A little army like that, however, can swell in numbers after a victory in much the same way that a mountain torrent overflows its banks. So, if the Avenger should by any stroke of fortune or flash of generalship out-maneuver Grim, hundreds more from scattered settlements were likely to flock to his standard within a day or two; and to feed them he would have to carry on, seeing there is no such food-consuming, unproductive Frankenstein Monster as a victorious army that sits still.
We soon were to have a chance to form our own estimate of the real strength of the rival forces. In front of us was a sugar-loaf hill, cut sheer on the northern side. Grim led straight towards it. In the distance on our right, cut off from us by two or three deep wadys and a waste of rock-strewn sand, was Ayisha’s column kicking up a cloud of dust like the smoke-trail of an ocean liner.
We left our camels at the foot of the sugar-loaf hill, where there wasn’t a vestige of water, by the way, and Ibrahim ben Ah, Mujrim, Ali Baba, Narayan Singh, Grim and I struggled painfully to the top on foot. The rocks, and even the sand in places, were hot enough to burn you through the soles of thick shoes.
From the top we had a good view of Abu Lissan in the distance— apparently a cluster of mud and stone roofs, with a minaret or two and a good-sized patch of green that betokened date trees.
“Good plundering yonder!” was Ibrahim ben Ah’s sole comment as soon as he had recovered breath. Ali Baba and Mujrim echoed him. It didn’t look like good anything to me from that distance; a more discouraging landscape, or a meaner lot of squalid buildings, wouldn’t be very easy to imagine. But I suppose such experts in the art of acquiring other men’s belongings would know where to dig for treasure that the mean surroundings were deliberately planned to mask.
We could see for many miles in every direction—even as far as the fiumara behind us, in which we had camped the previous night. The hill, with three wells in the crook of its elbow, where Ayisha had taken charge and we had made a “guest” of Ibrahim ben Ah, cast a long blue shadow to our right rear. Over on our left, extending in a ridge like a monster’s backbone for endless miles until it ran into the sky at the horizon, lay one of the mountain chains of Edom, with a much lower, broken range at its feet, running very nearly parallel, so that the two were like a double earthwork on titanic scale. In two or three places many miles apart between breaks in the lower range were patches of bright green, indicating water.
From that mountain range, all the way across our front as far as Abu Lissan, was dry desert blown here and there into humps like a camel’s. At a guess, that part of the plain was fifteen miles across, measured in a straight line from Abu Lissan in any direction, so that the town, which itself was a smirch on the face of a hillside, stood as it were a hub in the centre of a half-wheel, because the chain of hills on our left had a pronounced curve.
The nearest water-hole to Abu Lissan that we could see where we stood lay about five miles away from us on our left hand. No buildings were visible, but there were enough trees to suggest ample supplies of water, and it was obvious at a glance that an army advancing on Petra would have its choice of two routes. The longer, north-westerly way on our right hand, as we stood facing Abu Lissan, would lead by the wells where Ibrahim ben Ah had bivouacked. That to the north-east, on our left hand, would follow the foot-hills, providing water at the end of fifteen miles, and a further, scant supply in the bed of the fiumarain which we spent the night.
A commander might divide his force, for sake of the time that would save at the water-holes, sending half his men by either route, rendezvousing in the fiumara for a march on Petra. Alternatively, anyone attacking Abu Lissan might converge simultaneously from two water holes, and be secured against that bugbear of an army, a congested, dry line of retreat.
The Avenger had seized the water-hole to our left, for we could see an advance-guard of his camel-men taking it easy there. Grim swore he could make out a machine-gun through the glasses, and Ibrahim ben Ah confirmed that with a discouraged nod. But as Narayan Singh said promptly:
“A machine-gun in the hands of such folk works while it is new. Thereafter it impedes them, for they wait on it, and dance about it, and swear, and, pray; and then, because it continues jammed, they waste time trying to hide it from the enemy, who naturally make it as hot for them as possible. And presently, because their faith was in the machine-gun, they lose courage and run. I know, for I have seen.”
Another force of the Avenger’s, of, I should say, two hundred men, was advancing rather leisurely behind a sand-ridge two by two, to join the advance-guard at the water-hole. We could see their heads and their spears and rifles over the top of the ridge. They might be going to spend the night at the water-hole (for they don’t as a rule make a long march on the first day out); or possibly they intended to rest there, and make a forced march by night on Petra, which in that case would bring them into the entrance gorge somewhere about dawn.
We looked for a long time before we detected signs of the Avenger’s other wing, which, as a matter of fact, had started on its way toward the three wells by which Ibrahim ben Ah had bivouacked. For several minutes we could not even make out Ayisha’s column, which had taken cover far to our right in a wady. She had placed nine or ten men on a high mound near its rim to keep watch, and they lay low; but the sun gleaming on their rifle-barrels gave the clue to the column’s whereabouts.
The men of the Avenger’s left wing had caught sight of Ayisha’s column before it entered the wady, and themselves had taken cover amid a cluster of rocks and sandhills near the middle of the plain below us to our right front. They were extremely well hidden, being difficult to make out even from our height looking downward.
They were evidently waiting for instructions. A thing that looked like a bed-bug moving at amazing speed resolved itself with the aid of Grim’s glasses into a camelman riding hell-bent-for-leather toward Abu Lissan. So it was a fair presumption that the Avenger hadn’t left headquarters yet —a presumption that strengthened the other, that the whole force had intended to bivouac for the night at the two water-holes.
And now another hypothesis developed into something like a fact. Unless the Avenger had several hundred men remaining with him in Abu Lissan, of which there was no sign; or unless he had sent a raiding force away in another direction, which was unlikely, considering the task in front of him of tackling the hitherto invariably successful Ali Higg, then the total number of men he could dispose of dwindled already to five hundred at the outside estimate.
The two bodies of camel-men were close enough to be considered one force, since either of them could race to the assistance of the other in the event of a surprise attack. But it was pretty clear, nevertheless, that Ayisha’s appearance on the scene with a compact force of a hundred and forty, which probably looked twice as big to their nervous imagination, had considerably upset calculations.
You see, the Avenger had done all the boasting. It was he who had pronounced damnation on Ali Higg, declaring him a heretic, which is the perfect form of propaganda in all Moslem lands. It was the Avenger, not Ali Higg, who had promised conquest and loot—women and gold and camels—the swift, tumultuous triumph for which the Bedouin’s heart burns. So it was naturally disconcerting to find Ali Higg’s men first in the field—and on their flank at that, instead of in a trap between the two wings of the Avenger, where a reasonable enemy ought to be.
Ibrahim ben Ah began to grow excited, and old Ali Baba seconded him.
“Now, Jimgrim! Send a message to Ayisha quickly. Bid her attack at once. Those cowards of the Avenger’s don’t know what to do. They’ll run, and be slaughtered. Then, having dealt with them as they deserve, we can cross the plain and show those others how brave men tackle a machine-gun! Quick now! Let me go!”
“Aye, let him go!” agreed Ali Baba.
If I had stood in Grim’s shoes I would have done just that. But Narayan Singh sat still on a rock and watched Grim’s face; and Grim said nothing for a while—only kept on smiling. The more those two old firebrands clamored, the more set he seemed to grow on doing nothing, and on saying less. Ibrahim ben Ah actually clutched his arm at last, and shouted in his ear:
“Allah