Well waited is well done.
“Here—hi!”
This time some one heard him, and that small, silent man, Ben Abdi, stood in the doorway of the tent at attention.
“Are you keeping a good look-out down the valley?” asked Major Agar.
“Ee yess, sar.”
“No signs of any one?”
“No, sar.”
Agar shut up the diary, which book Ben Abdi had been taught to regard as strictly official, laid it aside, and passed out of the tent, the little Goorkha following close upon his heels with a quick intelligent interest in his every movement which somehow suggested a dusky and faithful little dog.
For some moments they stood thus on the edge of the small plateau, the big man in front, the little one behind—alert, with twinkling, beady eyes. Behind them towered a bleak grey slope of bare rock, like a cliff set back at a slight angle, so treeless, so smooth was the face of it. In front the great blue-shadowed valley lay beneath them, stretching away to the south, until in a distant haze the sharp hills seemed to close in and cut it short.
Perched thus, as it were, upon the roof of the world, these two men looked down upon it all with a calm sense of possession, and to him of the dominant race standing there some thousands of miles from his native land—alone—master of this great stretch of an alien shore, there must have come some passing thought of the strangeness of it all.