"Stand by to fire! Be very careful; fire below, and to right of the match, if Jaffa strikes one."
There was a very ominous murmur now. Jaffa was haranguing, expostulating; then he stopped.
"Stand by!" I shouted, bringing my rifle to my shoulder.
A tiny light showed. Jaffa had struck a match.
"Fire!" I yelled, and our four rifles went off together.
We heard groans, a yell of pain, and a body falling. Some of our bullets had gone home.
Jaffa's pistol flashed once; we fired again; it flashed a second time, and then, with a glare and a startling roar, a shell burst not fifty yards below us, and for a second or two lighted up the whole scene—Jaffa on the rock, and those Arabs, a whole line of them, surging up to him. Wild screams came up from a lower path, and told us that men there had been wounded; and Jaffa began in his old voice of calm assurance, "Ma kattle kum! Khalli bunduk 'ak"—he never once stopped talking.
"No shoot," he called to us; "they throw away rifles—they come:" and with the most intense relief from the strain of those few awful seconds I heard the welcome clatter of rifles on the rocks, and that weird procession began again to pass between us.
In their hurry to escape this new terror of the bursting shells the Arabs actually swept the two marines back to the farther end of the gap.
Another shell burst, some way from us, but near enough for all to hear the fragments smashing against the rocks, and enough to break the nerves of any who had already suffered as those poor wretches had done.