By this time we were both in uniform—if one could call it uniform: white topee helmets, white cotton shirts with the sleeves rolled up, white cotton "shorts", bare legs, and canvas shoes. We only had to put our neck through our revolver lanyards and buckle our revolver belts round our waists to be ready to land and demand the Prodigal Son; quite ready even though ten thousand Arabs wanted to keep him. The chart showed three fathoms of water quite close to the fort which he was so gallantly, or otherwise, holding out against such odds; the little "_B.A._" only drew eight feet at the stern, so we could run up almost alongside, and the one thousand or ten thousand Arabs would, we feared, soon alter their minds when they heard the chink of those dollars. Both of us sincerely hoped that they would not and would give the six-pounder and the Maxims a chance of arguing it out with them. We were doing this for the Sultan as a personal favour, so knew he wouldn’t mind how many of his faithful (?) subjects went to Paradise during the argument. We certainly did not. "My dear old chap," Popple Opstein said, smacking me on the back as this thought struck him, "there’ll be no red-tape business about this little job; none of your beastly waiting for them to fire at you first, no worry about ’papers’ and nationality or rot like that. Just go straight in, see how things are; if he’s in a tight place, and they won’t take the old man Sultan’s bag of dollars, pull the Prodigal Son out by the scruff of his neck—and there we are. We ought to have fine sport." Presently we ran clear of the channel into a big backwater or "khor", not so big as that at Kalat-al-Abeid but longer and more narrow, its shores thick with scraggy, dried-up-looking mangrove trees, with here and there a clump of darker almond trees, the everlasting bare hills rising behind everything. "There’s the fort," we both cried, pointing to the top end, where we could see a big, square, battlemented building about two miles away, standing alone on a waste of sand in which even the mangrove trees apparently could not exist, for they stopped short perhaps five hundred yards from either side of the fort. Almost at the same moment we spotted the two rebellious towns—one on each shore—nestling under the trees. Through my telescope I saw that the red flag of Muscat drooped down from the flagstaff over the fort, so we had not arrived too late! Not another sign of life appeared, no figures were moving about behind the parapet of the fort, and not a single soul showed on the open sandy space. As we drew nearer, a dark patch close to the edge of the sea turned out to be a couple of trees half-concealing a dome-shaped well—the well for the guarding of which the fort had been built.