Yet their presence was fraught with danger, especially after the sun, with its usual rapidity in these regions, went down like a red, fiery ball, and the lurid haze exhaled from the flat desert on which the darkness fell.
The stars were coming out in the blue zenith; the dew was already beginning to fall; long and dark shadows lay across the plain, but the line of the railway was a sure guide back to Matarieh and the vicinity of Heliopolis.
Every step of his bearers elicited a moan of pain from Cameron, and these went to the heart of his friend as if they had been the utterances of a brother, while now and then the sufferer muttered his thanks to the soldiers for their care and kindness, and his regret for the trouble he gave them after a day of toil, and his fears that he was retarding their retreat and thereby involving them in danger. Of his own pain or peril he never uttered a word.
Constellations new to him and his comrades were in the sky now—a vast blue dome that stretched far, far away, all bright with glorious stars.
At last it was absolutely necessary to halt for a time, for all thought the sufferer was dying, and the Highlanders said that if the Bedouins came on again they would form square round him; and soon it became too evident that Evan Cameron was lying 'on the bleak neutral ground between life and death.'
Accustomed though they were to suffering and slaughter, the Highlanders stood around him leaning on their muskets, full of commiseration, and looking attentively at the pale face of the dying officer and back to the desert where they had last seen the enemy hovering; and more than one wished that the Bedouins would only come on again.
'Has no man among us here any water?' asked Allan, for by this time the tin bottles of the detachment were empty.
A man who was in the act of taking the stopper out of his, paused instantly.
'Captain Graham, here is mine,' said he; 'there are only a drop or two left, but if it was my blood I'd give it for Evan Cameron,' he added, emphatically, with that familiarity which is peculiar to the Highlander, and has no rudeness in it.
'Donald, thank you,' said Allan.