Then—all at once—bullets came whizzing our way, striking rocks below, above, at each side of us, and screaming away out of the "coffee-cup". The noise of this rifle fire was very different—each shot was a roar, magnified a hundred times, and multiplied a hundred times as it re-echoed from the walls of the chasm.
Thank goodness! At last we had compelled the sheikh to weaken his defence by trying to save his caravan from destruction.
Griffiths and I began firing at more camels; Webster and his men followed suit; more went hurtling down.
We had to do this, however cruel and beastly it was. Unless we kept those fellows away from the mouth of the ravine, the Intrepids might never force their way in.
I could now see the flashes of many rifles—it was a beautiful sight.
Jaffa, excited for the first time, told me that twenty or thirty armed Arabs were climbing up the zigzag. I wished that fifty or a hundred were coming—the more the better. They could not possibly see to aim at us, nor could they know how few we were, and as they emerged from the gloom we could pick them off like starlings on a fence.
Several more camels were hit and fell. Absolute panic had broken out among the unarmed men; many of those on the upper zigzags began creeping and crawling downwards, and I knew that when they met the Arabs coming up to attack us, the confusion on that awful path, and in that awful obscurity below, would be appalling.
After this events began to follow each other very rapidly.
The number of bullets whizzing round us was great, and proved that very many men must have been withdrawn already, back into the hollow; I felt certain that the noise of the Maxim gun seemed louder. If this meant anything it meant that the Arabs were gradually being forced back and that the line of bluejackets was advancing.
Very shortly afterwards the character of the noise of rifle firing altered entirely. There was very little of that muffled rumbling which we had heard before; the noise was sharper and very much louder, and amongst it, quite distinct, I could hear the most distant sound of our own rifles, much like tin tacks being driven into wood with single blows of a big hammer. The bottom of the ravine, too, was lighted up with hundreds and hundreds of rifle flashes, and shells began bursting there again. This made it certain that the Arabs had actually fallen back into the bottom of the "coffee-cup", and I knew that they must be so bunched up together that the shrapnel bullets would soon compel them to scatter up the lower legs of that zigzag. Once there it would be difficult to reach them, but I did not bother about that. They would have to come up and attack us if they wanted to save a single camel.