“A near thing that!” said Brown.  “That fakir’s a bright beauty, isn’t he!”

“Shall I kick him, sir?” asked one of Brown’s men.

“Kick him?  No!  What good’d that do?  What next, Juggut Khan?”

But Juggut Khan was bending down, and listening at the hole laid bare by the huge hinged trap.

“Silence!” commanded Brown.

The men held their breath, even, but not a sound came up from the darkness down below.

“Are they dead, d’you suppose?” asked Brown.

And, even as he asked it, some one in the darkness snuffled, and he heard a woman’s voice that moaned.

“Snff-snff-snff!  I wonder if I’m dead yet!  I wouldn’t be, I know, if Bill were here!  He’d ha’ got us out!”

“There is one of them alive!” said Juggut Khan.

“So I notice!” answered Brown, with a strange dry quaver in his voice.  “Go down and bring her up, please!  Take three or four men with you.  It won’t do to bring women and a child up here and let ’em see this awful fakir and these corpses.  Take your time about bringing ’em up, while I make the prisoners carry their dead up on to the roof.  I’ll take the fakir up there too where he’s out of mischief!”

Just as a six-foot-wide pathway ran round and round the outside of the dome, another one, scarcely more than a yard wide, ran round the inside, and formed a roadway to the top in place of a stair.  It took the prisoners and Brown’s men fifteen minutes of continuous effort to carry up the dead and the fakir, and lay them on the roof.

“Pitch the dead over!” ordered Brown, and the mutineers obeyed.

“I’ve a mind to pitch you over too!” he growled at the fakir, and the strange creature seemed to understand him, for his eyes changed from their baleful hatred to a look of fear.

The bodies slid and rolled down the rounded roof, and fell with a thud against the battlements, or else went rolling down the circular causeway that led to the street below.

Brown seemed to be garnering ideas from watching them.  He gazed down at the noisy tumult of the city, watching for a while the efforts of an ill-directed crowd to put out a fire that blazed in a distant quarter of the bazaar.

There seemed to him something strangely preconcerted about much of the hurrying to and fro below him.  It struck him as being far too orderly to be the mere boiling of a loot-crazed mob.

His prisoners gave the secret to him.  They were leaning against the parapet on the other side—­the side closest to the city-wall, and farthest from the top of the causeway—­and they were chattering together excitedly in undertones.  Brown walked round to where they stood, and stared where they stared.  Just as they had done, he recognized what lay below him.

It was faintly outlined in the blackness, picked out here and there by lanterns, and still too far away for most civilians to name it until the sun rose and showed its detail.  But Brown, the soldier, knew on the instant, and so did his men.