Waldo, brought face to face with the actuality of the unbelievable—as he himself would have worded it—was completely dazed.  In silence he suffered the consul to lead him from the tepid gloom of the interior, through the ruinous doorway, out into the hot, stunning brilliance of the desert landscape.  Hassan followed, with never a look behind him.  Without any word he had taken Waldo’s gun from his nerveless hand and carried it, with his own and the consul’s.

The consul strode across the gravelly sand, some fifty paces from the southwest corner of the tomb, to a bit of not wholly ruined wall from which there was a clear view of the doorway side of the tomb and of the side with the larger crevice.

“Hassan,” he commanded, “watch here.”

Hassan said something in Persian.

“How many cubs were there?” the consul asked Waldo.

Waldo stared mute.

“How many young ones did you see?” the consul asked again.

“Twenty or more,” Waldo made answer.

“That’s impossible,” snapped the consul.

“There seemed to be sixteen or eighteen,” Waldo reasserted.  Hassan smiled and grunted.  The consul took from him two guns, handed Waldo his, and they walked around the tomb to a point p. 169about equally distant from the opposite corner.  There was another bit of ruin, and in front of it, on the side toward the tomb, was a block of stone mostly in the shadow of the wall.

“Convenient,” said the consul.  “Sit on that stone and lean against the wall; make yourself comfortable.  You are a bit shaken, but you will be all right in a moment.  You should have something to eat, but we have nothing.  Anyhow, take a good swallow of this.”

He stood by him as Waldo gasped over the raw brandy.

“Hassan will bring you his water bottle before he goes,” the consul went on; “drink plenty, for you must stay here for some time.  And now, pay attention to me.  We must extirpate these vermin.  The male, I judge, is absent.  If he had been anywhere about, you would not now be alive.  The young cannot be as many as you say, but, I take it, we have to deal with ten, a full litter.  We must smoke them out.  Hassan will go back to camp after fuel and the guard.  Meanwhile, you and I must see that none escape.”

He took Waldo’s gun, opened the breech, shut it, examined the magazine and handed it back to him.

“Now watch me closely,” he said.  He paced off, looking to his left past the tomb.  Presently he stopped and gathered several stones together.

“You see these?” he called.

Waldo shouted an affirmation.

The consul came back, passed on in the same line, looking to his right past the tomb, and presently, at a similar distance, put up another tiny cairn, shouted again and was again answered.  Again he returned.

p. 170“Now you are sure you cannot mistake those two marks I have made?”

“Very sure indeed,” said Waldo.

“It is important,” warned the consul.  “I am going back to where I left Hassan, to watch there while he is gone.  You will watch here.  You may pace as often as you like to either of those stone heaps.  From either you can see me on my beat.  Do not diverge from the line from one to the other.  For as soon as Hassan is out of sight I shall shoot any moving thing I see nearer.  Sit here till you see me set up similar limits for my sentry-go on the farther side, then shoot any moving thing not on my line of patrol.  Keep a lookout all around you.  There is one chance in a million that the male might return in daylight—mostly they are nocturnal, but this lair is evidently exceptional.  Keep a bright lookout.

“And now listen to me.  You must not feel any foolish sentimentalism about any fancied resemblance of these vermin to human beings.  Shoot, and shoot to kill.  Not only is it our duty, in general, to abolish them, but it will be very dangerous for us if we do not.  There is little or no solidarity in Mohammedan communities, but on the comparatively few points upon which public opinion exists it acts with amazing promptitude and vigor.  One matter as to which there is no disagreement is that it is incumbent upon every man to assist in eradicating these creatures.  The good old Biblical custom of stoning to death is the mode of lynching indigenous hereabouts.  These modern Asiatics are quite capable of applying it to any one believed derelict against any of these inimical monsters.  If we let one escape and the rumor of it gets about, p. 171we may precipitate an outburst of racial prejudice difficult to cope with.  Shoot, I say, without hesitation or mercy.”

“I understand,” said Waldo.

“I don’t care whether you understand or not,” said the consul.  “I want you to act.  Shoot if needful, and shoot straight.”  And he tramped off.

Hassan presently appeared, and Waldo drank from his water bottle as nearly all of its contents as Hassan would permit.  After his departure Waldo’s first alertness soon gave place to mere endurance of the monotony of watching and the intensity of the heat.  His discomfort became suffering, and what with the fury of the dry glare, the pangs of thirst and his bewilderment of mind, Waldo was moving in a waking dream by the time Hassan returned with two donkeys and a mule laden with brushwood.  Behind the beasts straggled the guard.

Waldo’s trance became a nightmare when the smoke took effect and the battle began.  He was, however, not only not required to join in the killing, but was enjoined to keep back.  He did keep very much in the background, seeing only so much of the slaughter as his curiosity would not let him refrain from viewing.  Yet he felt all a murderer as he gazed at the ten small carcasses laid out arow, and the memory of his vigil and its end, indeed of the whole day, though it was the day of his most marvelous adventure, remains to him as the broken recollections of a phantasmagoria.
 

On the morning of his memorable peril Waldo had waked early.  The experiences of his p. 172sea-voyage, the sights at Gibraltar, at Port Said, in the canal, at Suez, at Aden, at Muscat, and at Basrah had formed an altogether inadequate transition from the decorous regularity of house and school-life in New England to the breathless wonder of the desert immensities.

Everything seemed unreal, and yet the reality of its strangeness so besieged him that he could not feel at home in it, he could not sleep heavily in a tent.  After composing himself to sleep, he lay long conscious and awakened early, as on this morning, just at the beginning of the false-dawn.

The consul was fast asleep, snoring loudly.  Waldo dressed quietly and went out; mechanically, without any purpose or forethought, taking his gun.  Outside he found Hassan, seated, his gun across his knees, his head sunk forward, as fast asleep as the consul.  Ali and Ibrahim had left the camp the day before for supplies.  Waldo was the only waking creature about; for the guards, camped some little distance off, were but logs about the ashes of their fire.

When he had begun camp life he had expected to find the consul, that combination of sportsman, explorer and arch?ologist, a particularly easy-going guardian.  He had looked forward to absolutely untrammeled liberty in the spacious expanse of the limitless wastes.  The reality he had found exactly the reverse of his preconceptions.  The consul’s first injunction was:

“Never let yourself get out of sight of me or of Hassan unless he or I send you off with Ali or Ibrahim.  Let nothing tempt you to roam about alone.  Even a ramble is dangerous.  You might lose sight of the camp before you knew it.”

p. 173At first Waldo acquiesced, later he protested.  “I have a good pocket compass.  I know how to use it.  I never lost my way in the Maine woods.”

“No Kourds in the Maine woods,” said the consul.

Yet before long Waldo noticed that the few Kourds they encountered seemed simple-hearted, peaceful folk.  No semblance of danger or even of adventure had appeared.  Their armed guard of a dozen greasy tatterdemalions had passed their time in uneasy loafing.

Likewise Waldo noticed that the consul seemed indifferent to the ruins they passed by or encamped among, that his feeling for sites and topography was cooler than lukewarm, that he showed no ardor in the pursuit of the scanty and uninteresting game.  He had picked up enough of several dialects to hear repeated conversations about “them.”  “Have you heard of any about here?”  “Has one been killed?”  “Any traces of them in this district?”  And such queries he could make out in the various talks with the natives they met; as to what “they” were he received no enlightenment.

Then he had questioned Hassan as to why he was so restricted in his movements.  Hassan spoke some English and regaled him with tales of Afrits, ghouls, specters and other uncanny legendary presences; of the jinn of the waste, appearing in human shape, talking all languages, ever on the alert to ensnare infidels; of the woman whose feet turned the wrong way at the ankles, luring the unwary to a pool and there drowning her victims; of the malignant ghosts of dead brigands, more terrible than their living fellows; of the spirit in the shape of a wild ass, or of a gazelle, enticing its pursuers p. 174to the brink of a precipice and itself seeming to run ahead upon an expanse of sand, a mere mirage, dissolving as the victim passed the brink and fell to death; of the sprite in the semblance of a hare feigning a limp, or of a ground-bird feigning a broken wing, drawing its pursuer after it till he met death in an unseen pit or well-shaft.

Ali and Ibrahim spoke no English.  As far as Waldo could understand their long harangues, they told similar stories or hinted at dangers equally vague and imaginary.  These childish bogy-tales merely whetted Waldo’s craving for independence.

Now, as he sat on a rock, longing to enjoy the perfect sky, the clear, early air, the wide, lonely landscape, along with the sense of having it to himself, it seemed to him that the consul was merely innately cautious, over-cautious.  There was no danger.  He would have a fine, leisurely stroll, kill something perhaps, and certainly be back in camp before the sun grew hot.  He stood up.

Some hours later he was seated on a fallen coping-stone in the shadow of a ruined tomb.  All the country they had been traversing is full of tombs and remains of tombs, prehistoric, Bactrian, old Persian, Parthian, Sassanian, or Mohammedan, scattered everywhere in groups or solitary.  Vanished utterly are the faintest traces of the cities, towns, and villages, ephemeral houses or temporary huts, in which had lived the countless generations of mourners who had reared these tombs.

The tombs, built more durably than mere dwellings of the living, remained.  Complete or ruinous, or reduced to mere fragments, they were everywhere.  In that district they were all of one type.  p. 175Each was domed and below was square, its one door facing eastward and opening into a larger empty room, behind which were the mortuary chambers.

In the shadow of such a tomb Waldo sat.  He had shot nothing, had lost his way, had no idea of the direction of the camp, was tired, warm and thirsty.  He had forgotten his water bottle.

He swept his gaze over the vast, desolate prospe............