“It’s devilish pretty,” said the Colonel, looking about him.  “I always had an idea that I should like to die in a real, good, yellow London fog.  You couldn’t change for the worse.”

“I should have liked to have died in my sleep,” said Sadie.  “How beautiful to wake up and find yourself in the other world!  There was a piece that Hetty Smith used to say at the College:  ’Say not good-night, but in some brighter world wish me good-morning.’”

The Puritan aunt shook her head at the idea.  “It’s a terrible thing to go unprepared into the presence of your Maker,” said she.

“It’s the loneliness of death that is terrible,” said Mrs. Belmont.  “If we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should think no more of it than of changing our house.”

“If the worst comes to the worst, we won’t be lonely,” said her husband.  “We’ll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart waiting on the other side.”

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders.  He had no belief in survival after death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they took things for granted.  He chuckled to think of what his friends in the Cafe Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life for the Christian faith.  Sometimes it amused and sometimes it maddened him, and he rode onwards with alternate gusts of laughter and of fury, nursing his wounded wrist all the time like a mother with a sick baby.

Across the brown of the hard, pebbly desert there had been visible for some time a single long, thin, yellow streak, extending north and south as far as they could see.  It was a band of sand not more than a few hundred yards across, and rising at the highest to eight or ten feet.  But the prisoners were astonished to observe that the Arabs pointed at this with an air of the utmost concern, and they halted when they came to the edge of it like men upon the brink of an unfordable river.  It was very light, dusty sand, and every wandering breath of wind sent it dancing into the air like a whirl of midges.  The Emir Abderrahman tried to force his camel into it, but the creature, after a step or two, stood still and shivered with terror.  The two chiefs talked for a little, and then the whole caravan trailed off with their heads for the north, and the streak of sand upon their left.

“What is it?” asked Belmont, who found the dragoman riding at his elbow.  “Why are we going out of our course?”

“Drift sand,” Mansoor answered.  “Every sometimes the wind bring it all in one long place like that.  To-morrow, if a wind comes, perhaps there will not be one grain left, but all will be carried up into the air again.  An Arab will sometimes have to go fifty or a hundred miles to go round a drift.  Suppose he tries to cross, his camel breaks its legs, and he himself is sucked in and swallowed.”

“How long will this be?”

“No one can say.”