The _Victoria_ at that moment almost commanded the troop of horsemen who were still desperately urging their steeds at Joe’s heels. The doctor, standing in the front of the car, held the ladder clear, ready to throw it at any moment. Meanwhile, Joe had still maintained the distance between himself and his pursuers—say about fifty feet. The _Victoria_ was now ahead of the party. “Attention!” exclaimed the doctor to Kennedy. “I’m ready!” “Joe, look out for yourself!” shouted the doctor in his sonorous, ringing voice, as he flung out the ladder, the lowest ratlines of which tossed up the dust of the road. As the doctor shouted, Joe had turned his head, but without checking his horse. The ladder dropped close to him, and at the instant he grasped it the doctor again shouted to Kennedy: “Throw ballast!” “It’s done!” And the _Victoria_, lightened by a weight greater than Joe’s, shot up one hundred and fifty feet into the air. Joe clung with all his strength to the ladder during the wide oscillations that it had to describe, and then making an indescribable gesture to the Arabs, and climbing with the agility of a monkey, he sprang up to his companions, who received him with open arms. The Arabs uttered a scream of astonishment and rage. The fugitive had been snatched from them on the wing, and the _Victoria_ was rapidly speeding far beyond their reach. “Master! Kennedy!” ejaculated Joe, and overwhelmed, at last, with fatigue and emotion, the poor fellow fainted away, while Kennedy, almost beside himself, kept exclaiming: “Saved—saved!” “Saved indeed!” murmured the doctor, who had recovered all his phlegmatic coolness. Joe was almost naked. His bleeding arms, his body covered with cuts and bruises, told what his sufferings had been. The doctor quietly dressed his wounds, and laid him comfortably under the awning. Joe soon returned to consciousness, and asked for a glass of brandy, which the doctor did not see fit to refuse, as the faithful fellow had to be indulged. After he had swallowed the stimulant, Joe grasped the hands of his two friends and announced that he was ready to relate what had happened to him. But they would not allow him to talk at that time, and he sank back into a profound sleep, of which he seemed to have the greatest possible need. The _Victoria_ was then taking an oblique line to the westward. Driven by a tempestuous wind, it again approached the borders of the thorny desert, which the travellers descried over the tops of palm-trees, bent and broken by the storm; and, after having made a run of two hundred miles since rescuing Joe, it passed the tenth degree of east longitude about nightfall. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENTH. The Western Route.—Joe wakes up.—His Obstinacy.—End of Joe’s Narrative.—Tagelei.—Kennedy’s Anxieties.—The Route to the North.—A Night near Aghades.