Two hundred and fifty yards away the dark-blue men were firing madly in a thin film of light-blue smoke.  Their bullets struck the hard gravel into the air, and the troopers, to shield their faces from the stinging dust, bowed their helmets forward, like the Cuirassiers at Waterloo.  The pace was fast and the distance short.  Yet, before it was half covered, the whole aspect of the affair changed.  A deep crease in the ground—­a dry watercourse, a khor—­appeared where all had seemed smooth, level plain; and from it there sprang, with the suddenness of a pantomime effect and a high-pitched yell, a dense white mass of men nearly as long as our front and about twelve deep.  A score of horsemen and a dozen bright flags rose as if by magic from the earth.  Eager warriors sprang forward to anticipate the shock.  The rest stood firm to meet it.  The Lancers acknowledged the apparition only by an increase of pace.  Each man wanted sufficient momentum to drive through such a solid line.  The flank troops, seeing that they overlapped, curved inwards like the horns of a moon.  But the whole event was a matter of seconds.  The riflemen, firing bravely to the last, were swept head over heels into the khor, and jumping down with them, at full gallop and in the closest order, the British squadrons struck the fierce brigade with one loud furious shout.  The collision was prodigious.  Nearly thirty Lancers, men and horses, and at least two hundred Arabs were overthrown.  The shock was stunning to both sides, and for perhaps ten wonderful seconds no man heeded his enemy.  Terrified horses wedged in the crowd, bruised and shaken men, sprawling in heaps, struggled, dazed and stupid, to their feet, panted, and looked about them.  Several fallen Lancers had even time to re-mount.  Meanwhile the impetus of the cavalry carried them on.  As a rider tears through a bullfinch, the officers forced their way through the press; and as an iron rake might be drawn through a heap of shingle, so the regiment followed.  They shattered the Dervish array, and, their pace reduced to a walk, scrambled out of the khor on the further side, leaving a score of troopers behind them, and dragging on with the charge more than a thousand Arabs.  Then, and not till then, the killing began; and thereafter each man saw the world along his lance, under his guard, or through the back-sight of his pistol; and each had his own strange tale to tell.

Stubborn and unshaken infantry hardly ever meet stubborn and unshaken cavalry.  Either the infantry run away and are cut down in flight, or they keep their heads and destroy nearly all the horsemen by their musketry.  On this occasion two living walls had actually crashed together.  The Dervishes fought manfully.  They tried to hamstring the horses, They fired their rifles, pressing the muzzles into the very bodies of their opponents.  They cut reins and stirrup-leathers.  They flung their throwing-spears with great dexterity.  They tried every device of cool, determined men practised in