Five kilometres an hour was the inexorable pace to which the machine was set.
A longer halt than usual whilst waiting for despatch bearers had shifted the starting hour of each march to one o'clock in the morning.
Then, under the stars and in the perishing cold of the desert night, the bugles would ring out, the city of little white tents shrivel up and vanish, and the great centipede reform itself out of all its incongruous elements.
Criminals, soldiers of fortune, clerks, once men of learning, men from all the quarters of the world and all the walks of civilization, woke from profound sleep or troubled dreams and became, once again, the Legion.
As they marched under the stars, not a voice broke the silence of the ranks, half-awake; still under the opiate weariness of the last march, the night seemed to them like a blue veil tangling their feet. The sound of the vast moving column filled the night, not with the tramp of men, but with a noise like the shuffling of a great snake—the shuddering, shuffling sound of sand trodden upon and tossed aside by the feet of the Legion.
Men marched as they pleased, there was no keeping in step. It did not matter how rifles were carried—so that they were carried; how men marched—so that they marched.
One thing alone mattered—the pace. Five kilometres an hour.
Then a pale light would appear in the east and flicker out, and then, vague blue and luminous, dawn would show and tinted fingers along the sand rim begin to lift the veil.
It was day far up in the sky before the first sun-flash struck the sands.
Then came the blaze, and like Memnon the Legion would find its voice.