’The story!  Haven’t I heard the story?  I’ve heard it on the march, in camp (he made me scour the country after invisible game); I’ve listened to a good part of it on one of the twin summits, after climbing the last hundred feet or so on my hands and knees.  Our escort (we had volunteer followers from village to village) had camped meantime on a bit of level ground half-way up the slope, and in the still breathless evening the smell of wood-smoke reached our nostrils from below with the penetrating delicacy of some choice scent.  Voices also ascended, wonderful in their distinct and immaterial clearness.  Jim sat on the trunk of a felled tree, and pulling out his pipe began to smoke.  A new growth of grass and bushes was springing up; there were traces of an earthwork under a mass of thorny twigs.  “It all started from here,” he said, after a long and meditative silence.  On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre precipice, I saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there ruinously—­the remnants of Sherif Ali’s impregnable camp.

’But it had been taken, though.  That had been his idea.  He had mounted Doramin’s old ordnance on the top of that hill; two rusty iron 7-pounders, a lot of small brass cannon—­currency cannon.  But if the brass guns represent wealth, they can also, when crammed recklessly to the muzzle, send a solid shot to some little distance.  The thing was to get them up there.  He showed me where he had fastened the cables, explained how he had improvised a rude capstan out of a hollowed log turning upon a pointed stake, indicated with the bowl of his pipe the outline of the earthwork.  The last hundred feet of the ascent had been the most difficult.  He had made himself responsible for success on his own head.  He had induced the war party to work hard all night.  Big fires lighted at intervals blazed all down the slope, “but up here,” he explained, “the hoisting gang had to fly around in the dark.”  From the top he saw men moving on the hillside like ants at work.  He himself on that night had kept on rushing down and climbing up like a squirrel, directing, encouraging, watching all along the line.  Old Doramin had himself carried up the hill in his arm-chair.  They put him down on the level place upon the slope, and he sat there in the light of one of the big fires—­“amazing old chap—­real old chieftain,” said Jim, “with his little fierce eyes—­a pair of immense flintlock pistols on his knees.  Magnificent things, ebony, silver-mounted, with beautiful locks and a calibre like an old blunderbuss.  A present from Stein, it seems—­in exchange for that ring, you know.  Used to belong to good old McNeil.  God only knows how he came by them.  There he sat, moving neither hand nor foot, a flame of dry brushwood behind him, and lots of people rushing about, shouting and pulling round him—­the most solemn, imposing old chap you can imagine.  He wouldn’t have had much chance if Sherif Ali had let his infernal crew loose