Gunboat and Gun-runner: A Tale of the Persian Gulf

by T. T. Jeans

I whistled softly to Webster, and he came crawling across to me, keeping well below the sky-line.

"Take your men a hundred yards along the ridge," I told him; "hide among those rocks there, below the edge, and for Heaven's sake don't show yourselves, not until the last Arab and the last camel have gone halfway down the zigzag, and not until you see me move."

"I understand, sir," he answered grimly, and presently I saw him and his two men scramble to a cluster of detached rocks much farther along.

When they were safely hidden, Jaffa, Griffiths, and myself crawled in the opposite direction, away from the gap, behind some more boulders. We shifted about among them until we found a position from which we could see that gap, and also look down the zigzag path. We were about one hundred and fifty yards from the gap, and practically on a level with it. Of course we could see nothing of the approaching horses and camels, but I trusted to my ears to hear them.

Lying there under these conditions was an extraordinary trial to my nerves, and I thanked my stars that Webster had come ashore with me that morning and not Moore. Moore would have made a hopeless muddle of his job, and could not have controlled his own nerves, let alone those of his men. As it was, I presently found the strain of waiting and listening so great that I had to hang on to those rocks, like a maniac, to prevent my legs making me crawl up to the sky-line, twenty feet above us, to have one more look at the caravan.

I do not believe that if I lived a thousand years I could be more excited or "jumpy".

I breathed more freely when I saw the head-man reach the bottom of the "coffee-cup", gather his villagers together, and disappear with them, like a lot of white ants, out of sight round that projecting corner of rock which marked the huge crack or rent giving exit to the path. I relied upon the old sportsman hurrying down to the village as quickly as he could, and hoped that in another hour Commander Duckworth would receive my note. In another forty or fifty minutes afterwards he might be able to land his men, and in another hour and a half they might reach the entrance to the "coffee-cup".

Then the fun would begin.

My wrist watch was, of course, still smashed—there had been no chance of having it repaired—so I could only judge by the height of the sun that the time was about eleven o'clock. At the earliest the Intrepids could not reach the bottom of the zigzag path for another three hours; and, if the head-man had been accurate, the head of the caravan would be at the gap an hour and a half before they arrived.

The only thing that troubled me then was whether the leading Arabs would have descended it, turned the corner, and sighted the Intrepid, and perhaps the advancing bluejackets, before the rear of the caravan had passed through the gap and had begun the perilous descent.