The breakers on the beach beyond the intervening sand-waves reared up, and combed, and fell in blue-green foam. Outside them a black sea heaved ceaselessly.
Inland, a segment of the circular rock-rampart which enclosed the camp loomed up above the endless, empty desert, and on its summit showed a number of white-clad, crouching figures with rifles, all firing inward and downward on the pandemonium raging below.
Only a few yards away from where the two helpless onlookers lay the man in the scarlet mask was standing, his hands behind him, between the two big negroes Sallie had seen in the Emir's tent. And, grouped about them, staring at the blue-light with wide eyes, were a dozen or more armed Arabs. Two other negroes, knee-deep in a hole, were leaning on their spades.
Farther off, beside the lagoon where the boats were lying, the third mate and his men were making the best fight they might for their lives against overwhelming odds. More than one of them had already fallen before the blue-light guttered away and that inferno was blotted out.
But the renewed darkness lasted only for a few seconds before the search-light on the bridge of the Olive Branch in the bight answered the signal from the ridge, cutting through the inky night a long, white, fan-like swathe which swept the coast in sections until it finally found its objective and settled there.
The group about the half-dug grave were at first almost paralysed with fear of that phenomenon. The two black eunuchs seized their prisoner and pulled him to the ground, the men of the guard took cover, with rifles ready, the grave-diggers dropped incontinently into the grave and cowered there.
But when, after its first gyrations, it steadied on to the ridge round the camp, leaving them quite unharmed and outside its focus, they fell to talking again, in awed whispers, while they gazed blinkingly at its effect, all but the two who were busy digging again.
Yoxall plucked at Sallie's sleeve. She crept after him, and by very slow degrees they got safely round in rear of the burial-party.
"Wait here," he breathed in her ear, and left her behind a low swell of the sand.
She crawled to its brink. He was wriggling back toward the shapes silhouetted against the dusky light. She clenched both her hands tightly over her lips as he reached the one that was lying motionless, a knee upraised, quite close to the others' heels.