"Give it to the old man! Tell him to take it to the Intrepid as quickly as he can; tell him to take his villagers and the women back with him."
Jaffa's eyes sparkled as he passed the orders to the trembling head-man and gave him the note.
I let go of his cloak, and he slid down the rocks like an eel, and was off down the dizzy zigzag path, like a goat, to where his people lay hid.
Then Webster, with a grin on his face, went back to his side of the gap with orders to conceal himself and his two men farther along the edge, not to expose themselves on the sky-line for a single moment, and on no account to fire until I fired.
I knew that I could trust Webster.
Jaffa drew out his beloved Mauser pistol to see that it was loaded, and we had nothing to do but wait whilst those weary camels and their escort wound their way up towards the gap.
CHAPTER IX
Trapping a Caravan
From where I lay, sprawling on my stomach, on the very edge of that vast ridge, like a fly clinging to the rim of a cup—my "coffee-cup"—I could look down on both sides. Inland, the sides of the ridge fell away steeply but not precipitously; the track from the gap did not zigzag down, as it did on my other side, but wound and sloped at an easy angle until I could trace it no farther. The leading horseman of the caravan was, possibly, two miles away, and perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below me—one could not judge heights or distances with any accuracy—the middle portion of the winding caravan was hidden by a swelling of the mountain slope, and the tail end, indistinct, lost itself in the stifling haze which filled the valleys below. I watched those first few mounted men. They kept on halting and waiting, going on again and stopping, as though the camels could not keep pace with them.
I turned my head the other way, and looked down the precipitous curtain of rocks which fell almost sheer into the extraordinary hollow below me. The red turban and flowing white cloak of the old villager showed up—a bright spot against the dark rocks—as he scrambled hastily to join his people, tiny little dots moving about between the boulders which strewed the bottom of the "coffee-cup". I could not see the crack through which we had entered the hollow, because the huge walls surrounding it overlapped there, but I marvelled how we had managed to climb the path without slipping and being dashed to pieces below. I really did not believe it possible for a camel to negotiate it in safety.