It was a nerve-trying moment when the slab was gently raised from below, and Burnet, with his head just above the hole, looked towards the officers' tents. He could barely see the figure of the sentry pacing slowly to and fro. With the silence of moles Burnet and his Arab companion crept out of the hole, and, crawling on all fours, stole along a few yards to the shelter of the ruined wall. Burnet had his revolver, the Arab only a knife. They peered over the wall. Three campfires burned dully below the mound, some distance apart. Their light was insufficient to reveal the disposition of the bivouac. Moving stealthily round the corner of the wall, and sinking to the ground again, they crawled a few yards down the slope. A little to the right, at the foot of the mound, was a pile of objects which had certainly not been there before. Burnet guessed that it consisted of the stores which had been removed from the mules' backs. The two men threaded their way between boxes and bales, and continuing in the same direction, towards one of the camp-fires, discovered the guns close under the mound on the north-east side. Just above them, shadowing them from the little light that flickered from the stars, was another stack of boxes. Burnet had expected to find a special guard set over the guns. The camp, however, was so small--the total number of men seemed to be about a hundred and fifty--that the two sentries whose figures could be dimly descried moving up and down along the outer border of the bivouac had been deemed sufficient. There was a tent, however, near one of the camp-fires about a hundred yards away: it was clear that this was being used as a guard-house, for while Burnet, lying flat, was peering into the darkness four men came from the tent and marched northward. The sentries were being relieved. In a few minutes four men returned, and marched up the slope within twenty yards of the two figures lying there like logs. The officers' sentry was relieved; the sergeant came back with the three men released from duty, and re-entered the tent. Near another camp-fire, farther away, was a larger tent, presumably devoted to the subaltern officers. The men lay here and there on the open ground. From the sounds that reached his ears Burnet guessed that the horses and mules were hobbled near a patch of swamp still farther to his right. Burnet congratulated himself on his luck in having no special guard over the guns to deal with. He had the average Briton's dislike of attacking a man in the dark and at a disadvantage, and the possible necessity of disposing of an unsuspicious sentry had been disagreeable to contemplate. In the absence of such a guard, everything depended on whether he could move about without attracting the attention of the men in the guard-tent, of the distant sentries, or of any of the soldiers who might chance to be wakeful.