at last there came something to break the monotony.

One evening, as the sun was sinking, Hilary Joyce rode slowly down the old caravan road.  It had a fascination for him, this narrow track, winding among the boulders and curving up the nullahs, for he remembered how in the map it had gone on and on, stretching away into the unknown heart of Africa.  The countless pads of innumerable camels through many centuries had beaten it smooth, so that now, unused and deserted, it still wound away, the strangest of roads, a foot broad, and perhaps two thousand miles in length.  Joyce wondered as he rode how long it was since any traveller had journeyed up it from the south, and then he raised his eyes, and there was a man coming along the path.  For an instant Joyce thought that it might be one of his own men, but a second glance assured him that this could not be so.  The stranger was dressed in the flowing robes of an Arab, and not in the close-fitting khaki of a soldier.  He was very tall, and a high turban made him seem gigantic.  He strode swiftly along, with head erect, and the bearing of a man who knows no fear.

Who could he be, this formidable giant coming out of the unknown?  The precursor possibly of a horde of savage spearmen.  And where could he have walked from?  The nearest well was a long hundred miles down the track.  At any rate the frontier post of Kurkur could not afford to receive casual visitors.  Hilary Joyce whisked round his horse, galloped into camp, and gave the alarm.  Then, with twenty horsemen at his back, he rode out again to reconnoitre.  The man was still coming on in spite of these hostile preparations.  For an instant he hesitated when first he saw the cavalry, but escape was out of the question, and he advanced with the air of one who makes the best of a bad job.  He made no resistance, and said nothing when the hands of two troopers clutched at his shoulders, but