Forward the Master made his way, with the three others of his immediate escort.  Though there no longer existed any need of silence, hardly a word was spoken.  Something vast, imminent, overpowering, seemed to have laid its finger on the lips of all, to have muted them of speech.

The vacuum-lights, however, were now freely flashing in the little party, as it advanced directly toward the stockade.  The men clambered over rocks, through bushes, across fallen logs.  Rrisa stopped, suddenly, played his light on a little bundle of gray fur, and touched it with a curious finger.  It was a squirrel, curled into a tiny ball of oblivion.

Alden’s foot narrowly missed the body of a sleeping robin.  An owl, lodged in the fork of a tree, moved not as the men passed.  It, too, was whelmed in deep, temporary Nirvana.

The party’s next find arrested them, with a thrill of genuine emotion, a triumph that could not be denied some few half-whispered exclamations of exultation from the Master’s three companions.  He himself was the only one who spoke no word.  But, like the others, he had stopped and was pointing the beam of his light on the figure lying inert among broken bushes.

With his toe he touched this figure.  His light picked up the man’s face from the gloom.  That face was looking at him with wide-open eyes.  The eyes saw nothing; but a kind of overwhelming astonishment still seemed mirrored there, caught in the last moment of consciousness as the man had fallen.

The effect was startling, of that sleeping face, those open eyes, that lax mouth.  The man was breathing easily, peacefully as a tired child.  The Master’s brows contracted a little.  His lips tightened.  Then he nodded, and smiled the ghost of a smile.

“Lord!” exclaimed Bohannan, half awed by the weirdness of the apparition.  “Staring at us, that way—­and all!  Is he asleep?”

“Try him in any way your ingenuity may suggest,” answered the Master, while Alden blinked strangely through his eyeholes, and Rrisa in Arabic affirmed that there is no God but Allah.  “Try to force some sense-impression to his brain.  It is sleep, but it is more than that.  The best experiment for any doubting Thomas to employ is just to waken this guard—­if possible.”

Bohannan shook his head.

“No,” he answered, “I’m not going to make a fool of myself.  There’s no going against any of your statements.  I’m beginning to find that out, definitely.  Let’s be on our way!”

The Master spoke a few quick words of Arabic to his orderly.  Rrisa knelt by the prostrate man.  Then, while the Master kept the light-beam on him, Rrisa unbuckled the guard’s belt, with cartridges and holster containing an ugly snouted gun.  This belt the Arab slung round his own body.  He arose.  In silence, leaving the unconscious man just as he had fallen, they once more pushed onward.

Lights were beginning to gleam ahead, now, in what appeared to be a long, high line.  The trees half hid them, but moment by moment they appeared more distinctly.  Meantime, too, the glow over the stockade was getting stronger.  Presently the trees ceased; and there before them the men saw a wide, cleared space, a hundred feet of empty land between the woods and a tall, stout fence topped with live wires and with numerous incandescents.