There came a deep, growling, rumbling roar. He looked upward. Heavens! Was the whole world falling over upon him? In the flash of a moment, abandoning all thought of human enemies—of human forces, Helston had wrenched his horse from behind the great hump of earth where he had sheltered it, and mounting, spurred with hot haste onward and upward in the track of those who had gone before. At the end of a couple of hundred yards or so he alighted from his saddle just in time to avoid being hurled therefrom in the rocking swaying horror of a moving world, and looked back. A cracking roar, painful to the drums of his ears, split the air. He took in the enormous mass curling over, the volume of mud and earth and stones, at least two score of feet high, pouring like a gigantic flood down the face of the slide. He took in the frantic struggling crowd of horsemen right in the centre of its road, and then, the whole slope took on a new formation as half a mountain side poured down it, roaring up stones and mud masses high in the air. And—of the three score and odd Gularzai—pressing on in hate and vengeance to destruction—there remained no more trace than there had been before their arrival there at all. That gigantic mud-slide had in a moment found a common sepulchre for the lot.
“Well, Miss Seward,” Helston remarked, as somewhat shaken by the stupendous awesomeness of the phenomenon, he rejoined the fugitive group, higher up. “Allah is on our side this time anyhow.”
“Yes,” she said in an awed tone. “What a sight! But what was it? An earthquake?”
“Another mud-slide, like the one which formed the first—or a little of both. Maybe a touch of earthquake that started it off. But we were through just in time, and—good-bye to Allah-din Khan and Co.”
“Whom I hope are grilling in their Jehanum,” growled Mervyn, with the recollection of his own ordeal fresh upon him.
“Well, there’s nothing between us and Mazaran now,” pronounced Helston Varne, “and the sooner we get there the better. No, Miss Seward. You’d better not look back. Get it out of your mind.”
For Melian’s gaze seemed riveted on the gloomy Dantesque gorge, now half barred up by the tremendous convulsion of Nature which had taken effect right under her very eyes, and the thought of the buried men lying there—even though they were fierce barbarians and fanatical enemies, still they had been engulfed in the horrible cataclysm right under her eyes. But she recognised the other’s advice was sound, and laid herself out to follow it. And the reaction of feeling that they were all in comparative safety largely helped.