I am no man of iron.  I haven’t iron nerves.  Not one second of that descent was less than hell.  I could hear the thunder of some kind of battering-ram on the door at the foot of the stair.  I could imagine the rope chafing against the sharp edge of the parapet as they paid it out hand over hand.  The only thing that made me keep my head at all was knowledge that Abdul Ali had had to do the trip feet-upward, with his head in a bag.  When they let go too fast it was rather like the half-way stage of taking chloroform.  When they slowed up, there was the agonizing dread of pursuit.  And through it all there burned the torturing suggestion that the rope might break.

Mother Earth felt good that night, when strong hands reached up and lifted me out of the noose that failed of reaching the bottom by about a man’s height.  Come to think of it, it wasn’t mother earth at that.  It was the stinking carcass of a camel only half autopsied by the vultures, that my feet first rested on—­brother, perhaps, to the beast I had put out of his agony that afternoon.

The others came down the rope hand-over-hand, Grim last.  I suppose he stayed up there with his pistol, ready for contingencies.  He had his nerve with him, for he had fastened the upper end of the rope to a piece of broken stone laid across a gap that the crusaders had made in the ramparts, centuries ago, for the Christian purpose of pouring boiling oil and water on their foes.  It did not take more than a minute’s violent shaking after he got down to bring the rope tumbling on our heads.

Then the next thing he did was to take a look at the prisoner.  Finding him not much the worse for wear, barring some bruises and a missing inch or two of skin, he ordered the bag pulled over his head again and gave the order for retreat.  Mahommed ben Hamza went scouting ahead.  The others picked up Abdul Ali as the construction gangs handle baulks of timber—­horizontal—­face-downward.  When he wriggled they cuffed him into good behaviour.

You have to get down into an Arab moat before you can realize what the Hebrews meant by their word Gehenna.  The smell of rotting carrion was only part of it.  One stumbled into, and through, and over things that should not be.  Heaps, that looked solid in the moonlight, yielded to the tread.  Whatever liquid lay there was the product of corruption.

Yet we did not dare to climb out of the moat until we reached the shadows at the northern angle.  Though the moonlight shone almost straight down on us it was a great deal brighter up above, and the walls cast some shadow.  There was nothing for it but to pick our way in the comparative gloom of that vulture’s paradise, praying we might find a stream to wade in presently.

Once, looking up behind me, I thought I saw men’s heads peering over the parapet, but that may have been imagination.  Grim vowed he did not see them, although I suspected him of saying that to avoid a panic.  He shepherded us along, speaking in a perfectly normal voice whenever he had to, as if there were no such thing as hurry in the world.  When we reached the farther corner of the moat it was he who climbed out first to con the situation.  A look-out in a bastion on the ruined town wall promptly fired at him.