Now we began to pray for time, to recover from the effects of hail and chill.  Some of the men began to develop fevers, and if Ranjoor Singh had not fiercely threatened the doctor, things might have gone from bad to worse.  As it was, three men died of something the matter with their lungs, and five men died of wounds.  Yet, on the other hand, we did not desire too much time, because (surest of all certainties) the Turks were going to send regiments in a hurry to wreak vengeance.  Before noon, somebody rallied the remnants of the convoy we had beaten and brought them back to bury dead and look for property, and they looked quite a formidable body as I watched them from between the boulders.  They soon went away again, having found nothing but tents torn to rags; but I counted more than four hundred, which rather lessened my conceit.  It had been the storm that night that did the work, not we.

We could not burn our dead, for lack of sufficient wood, although we drove the Syrians out of camp to gather more; so we buried them in a trench, and covered them, and laid little fires at intervals along the new-stamped earth and set light to those.  We did not bury them very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave to defeat jackals.

The Kurdish chief returned on the fifth day and by that time, although most of us still ached, some of us looked like men again, and what with the plunder we had taken, and the chests of gold in full view, he was well impressed.  He began by demanding the gold at once, and Ranjoor Singh surprised me by the calm courtesy with which he refused.

“Why should my brother seek to alter the terms of our bargain?” he asked.

For a long time the Kurd made no answer, but sat thinking for some excuse that might deceive us.  Then suddenly he abandoned hope of argument and flew into a rage, spitting savagely and pouring out such a flood of words that Abraham could hardly translate fast enough.

“That pig you gave me for a hostage played a trick!” he shouted.  “He and a man of mine knew Persian.  They talked together.  Then in the night they ran away, and your hostage went to Wassmuss, and has told him all the truth and more untruth into the bargain than ten other men could invent in a year!  So Wassmuss threw in my teeth that letter you gave me, and I was laughed out of countenance by a heritage of spawn of Tophet!  And what has Wasmuss done but persuade three hundred Kurds of a tribe who are my enemies to accept this duty of escort at a great price!  And so your Germans are gone into Persia already!  Now give me the gold and my hostages back, and I will leave you to your own devices!”