Error
more easily, and hardly colder than before. But the effort proved
useless, the air being too thick for observation. So I worked down,
cut and bruised, to the others; and dressed numbly. On our way
back we suffered the only casualty of this trip. Sultan had insisted on
coming with us, and his Ateibi servant, who must follow him
though he had no head for heights, slipped in one bad place with
a fall of forty feet to the stones, and plunged down headlong.
When we got back my hands and feet were too broken to serve me longer, and I lay down and shivered for an hour or so while the others buried the dead man in a side valley. On their return they met suddenly an unknown rider on a camel, crossing their track. He fired at them. They fired back, snap-shooting through the rain, and the evening swallowed him. This was disquieting, for surprise was our main ally, and we could only hope that he would not return to warn the Turks that there were raiders in the neighbourhood.
After the heavy camels with the explosives caught us, we mounted again to get closer to the line; but we had no more than started when brazenly down the visible wind in the misted valley came the food- call of Turkish bugles. Dakhil-Allah thrust his ear forward in the direction of the sound, and understood that over there lay Madahrij, the small station below which we meant to operate. So we steered on the hateful noise, hateful because it spoke of supper and of tents, whereas we were shelterless, and on such a night could not hope to make ourselves a fire and bake bread from the flour and water in our saddle bags, and consequently must go hungry.
We did not reach the railway till after ten o’clock at night, in conditions of invisibility which made it futile to choose a machine- gun position. At random I pitched upon kilometre 1,121 from Damascus for the mine. It was a complicated mine, with a central tigger to fire simultaneous charges thirty yards apart: and we hoped
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