The cutting of the cable seemed to determine him to follow my advice about preparing his house for any emergency. All day I heard people lumbering in and out, and the old butler, looking scared, told me that they were putting sand-bags round the veranda and filling the upper rooms with stores, the most portable of the telegraph apparatus, and ammunition. They even carried sand-bags through my room and piled them up on the balcony outside. Ellis and Hartley supervised these preparations and kept me informed of what the _Bunder Abbas_ was doing; and when, later on, I heard a good deal of rifle firing and one or two rounds from her six-pounder, they told me that the Afghans were sniping at the boat whilst it was trying to grapple the end of the cable. I could not help wondering whether this was very soothing to Mrs. Fisher’s nerves, and I pictured her in the cabin with that six-pounder going off just below her, and wishing that she had remained on shore. At sunset they reported that the boat had returned, unsuccessful, and that the _Bunder Abbas_ had steamed round to her former anchorage. I now had not spoken for forty-eight hours, and had lain like a log all the time. I felt distinctly stronger, and no blood had come into my throat and mouth since the early morning. I slept fairly well that third night, and was awakened from a nightmare by real shrieking and yelling, by the firing of hundreds of rifles beneath the windows, and the tut-tut-tut-tut of the Maxim on the roof above me. A moment later came the comforting sound of the six-pounder and the noise of the other Maxim aboard the "_B.A._". Not a soul could I hear stirring in the house, and the feeling of being left quite alone, without knowing what was happening and how things were going, was almost insupportable. A bullet, splintering a shutter, flattened itself against the wall over my bed and dropped with a thud on the floor, a shower of plaster following it, and some dropping on my face. Outside the wall of the room there was a sound as if men were hammering on the stonework, and I gradually realized that these were bullets, not hammers. The horrid noises seemed to be drawing closer, and I thought that they were growing louder away to the right, where those huts stood. *CHAPTER XVIII* *To the Rescue* As I lay there on my trestle-bed, groaning at my miserable position, more bullets came in through the shutters and brought down showers of plaster from the wall behind me. At last I could stand the strain no longer, and was on the point of trying to reach the shutters and open them, so that at least I could see what was happening, when Miss Borsen, white as a sheet, came in, and, seeing me with one leg over the side of the bed, bade me angrily to lie down and not move or speak.