I thought how old Popple Opstein’s face would have beamed, and his yellow hair stood up, if only he had been here with me on that edge of rocks. Yes, here I was literally on the edge of civilization, where all my life I had longed to be. How my chum would have chaffed me about that if he saw me now! Perhaps in a few hours, if he had the luck to be landed, he would see me. And, thinking of yellow hair, perhaps little Miss Borsen, if she too could see me and could realize what might soon happen, would treat me as a man. More likely than not she would only have smiled in her tantalizing, irritating way, and told me how uncomfortable I looked. Jaffa touched me. "Bedouin see very far; very good sight; see us soon." What an ass I was! I had ordered Webster and his fellows to conceal themselves below the crest, and here I was still sprawling on the sky-line myself. I crawled lower down; so did Jaffa and Griffiths. Until I had left the ridge it never occurred to me that probably the advance party of Bedouins would scale the sides of the gap and scatter along the edge. If they did that they would certainly see us; so it was necessary to hide much farther away from it and take no such risk. I whistled softly to Webster, and he came crawling across to me, keeping well below the sky-line. "Take your men a hundred yards along the ridge," I told him; "hide among those rocks there, below the edge, and for Heaven’s sake don’t show yourselves, not until the last Arab and the last camel have gone halfway down the zigzag, and not until you see me move." "I understand, sir," he answered grimly, and presently I saw him and his two men scramble to a cluster of detached rocks much farther along. When they were safely hidden, Jaffa, Griffiths, and myself crawled in the opposite direction, away from the gap, behind some more boulders. We shifted about among them until we found a position from which we could see that gap, and also look down the zigzag path. We were about one hundred and fifty yards from the gap, and practically on a level with it. Of course we could see nothing of the approaching horses and camels, but I trusted to my ears to hear them. Lying there under these conditions was an extraordinary trial to my nerves, and I thanked my stars that Webster had come ashore with me that morning and not Moore. Moore would have made a hopeless muddle of his job, and could not have controlled his own nerves, let alone those of his men. As it was, I presently found the strain of waiting and listening so great that I had to hang on to those rocks, like a maniac, to prevent my legs making me crawl up to the sky-line, twenty feet above us, to have one more look at the caravan. I do not believe that if I lived a thousand years I could be more excited or "jumpy".