dots of their flying mantles scattered here and there among the quickly moving brownish mass formed by their beasts in silhouette against the somber desert sky.
They had long left the road of the caravans. Their course was slowly declining in a northwesterly direction, towards the Walls of the Princes of the North, the Gate of Egypt from Asia. But between their intention and their goal lay the Nahal Musri,[1] the watery boundary line of Egypt towards the East, a torrent at times of a most violent and uncompromising temper and disposition.
In a shallow depression of the monotonous ground hard by the road of the caravans, and only a stone's throw from the scene of the recent fray, several dozen camels were moving about, nervous, with the excitement of the battle and the satisfaction of their success plainly visible in their exaggerated and silent stride and the frisky tossing of their bald heads. They were nosing each other with bubbling good-humor, and rubbing their sides against each other, and still were constantly stamping about without rest and their usual composure.
Their riders were sitting on the ground at one end of the hollow, busy with repairing and cleaning their weapons. Here one was diligently scouring a mischievously crooked steel blade, there, another was mending the broken pole of citron wood which had served him as a javelin, and had snapped in two at the outset, and still another was energetically whetting the head of a lance which had been nicked and dulled by the heavy blows of the swords of their adversaries. But Rachor, their leader, a man of the build of the wild
- ↑ Wady el Arish.
