He had looked at his watch, and now he made a swift calculation of times and distances.  It was past six when he had left the camp.  Over broken ground it was impossible that he could hope to do more than seven miles an hour—­less on bad parts, more on the smooth.  His recollection of the track was that there were few smooth and many bad.  He would be lucky, then, if he reached Sarras anywhere from twelve to one.  Then the messages took a good two hours to go through, for they had to be transcribed at Cairo.  At the best he could only hope to have told his story in Fleet Street at two or three in the morning.  It was possible that he might manage it, but the chances seemed enormously against him.  About three the morning edition would be made up, and his chance gone for ever.  The one thing clear was that only the first man at the wires would have any chance at all, and Anerley meant to be first if hard riding could do it.  So he tapped away at the bird-like neck, and the creature’s long, loose limbs went faster and faster at every tap.  Where the rocky spurs ran down to the river, horses would have to go round, while camels might get across, so that Anerley felt that he was always gaining upon his companions.

But there was a price to be paid for the feeling.  He had heard of men who had burst when on camel journeys, and he knew that the Arabs swathe their bodies tightly in broad cloth bandages when they prepare for a long march.  It had seemed unnecessary and ridiculous when he first began to speed over the level track, but now, when he got on the rocky paths, he understood what it meant.  Never for an instant was he at the same angle.  Backwards, forwards he swung, with a tingling jar at the end of each sway, until he ached from his neck to his knees.  It caught him across the shoulders, it caught him down the spine, it gripped him over the loins, it marked the lower line of his ribs with one heavy, dull throb.  He clutched here and there with his hand to try and ease the strain upon his muscles.  He drew up his knees, altered his seat, and set his teeth with a grim determination to go through with it should it kill him.  His head was splitting, his flayed face smarting, and every joint in his body aching as if it were dislocated.  But he forgot all that when, with the rising of the moon, he heard the clinking of horses’ hoofs down upon the track by the river, and knew that, unseen by them, he had already got well abreast of his companions.  But he was hardly halfway, and the time already eleven.

All day the needles had been ticking away without intermission in the little corrugated iron hut which served as a telegraph station at Sarras.  With its bare walls and its packing-case seats, it was none the less for the moment one of the vital spots upon the earth’s surface, and the crisp, importunate ticking might have come from the world-old clock of Destiny.  Many august people had been at the other