"It is a fairly safe building?"
"Well, it has certain natural advantages, I grant." Sir Richard spoke rather dubiously. "We went over it one day, in a spirit of curiosity; and I have a pretty clear recollection of the place. To begin with, as I told you the Bedouin encampment is a sort of oasis in a valley at the foot of some quite respectably high rocks. You know the desert is not, as some people imagine, merely a flat expanse of sand. Here and there are ranges of hills, limestone, and so on--and now and then one comes across quite a chain of rocky places which in another country would be looked upon as precipices."
He paused; and Anstice waited eagerly for him to continue.
"Well, this Fort is, very luckily, built on a plateau overlooking the valley. On one side the ground slopes gently down to the little colony, but on the other the Fort overlooks a high precipice of rock which of course affords no means of transit from the ground below; so that on that side the place is absolutely impregnable."
"I see." Anstice's tone held a note of relief. "Well, that sounds fairly promising--as I suppose it means there are only three sides to defend instead of four."
"Well, it is a circular building," Sir Richard explained, "and there are only slits in the walls on two sides; and also, fortunately for us, only one means of entrance or exit, in the shape of a massive door which could hardly be forced without a charge of dynamite. It was the stronghold, so I gather, of a kind of robber chief in the old days, and doubtless was built to resist possible assaults from lawless tribesmen. But there is one weak spot in the building--one or rather two places which are a decided menace to any defence."
"And those----"
"Well, it seems this French artist, Massenet by name, sought and obtained permission from the authorities who leased him the building to throw out a couple of windows in the upper floor which enabled him to convert the place into a very passable studio. He was a rich man--son of a well-known Paris banker, and the cost did not intimidate him. But the result is that those two big windows, which only boast the flimsiest of sand-shutters, are, without a doubt, capable of being made into means of entry, provided, of course, that the defenders within are short of ammunition or are unable to construct efficient barricades."