anything!" cried Stephens. "Look.
here, I'll turn Mohammedan if they'll promise to leave the women alone.
After all, it isn't binding--it's under compulsion. But I can't see the
women hurt."

"No, wait a bit, Stephens!" said the Colonel. "We mustn't lose our
heads. I think I see a way out. See here, dragoman! You tell that
grey-bearded old devil that we know nothing about his cursed tinpot
religion. Put it smooth when you translate it. Tell him that he cannot
expect us to adopt it until we know what particular brand of rot it is
that he wants us to believe. Tell him that if he will instruct us, we
are perfectly willing to listen to his teaching, and you can add that
any creed which turns out such beauties as him, and that other bounder
with the black beard, must claim the attention of every one."

With bows and suppliant sweepings of his hands the dragoman explained
that the Christians were already full of doubt, and that it needed but
a little more light of knowledge to guide them on to the path of Allah.
The two Emirs stroked their beards and gazed suspiciously at them. Then
Abderrahman spoke in his crisp, stern fashion to the dragoman, and the
two strode away together. An instant later the bugle rang out as a
signal to mount.

"What he says is this," Mansoor explained, as he rode in the middle of
the prisoners. "We shall reach the wells by mid-day, and there will be a
rest. His own Moolah, a very good and learned man, will come to give you
an hour of teaching. At the end of that time you will choose one way or
the other. When you have chosen, it will be decided whether you are to
go to Khartoum or to be put to death. That is his last word."

"They won't take ransom?"

"Wad Ibrahim would, but the Emir Abderrahman is a terrible man. I
advise you to give in to him."

"What have you done yourself? You are a Christian, too."

Mansoor blushed as deeply as his complexion would allow.

"I was yesterday morning. Perhaps I will be to-morrow morning. I serve
the Lord as long as what He ask seem reasonable; but this is very
otherwise."

He rode onwards amongst the guards with a freedom which showed that his
change of faith had put him upon a very different footing to the other
prisoners.

So they were to have a reprieve of a few hours, though they rode in that
dark shadow of death which was closing in upon them.

What is there in life that we should cling to it so? It is not the
pleasures, for those whose hours are one long pain shrink away screaming
when they see merciful Death holding his soothing arms out for them. It
is not the associations, for we will change all of them before we walk
of our own free wills down that broad road which every son and daughter
of man must tread. Is it the fear of losing the I, that dear, intimate
I, which we think we know so well, although it is eternally doing things
which surprise us? Is it that which makes the deliberate suicide cling
madly to the bridge-pier as the river sweeps him by? Or is it that
Nature is so afraid that all her weary workmen may suddenly throw down
their tools and strike, that she has invented this fashion of keeping
them constant to their present work? But there it is, and all these
tired, harassed, humiliated folk rejoiced in the few more hours of
suffering which were left to them.




CHAPTER VII

There was nothing to show them as they journeyed onwards that they were
not on the very spot that they had passed at sunset upon the evening
before. The region of fantastic black hills and orange sand which
bordered the river had long been left behind, and everywhere now was the
same brown, rolling, gravelly plain, the ground-swell with the shining
rounded pebbles upon its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of
sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away
in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The
sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical