The great red sun was down with half its disc slipped behind the violet bank upon the horizon.  It was the hour of Arab prayer.  An older and more learned civilisation would have turned to that magnificent thing upon the skyline and adored that.  But these wild children of the desert were nobler in essentials than the polished Persian.  To them the ideal was higher than the material, and it was with their backs to the sun and their faces to the central shrine of their religion that they prayed.  And how they prayed, these fanatical Moslems!  Rapt, absorbed, with yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets.  Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all thinking as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China?  Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may sweep the rotten, decadent, impossible, half-hearted south of Europe, as it did a thousand years ago, until it makes room for a sounder stock?

And now as they rose to their feet the bugle rang out, and the prisoners understood that, having travelled all day, they were fated to travel all night also.  Belmont groaned, for he had reckoned upon the pursuers catching them up before they left this camp.  But the others had already got into the way of accepting the inevitable.  A flat Arab loaf had been given to each of them—­what effort of the chef of the post-boat had ever tasted like that dry brown bread?—­and then, luxury of luxuries, they had a second ration of a glass of water, for the fresh-filled bags of the newcomers had provided an ample supply.  If the body would but follow the lead of the soul as readily as the soul does that of the body, what a heaven the earth might be!  I Now, with their base material wants satisfied for the instant, their spirits began to sing within them, and they mounted their camels with some sense of the romance of their position.  Mr. Stuart remained babbling upon the ground, and the Arabs made no effort to lift him into his saddle.  His large, white, upturned face glimmered through the gathering darkness.

“Hi, dragoman, tell them that they are forgetting Mr. Stuart,” cried the Colonel.

“No use, sir,” said Mansoor.  “They say that he is too fat, and that they will not take him any farther.  He will die, they say, and why should they trouble about him?”