“You burn your English skin; the flesh will come off,” she said gravely, and before he quite realised it, she had passed one of the muslin strips round and tied it on his wrist.  Stanhope’s instinct was to protest at once, but there was something in the girl’s earnestness and the tender interest with which she put the muslin on his hand that checked him.  Also the pain, whenever his sharp cuff touched the seared skin, was unpleasant, and made him really appreciate the improvised protection.

“Your pretty veil, Merla, you’ve torn it up for me,” he remarked regretfully as they started again.  Merla glanced at him suddenly; she said nothing, but the pride and joy in her eyes startled the man beside her.  He could find no more words, and silence fell on them again till Merla roused him from a reverie by saying indifferently: 

“Look! that white heap there—­bones, dead men, dead horses.  This side, white bones too; many dead here—­many bones.”

Stanhope looked round.  Everywhere, scattered in heaps, shone the white bones.  They had come to the edge of the battlefield.  Before them rose the little hill of Teb-el-Surgham, crowned by its cairn of black stones and rocks, surrounded by whitened bones and skulls, from the summit of which the English watched the defeat of the Khalifa’s force.  Stanhope cast his eyes over the dreary, black, blood-soaked plain, on which there was no blade of grass, no plant, no flower—­only black rock and white bones, that shimmered together in the torrid heat.

“Horrible!  Merla, war is horrible!  Come and sit down; I’m dead tired.  Let’s sit down here against this rock and rest.”

Stanhope threw himself down by one of the rocks at the base of the hill, and leant back against it.  The girl took her place on the sand opposite him, with her feet tucked under her.  Not far from them lay a skull, turned upwards to the glaring sky.

“Will you let me photograph you?” he asked after a minute’s gazing at the rich dark beauty of the youthful face, “or is it against your customs?”

“It is against our customs,” Merla answered, her hands closing hard on the tripod beside her.  What terror it would mean for her to stand before that great black box, and have that evil black eye glare upon her for long seconds!  She had seen her countrywomen flee shrieking to their huts, when the Englishmen approached with their black boxes.

“But you will do it for me, won’t you?” answered Stanhope persuasively, having set his heart on the picture.

“Yes, I will do it for you; it is right, if you wish it,” she answered steadily.

Stanhope accepted at once such a convenient theory, and sprang up to fix the tripod and the camera in order, and the girl sat still on the sand watching him, cold with terror in the burning air.

“Now, pick up that skull and hold it out in your hand, so.  Yes, that’s right.  Now, stand a little further back.  Yes, that’s perfect.”