They had reached the center of the plain when the sound they had long looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, breathless stillness of the night.  It was the Allah-il-Allah of their foes, the war-cry of the Moslem.  Out of the gloom—­whether from long pursuit or some near hiding-place they could not tell—­there broke suddenly upon them the fury of an Arab onslaught.  In the darkness all they could see were the flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snorting nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas—­whether two, or twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not know—­they never did know.  All of which they were conscious was that in an instant, from the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked space, they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing, horrible entanglement of conflict, without the power to perceive or to number their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts of attack and of defense.  All they were sensible of was one of those confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and din—­an eternity in semblance, a second in duration—­that can never be traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis of Gaul.

How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they struck, how they were encompassed, how they thrust back those who were hurled on them in the black night, with the north sea-wind like ice upon their faces, and the loose African soil drifting up in clouds of sand around them, they could never have told.  Nor how they strained free from the armed ring that circled them, and beat aside the shafts of lances and the blades of swords, and forced their chargers breast to breast against the fence of steel and through the tempest of rage, and blows, and shouts, and wind, and driven sand, cut their way through the foe whose very face they scarce could see, and plunged away into the shadows across the desolation of the plain, pursued, whether by one or by the thousand they could not guess; for the gallop was noiseless on the powdered soil, and the Arab yell of baffled passion and slaughterous lust was half drowned in the rising of the wind-storm.  Had it been day, they would have seen their passage across the level table-land traced by a crimson stream upon the sand, in which the blood of Frank and Arab blended equally.

As it was, they dashed headlong down through the darkness that grew yet denser and blacker as the storm rose.  For miles the ground was level before them, and they had only to let the half-maddened horses, that had as by a miracle escaped all injury, rush on at their own will through the whirl of the wind that drove the dust upward in spiral columns and brought icy breaths of the north over the sear, sunburned, southern wastes.