He sat thus for an hour, and then stepping daintily, with timid eyes alert, a tall reed-buck and his doe came through the glade towards the water.  But they did not drink; they waited, cropping the grass.  Gradually, through a long hour, others gathered, tawny and yellow, and dappled-brown, and stood and fed until—­perhaps a signal was given, perhaps a known moment had come—­all like soldiers at a command, moved down to the water’s edge.

Six nights later Hillyard camped at Lueisa, near to that big tree under which it is not wise to spread your bed.  He took his bath at ten o’clock at night under the moon, and the water from the river was hot.  He stretched himself out in his bed and waked again that night after the moon had set, to fix indelibly in his memory the blazing dome of stars above his head, and the Southern Cross burning in a corner of the sky.  The long, wonderful holiday was ended.  To-morrow night he would sleep in a house.  Would he ever come this way again?

In the dark of the morning he struck westwards from the Dinder, across a most tedious neck of land, for Senga and the Blue Nile.

CHAPTER VI

THE HONORARY MEMBER

At six o’clock in the evening Colin Rayne, a young civilian in the Sudan Service, heard, as he sat on the balcony of the mess at Senga, the rhythmical thud of camels swinging in to their rest in the freshness of the night air.

“There’s our man,” he exclaimed, and running downstairs, he reached the door just as Hillyard’s twelve camels and his donkeys trooped into the light.  Hillyard was riding bareheaded, with his helmet looped to his saddle, a young man, worn thin by sun and exercise, with fair burnt hair, and a brown clean shaven face.  Colin Rayne went up to him as he dismounted.

“Captain Luttrell asked me to look after you.  He has got some work on hand for the moment.  We’ll see after your affs.”

“Thank you.”

“You might show me, by the way, where your cartridges are.”

Hillyard selected the camel on which they were packed and Rayne called a Sudanese sergeant to take them into the mess.

“Now we will go upstairs.  I expect that you can do with a whisky-and-soda,” he said.

Hillyard was presented to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers of this headquarters of a Province.  They were all young, Hillyard himself was older than any of them.

“Oh, we have got some married ones, too,” said Rayne, “but they live in houses of their own like gentlefolk.”

“There are some Englishwomen here then?” said Hillyard, and for an appreciable moment there was silence.  Then a shortish, square man, with a heavy moustache explained, if explanation it could be called.

“No.  They were sent off to Senaar this morning—­to be out of the way.  Wiser.”