Afterwards

It was with more and more difficulty that he replied to Sir Richard's hopeful prophecies; and so strong upon him was the premonition of disaster that when he learned at last that they were within an hour or two's ride of their destination he spurred on his still willing steed in a sudden desire to know the worst which was to befall.

As he stared ahead of him, his eyes beginning to adjust themselves now to the peculiar conditions of the desert atmosphere, he caught sight of a speck upon the sand which, unlike the majority of desert objects, the scanty tamarisk bushes, the low humpbacked hills which here and there formed an apparently endless chain, appeared to move, to grow almost imperceptibly larger as the distance between them diminished.

During their ride over the desert they had met no other human beings. Once or twice they had seen, to right or left of their track, a collection of mud huts, overshadowed by the plumy tufts of tall date-palms, betokening the presence of a handful of fellaheen scratching a livelihood from the unfriendly sand. Again they had twice beheld in the far distance a caravan winding its leisurely way upon some mysterious errand to an unknown destination; but these last had been too far away for their component parts of horses, camels, merchandise, to be distinguished; and after a brief glance towards the long snaky lines as they wound their way through the sand, Sir Richard and Anstice had wisely refused to strain their eyesight further.

But this solitary unit on the vast face of the desert was a different matter; and Anstice gazed steadily ahead in an as yet fruitless attempt to make out what this thing which appeared to move towards them might be.

At first he said nothing, thinking that his eyes might quite conceivably be playing him tricks, that this apparently moving figure might possibly be a figment of his brain, or one of those delusive sprites which are said to haunt the unwary traveller in the desert; but at length, as the distance between the object and himself diminished more and more rapidly, until he could have sworn he caught the flutter of a blue robe, Anstice felt it time to point out the vision or whatever it might be to his as yet unseeing companion.

"Sir Richard," he said, so suddenly that Sir Richard, who had been jogging along sunk in reverie, started in surprise. "Do you see anyone coming towards us over the sand?"

Sir Richard, thus appealed to, sat up more erectly in his saddle; and gazed with his keen old eyes in the direction of Anstice's pointing hand; and Anstice watched him with an anxiety which was surely out of place.