Then a fine-looking, very richly dressed Arab, with a flowing red[#] patriarchal beard and a green turban pushed past the camel and began to give orders. The ropes securing the bundles were unlashed, the bundles were dragged aside and propped up against the projecting rocks, and then, hauling on those ropes (they passed under the camel's belly), shouting and yelling as though hell had broken loose, the Arabs tried to hoist him to his feet.
[#] The sheikh must have visited Mecca three times, as only after three such pilgrimages are beards dyed red.
The sheikh, or whoever he was, climbed to the top of the gap, the better to superintend operations. A grand-looking chap he was, with a fine "fighting" face, beetling eyebrows, and a great hooked nose.
For a moment I thought again of that cigarette end, and grew sick with fear lest it was there and he should see it. But he was too much interested in the camel to see anything else. Although his men heaved with all their might they only raised the poor beast a few inches, and down it would sink again.
Then the sheikh gave more orders. Men began calling down to those on the paths of the zigzag, immediately underneath the helpless camel, and I saw these hurriedly making large gaps in the line of camels. Two men took hold of the poor brute's halter and hauled the head round until it was touching the hind quarters; the others, gathering at the side of the camel farther from the precipice below, using their rifles as levers and also pressing against his lean flanks, shoved "all together"; the men on the head-rope tugged the head still farther round, and the helpless brute toppled over the edge. Rolling and falling, sliding through the gaps in the lines beneath, bounding from boulder to boulder, he at last "fetched up", two hundred feet below, against a rock, and lay there a shapeless mass of broken back and neck and legs.
The two vultures hopped about excitedly and flapped a little farther down, eyeing the remains with twisted heads.
At another order from the sheikh those bundles were torn open, and I simply "thrilled" to see at least two dozen rifles—brand-new rifles—hauled out. Each man, taking one or two of them as he passed, started off again along the zigzag path after the rest of the camels. The sheikh, clambering down to the path, followed them slowly, and that procession of camels commenced afresh through the gap, camel after camel, until I had counted eighty-three. After the eighty-third came many more, pace by pace, with weary feet, but these were loaded with boxes of ammunition. No attempts had been made to conceal that fact; the boxes were just as they had left the manufacturers, slung in great nets across the camels' backs.
One hundred and thirty-four passed through, counting both those with rifles and those with ammunition; and, last of all, led by two men, a magnificent camel, splendidly caparisoned, with a scarlet, silver-embroidered cloth and with silver-mounted harness, stalked angrily through, followed by two smaller ones with unwieldy burdens. These three were doubtless the sheikh's own camels, his riding camel and the two which carried his tent and the cooking gear and food which he might want on the march.
No more camels came.
I could hardly believe our good fortune. Everything had turned out as we had planned. Looking down into the "coffee-cup" I could see the zigzag of painfully-descending camels; and still farther below them the white figures of the advance-guard, not yet near the bottom or that corner beyond which they would be able to see the Intrepid. Not one of those Bedouin Arabs suspected that we six were lying there above them, or that the Intrepids were—possibly—hurrying up to drive them back to us. I would have given much to know what was happening beyond the mountain screen, whether the Intrepids had actually landed, and, if they had landed, how near they were. I reckoned that, by now, if all had happened as I hoped, they would be about halfway up from the village, and in another quarter of an hour, or less, the first of those Arabs would have scrambled out of the bottom of the "coffee-cup" and should see them.