"I have been fighting down the feeling of thirst for the last two hours. Do you know," he added, after a refreshing and yet a tantalising irrigation of the mouth and throat, "I have been haunted by a sort of waking dream while plodding on in silence this afternoon. There was an old man who used to bring fruit and ginger-beer to the cricket-field at my school, and he has kept rising up in my memory so vividly that I could see every wrinkle in his face, and the strings which kept down the corks of his brown stone bottles as vividly as if they were before me." "I wish they were!" cried Tom. "By Jove, what a trade the man might drive if he could be transported here just now." "Oh! And I have often scorned that nectarial fluid," groaned Edwards, "or only considered it as a tolerable ingredient of shandy--" "Silence!" cried Strachan. "Don't utter that word, or I shall simply go mad. It is quite bad enough of the exasperating Green to allude to the homely pop, though one bore with it in consideration of the tender reminiscences of his childhood; but human endurance has its limits." Those who reckoned on carrying the wells that night were over sanguine; when the rising ground was reached the progress of the guns was very slow; indeed, it was wonderful how the sailors managed to drag them on at all. The atmosphere had now for some time become perfectly clear; and when the infantry had surmounted the first hill they saw the broad valley of Tamai, and on the hills bounding it on the further side, corresponding with the somewhat lower range, where they stood, the enemy's lines were plainly discernible. There were multitudes on foot, and others mounted, some on camels, some on horseback. The brigades halted, and the scouts pushed to the front, to unmask the enemy's position. "Do you think we shall get on to-night, sir?" asked Major Elmfoot of the colonel. "Not a chance of it," replied the chief. "But let the men lie still and have a good rest before they begin making the zereba." So they did; even the youngest and most curious had learned by this time to husband their strength and snatch forty winks whenever they got a chance. "They are at it!" cried Edwards presently, as crack! crack! was heard in front; and then a couple of volleys, followed by more single shots and more volleys again, and then, when the work seemed getting really hot, sudden silence. Some object had been obtained, but what it was exactly regimental officers could not know till they read all about it in the papers afterwards. However, the question of advancing that evening, which had before been answered practically, was now settled officially in the negative, and the order to make the zereba was issued. Mimosa and cactus trees, many of them seven feet high, grew thickly around, so there was no lack of material.