A flying-machine in Ghazistan!  The voice of an old, old friend to whom he could not, for the moment, give a name ...  Why couldn’t the cowardly brutes of vultures begin their business, and end his?  What was that familiar voice calling:—­

“Hold on a bit, we’ll soon be with you!  Don’t give up.  We can’t land just here.  If we drop anything can you crawl and get it?”

“He opened his eyes,” said Captain Digby-Soames, “but I doubt if he’s conscious.  He must have come a frightful cropper.  You can see there’s a compound fracture of the right femur from here, and one of his feet is fairly pointing backwards.  Blood from the mouth, too.  Anyhow he’s alive.  Better shoot him if we can’t shift him——­”

“We’ll get him all right.  This is a Heaven-sent ‘problem’ and we’ll solve it—­and I’ll quote it in my ‘manual’.  Quite war-conditions.  Very badly wounded man—­inaccessible position—­stretcher-parties all out of sight—­aeroplane can’t land for any first-aid nor to pick up the casualty—­excellent problem and demonstration.  That oont[28] will simplify it, though.  Look here—­I’ll drop down and land you by it, and then come here again and hover.  You bring the beast up—­you’ll be able to ride most of the way if you zig-zag, and lead him most of the rest.  Then you’ll have to carry the casualty to the oont and bring him down.”

The aeroplane swooped down and grounded gently within a hundred yards of the kneeling camel, who eyed it with the cold and supercilious disdain of his kind.

“Tell you what,” said Colonel Decies, “when I get up there again, have a good squint and see if you think you can locate the spot for yourself from below.  If you can, I’ll come down again and we’ll both go up on the oont.  Bring the poor beggar down much better if one of us can hold him while the other drives the camel.  It’s no Grand Trunk Road, by Jove.”

“Right-O,” acquiesced Captain Digby-Soames.  “If I can get a clear bearing to a point immediately below where you hover, I’ll lie flat on the ground as an affirmative signal.  If there’s no good landmark I’ll stay perpendicular, what?”

“That’s it,” said Colonel Decies, and, with a swift run and throbbing whirr, the aeroplane soared from the ground and rose to where, a thousand feet from the plain, lay the mangled “problem”.  As it came to a halt and hovered[29] (like a gigantic dragon-fly poised on its invisibly-rapid wings above a pool), the junior officer’s practised eye noted a practicable gully that debouched on a level with, and not far from, the ledge over which the aeroplane hung, and that a stunted thorn-tree stood below the shelf and two large cactus bushes on its immediate left.  Having taken careful note of other landmarks and glanced at the sun, he lay on the ground at full length for a minute and then arose and approached the camel, who greeted him with a bubbling snarl.  On its great double saddle were a gun-cover and a long cane, while from it dangled a haversack, camera, cartridge-case, satchel, canvas water-bag, and a cord-net holdall of odds and ends.