Looking up the smooth strand, as far as the eye could reach, and down it to a like distance, there was no place where a crab could have screened itself; and these Saaran wreckers, well acquainted with the coast, knew that in neither direction was there any other ravine or gully into which the fugitives could have retreated.
No wonder then that the pursuers wondered, even to speechlessness.
Their silence was of short duration, though it was succeeded only by cries expressing their great surprise, among which might have been distinguished their usual invocations to Allah and the Prophet. It was evident that a superstitious feeling had arisen in their minds, not without its usual accompaniment of fear; and although they no longer kept their places, the movement now observable among them was that they gathered closer together, and appeared to enter upon a grave consultation.
This was terminated by some of them once more proceeding to the embouchure of the ravine, and betaking themselves to a fresh scrutiny of the tracks made by the shoes of the midshipmen; while the rest sate silently upon their horses and maherries, awaiting the result.
The footmarks of the three mids were still easily traceable, even on the ground already trampled by the Arabs, their horses, and maherries. The “cloots” of a camel would not have been more conspicuous in the mud of an English road, than were the shoe-prints of the three young seamen in the sands of the Saara. The Arab trackers had no difficulty in making them out; and in a few minutes had traced them from the mouth of the gorge almost in a direct line to the sea. There, however, there was a breadth of wet sea-beach, where the springy sand instantly obliterated any foot-mark that might be made upon it, and there the tracks ended.
But why should they have extended farther? No one could have gone beyond that point, without either walking straight into the water, or keeping along the strip of sea-beach, upwards or downwards.
The fugitives could not have escaped in either way, unless they had taken to the water and committed suicide by drowning themselves. Up the coast or down it they would have been seen to a certainty.
Their pursuers, clustering around the place where the tracks terminated, were no wiser than ever. Some of them were ready to believe that drowning had been the fate of the castaways upon their coast, and so stated it to their companions. But they spoke only conjectures, and in tones that told them, like the rest, to be under the influence of some superstitious fear. Despite their confidence in the protection of their boasted Prophet, they felt a natural dread of that wilderness of waters, less known to them than the wilderness of sand.
Ere long they withdrew from its presence; and betook themselves back to their encampment, under a half belief that the three individuals seen and pursued had either drowned themselves in the great deep, or by some mysterious means known to these strange men of the sea, had escaped across its far-reaching waters.