Ali offered, "I'll go again at dawn."
Beale continued to speak softly. "Any preferred direction?"
Ali gestured toward the horse track and Lieutenant Beale nodded permission. "Be back by sundown."
It was so early that the dim gray light still made for uncertain observation when Ali halted Ben Akbar and dismounted. He bent very near the earth, unable to see until he did so. The track was here, he had not erred. Leading Ben Akbar, he followed, slowly at first, then faster as the strengthening light permitted. From the crest of one hill, he looked over the top of another and finally saw what he so desperately wanted to see.
It was the topmost branches of a full-leafed tree, and here, in this place of no color, it was startling as snow on a naked cliff.
Ali turned his mount and said softly, "Kneel."
The big dalul knelt. Ali crawled forward. On the summit of the hill over which the tree top appeared, he crouched in a nest of boulders and verified his preconceived opinion that he would see more than water when he finally beheld the oasis.
Water there was, a limpid pool, shaded by one great tree and a cluster of small ones, and seeping underground to bring life to a patch of grass. Sixty-one horses cropped the grass, and sixty-one Indians lazed about.
Though he knew where he was and who these men were, Ali felt as he had when spying on the Druse tribesmen. Even external differences between burnous-clad Druse and half-naked Indians did not set them so very far apart. If the Indians were not bent on raiding, there would be women and children among them. The expedition was the only prize worth the assembly of so many warriors. At present, they were idling away their time until a scout reported.
The scout appeared, as Ali was sure he would, from the direction in which the expedition was encamped. Ali waited for the scout to reach his companions. When he did and began his report, Ali returned to Ben Akbar. He rode first toward the camp, so that he was between the warriors and the expedition. Then he put Ben Akbar up a hill, but not quite over it. He wanted only to look down on the path taken by the scout and which, by all reason, should be the path of the warriors.