And this was how he was feeling—strained—till something seemed to be urging him to cry out or move in the midst of that intense period, when all at once he turned cold all down the back, for a long-drawn, dismal, howling wail rose in the distance, making him shudder just as he had seen the sentry quiver in his horror and dread.
“Bah! Hyena,” he said to himself the next moment; and then a thrill ran through him as he felt Dickenson’s grip increase suddenly with quite a painful pressure.
He responded to it directly, every nerve in his body quivering with the greater strain placed upon it by what was happening, till every nerve and muscle seemed to harden into steel. For the long expected—whatever it might prove to be—the mystery was about to unfold itself, and in his intense feeling it seemed to Lennox as if the glittering stars were flashing out more light.
It was only a noise, but a noise such as Lennox felt that he must hear—a low, dull, harsh, grating noise as of stone passing over stone; and though he could see nothing with his eyes, mentally he knew that one of the great time-bleached and weathered blocks of granite that helped to form the cyclopean face of the kopje wall had begun to turn as on a pivot.
This grating sound lasted for a few seconds only, and it came apparently from a couple of yards away to his right, as he stood with his back pressed against the rugged natural stones.
Then the noise ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he listened, now holding his breath in the vain hope that it would silence the heavy, dull beating of his heart, whose throbs seemed to echo painfully in his brain.
He pressed Dickenson’s hand again, to feel from the return grip how thoroughly his comrade was on the alert.
Then all was perfectly silent again, while a dull feeling of despair began to assert itself as he felt that they were going to hear no more.
At last, with head wrenched round to the right, his revolver feeling wet in his fingers and his eyes seeming to start with the strain of gazing along the shelf at the brilliant stars before him, his nerves literally jerked and he felt perfectly paralysed and unable to stir, for here, not six feet away, he could make out against the starry sky the dimly-marked silhouette of a heavily-built man.