The wild Touareg chant was louder now, but she hardly heard it, because her ears strained for some sound which the singing might cover: the sound of rubble crumbling under a foot that climbed and sought a holding-place.
From far away came the barking of Kabyle dogs, in distant camps of nomads. In stalls of the bordj, where the animals rested, a horse stamped now and then, or a camel grunted. Each slightest noise made Victoria start and tremble. She could be brave for herself, but it was harder to be brave for one she loved, in great danger.
"They'll be here in ten minutes," shouted Nevill. "Legs, where are you?"
There was no answer; but Victoria thought she heard the patter of falling sand. At least, the ruin stood firm so far. By this time Stephen might have nearly reached the top. He had told her not to leave the dining-room, and she had not meant to disobey; but she had made no promise, and she could bear her suspense no longer. Where she stood, she could not see into the shell of the broken tower. She must see!
Running out, she darted across the courtyard, pausing near the Frenchman, Pierre Rostafel, who wandered unsteadily up and down the quadrangle, his torch of alfa grass ready in his hand. He did not know that one of the Englishmen was trying to climb the tower, and would not for an instant have believed that any human being could reach the upper chamber, if suddenly a light had not flashed out, at the top, seventy feet above his head.
Dazed already with absinthe, fantastic ideas beat stupidly upon his brain, like bats that blunder against a lamp and extinguish it with foolish, flapping wings. He thought that somehow the enemy must have stolen a march upon the defenders: that the hated Arabs had got into the tower, from a ladder raised outside the wall, and that soon they would be pouring down in a swarm. Before he knew what he was doing, he had stumbled up the stairs on to the flat wall by the gate. Scrambling along with his torch, he got on to the bordj roof, and lit bonfire after bonfire, though Victoria called on him to stop, crying that it was too soon—that the men outside would shoot and kill him who would save them all.
The sweet silence of the starry evening was crashed upon with lights and jarring sounds.
Stephen, who had climbed the tower with a lantern and a kitchen lamp-reflector slung in a table-cover, on his back, had just got his makeshift apparatus in order, and standing on a narrow shelf of floor which overhung a well-like abyss, had begun his signalling to the northward.
Too late he realized that, for all the need of haste, he ought to have waited long enough to warn the drunken Frenchman what he meant to do. If he had, this contretemps would not have happened. His telegraphic flashes, long and short, must have told the enemy what was going on in the tower, but they could not have seen him standing there, exposed like a target to their fire, if Rostafel had not lit the bonfires.
Suddenly a chorus of yells broke out, strange yells that sprang from savage hearts; and one sidewise glance down showed Stephen the desert illuminated with red fire. He went on with his work, not stopping to count the men on horses and camels who rode fast towards the bordj, though not yet at the foot of that swelling sand hill on which it stood. But a picture—of uplifted dark faces and pointing rifles—was stamped upon his brain in that one swift look, clear as an impression of a seal in hot wax. He had even time to see that those faces were half enveloped in masks such as he had noticed in photographs of Touaregs, yet he was sure that the twenty or thirty men were not Touaregs. When close to the bordj all flung themselves from their animals, which were led away, while the riders took cover by throwing themselves flat on the sand. Then they began shooting, but he looked no more. He was determined to keep on signalling till he got an answer or was shot dead.