“Come along to Zeitoon!” they called back to us.  But even Fred’s concertina, and the hymns of the handful who were not yet utterly spent, failed to get them moving before dawn.

We did not spend the night unguarded, although no armed men lay between us and the enemy.  We could hear the Kurds shouting now and then, and once, when I climbed a high rock, I caught sight of the glow of their bivouac fires.  Imagination conjured up the shrieks of tortured victims, for we had all seen enough of late to know what would happen to any luckless straggler they might have caught and brought to make sport by the fires.  But there was no imagination about the calls of Kagig’s men, posted above us on invisible dark crags and ledges to guard against surprise.  We slept in comfortable consciousness that a sleepless watch was being kept—­until fleas came out of the ground by battalions, divisions and army corps, making rest impossible.

But even the flea season was a matter of indifference to the hapless folk who lay around us, and although we fussed and railed we could not persuade them to go forward before dawn broke.  Then, though, they struggled to their feet and started without argument.  But an hour after the start we reached the secret of the safety of Zeitoon, without which not even the valor of its defenders could have withstood the overwhelming numbers of the Turks for all those scores of years; and there was new delay.

The gut of the pass rose toward Zeitoon at a sharp incline—­a ramp of slippery wet clay, half a mile long, reaching across from buttress to buttress of the impregnable hills.  It was more than a ridden mule could do to keep its feet on the slope, and we had to dismount.  It was almost as much as we ourselves could do to make progress with the aid of sticks, and we knew at last what Kagig had meant by his boast that nothing on wheels could approach his mountain home.  The poor wretches who had struggled so far with us simply gave up hope and sat down, proposing to die there.  The martyred biped copied them, except that they were dry-eyed and he shed tears.  “To think that I should come to this—­that I should come to this!” he sobbed.  Yet the fool must have come down by that route, and have gone up that way once.

We should have been in a quandary but for the sound of axes ringing in the mountain forest on our left—­a dense dark growth of pine and other evergreens commencing about a hundred feet above the naked rock that formed the northerly side of the gorge.  Where there were axes at work there was in all likelihood a road that men could march along, and our refugees sat down to let us do the prospecting.

“It would puzzle Napoleon to bring cannon over this approach, and the Turks don’t breed Napoleons nowadays!” Fred shouted cheerily.  “Give me a hundred good men and I’ll hold this pass forever!  Wait here while I scout for a way round.”

He tried first along the lower edge of the line of timber, encouraged by ringing axes, falling trees, and men shouting in the distance.