King stared about him. He had not realized until then that without aid of the lamps he could not see his own hand held out in front of him; his eyes had grown used to the gloom, like those of the surgeons in the sick-bays below the water line in Nelson's fleet. “But who shouted?” “Who knows? There is only one here who gives orders. We be many who obey,” said Ismail. “Whose men were the last ones?” King asked him, trying a new line. “Bull-with-a-beard's.” “And whose man art thou, Ismail?” The Afridi hesitated, and when he spoke at last there was not quite the same assurance in his voice as once there had been. “I am hers! Be thou hers, too! But it is night. Sleep against the toil tomorrow. There be many sick in Khinjan.” King made a little effort to clean the cave, but the task was hopeless. For one thing he was so weary that his very bones were water; for another, Ismail pretended to be equally tired, and when the suggestion that they should help was put to the others they claimed their izzat indignantly. Izzat and sharm (honor and shame) are the two scarcely distinguishable enemies of honest work, into whose teeth it takes both nerve and resolution to drive a Hillman at the best of times. Nerve King had, but his resolution was asleep. He was too tired to care. He appointed them to two-hour watches, to relieve one another until dawn, and flung himself on a clean bed. He was asleep before his head had met the pillow; and for all he knew to the contrary he dreamed of Yasmini all night long. It seemed to him that she came into the cave--she the woman of the faded photograph the general had given him in Peshawur--and that the cave became filled with the strange intoxicating scent that had first wooed his senses in her reception room in Delhi. He dreamed that she called him by name. First, “King sahib!” Then, “Kurram Khan!” And her voice was surprisingly familiar. But dreams are strange things. “He sleeps!” said the same voice presently. “It is good that he sleeps!” And in his sleep he thought that a shadowy Ismail grunted an answer. After that he was very sure in his dream that it was good to sleep, although a voice he did not recognize and that he was quite sure was a dream-voice, kept whispering to him to wake up and protect himself. But the scent grew stronger, and he began to dream of cobras, that danced with a woman and struck at her so swiftly that she had to become two women in order to avoid them; and Rewa Gunga came and laughed at both and called them amateurs, so that the woman became enraged and drew a bronze-bladed dagger with a golden hilt. Then intelligible dreams ceased altogether, and he, slept like a dead man, but with a vague suggestion ever with him that Yasmini was not very far away, and that she was interested in him to a point that was actually embarrassing. It was like the ether-dream he once dreamt in a hospital. When he awoke at last it was after dawn, and light shone down the passage into his cave.