“But your head’s bleeding,” she cried in anguish. “Where’s your handkerchief?”
“Haven’t got one,” he laughed. “Lend me yours.”
She threw down to him an absurd little wisp of cambric, with which he endeavoured vainly to staunch the red flow.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s only a little cut. How the devil am I to get out of this?”
She plied him with anxious questions; and presently, recklessly ripping off the flounce of her muslin dress, she tossed it to him, telling him to bandage the wound with it.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to the boat,” he said, “and get a rope and a sailor to hold it. I’m most awfully sorry.”
She would not go for help until she had satisfied herself that he was in no danger; and when at last she left him it was with the assurance that she would be back with all possible speed.
“Try rolling down the big sand-drift,” he said, anxious to be jocular. “It’s the quickest way. I did it yesterday, and was down in no time. It’s a pity you haven’t a tea-tray about you: it makes a fine toboggan.”
But when he was alone he leant heavily against the wall, feeling dizzy from the loss of blood and suffering considerable pain. Presently his attention was attracted by one of those hard, black desert beetles which are to be seen so frequently in Egypt parading busily over the sand with creaking armour: it was hurrying to and fro at the foot of the wall, vainly seeking for a way of escape from the prison into which it had evidently tumbled but a short time before. Upon the sand around him there were the dried remains of others of its tribe which had fallen down the shaft and had perished of starvation; and in one corner there was the skeleton of a jerboa which had died in like manner.
For a considerable time he sat staring stupidly at this beetle and mopping his head with the muslin flounce; but at last Monimé returned with two native sailors, who speedily lowered a rope to him. To climb the twenty feet to the surface, however, was no easy matter in his stiff and exhausted condition; and very laboriously he pulled himself up, barking his shins and his knuckles painfully against the rock.