Part 65 (1/2)

For the horse halted and she fell off, flat on the soft sand.

Shaken, but not hurt, she sat up and gazed around.

A little oasis had been reached, where date palms stood black against the all-prevailing silver, and a tiny spring bubbled with cheerful whisper.

When the Sultan took his namesake out for exercise, this was the extreme limit of their ride--the horse had been there once already that day--and in the shade of the date palms the man and the horse would rest awhile before returning to the city.

But Pansy knew none of these things. She only knew that valuable time was being lost sitting there on the ground. But it was such an effort to get up.

Green eyes had seen her fall as if dead. The hyenas crept stealthily forward to feast upon what lay helpless in the sand. But when she sat up they retreated, to squat on their haunches at a safe distance, and fill the night with demoniacal laughter.

The sound brought Pansy to her feet, swaying with fatigue. She had heard it before, around her father's camp in Gambia.

But it was one thing to hear the hyenas when there were thirty or more people between herself and them, and another now that she was quite alone in the desert, with no one to come to her aid.

The chorus of mad, mocking mirth brought fear clutching at her, a fear that the horse's wild snorts increased. She looked round sharply to find there were at least a dozen of the brutes on her trail.

It was not Pansy's nature to show fear, even though she felt it.

Going to the spring, she picked up several large stones, and threw them at the hyenas.

A note of fear crept into their hideous voices. They beat a swift retreat, melting away into distance. There was too much life left in the girl and horse for them to attack as yet.

Gathering her tired self together Pansy looked round for a rock high enough to enable her to mount by. As it happened there was none handy.

Taking her horse by the mane, she led him from the oasis. Somewhat protestingly he went.

Pansy had to stagger on for nearly a mile on foot, in the deep, fatiguing sand, before she could find a tussock high enough to mount by.

Once on, she left the route to her horse.

To the uninitiated, one portion of the desert looks very similar to another. And the girl had no idea that the horse was retracing his steps, making his way slowly and laboriously back to El-Ammeh.

She had not the strength left even to look around her. The hot night, the long ride, the sickly excitement attached to escaping, the thirst that now raged within her, and the final tiring walk, after months of inactivity, had told upon her. Utterly worn out, she just managed to keep her seat, in a world that had become a place of aching weariness, through which there rang occasional wild shrieks of laughter.

Then it became impossible to cling on any longer.

All at once, she fell off and stayed in the sand, half stunned by her fall, conscious of nothing except that she had escaped from the Sultan Casim Ammeh.

When she fell the horse stopped. He stretched a long neck and sniffed and sniffed at her. But since she did not get up, he did not leave her. He waited until she was ready to start off again, quite glad of the rest himself.

However, there was not to be much rest for him.

A shriek of diabolical laughter rang out at his very heels. With a snort of fear and rage, he lashed out. The laughter turned into a howl of pain, and one of the hyenas retreated on three legs, with a broken shoulder.

But there were twenty or more of them now, against one old horse and a girl too utterly exhausted to know even that her life was in danger.

And each of the hyenas had a strength of jaw that could break the thigh of an ox, and a cowardice of heart equalled only by their strength.

For sometime they circled round, watching their prey with ravenous, glaring green eyes, and every now and again one or the other made a forward rush, only to find those iron heels between it and its meal.