She moved mechanically, like one in a dream, and the circumstance of striking her head as she failed to stoop low enough in passing through the wicket added to her confusion; nor was she quite aware that they had been permitted to pass free and unquestioned, as two men, by the Naick, to whom Zohrab made some jesting remark about the "awkwardness of his friend," until she saw behind her the lofty white walls of the fort gleaming in the pale starlight, their loopholes and outline reflected downward, in the slimy wet ditch where water-lilies were floating in profusion. Unhaltering his horse and mounting, her new companion desired her, with more impressiveness than tenderness of tone--for the former was his habit, and the moment was a perilous and exciting one--to walk on by his side a little way, as if they were conversing, and thereby to lull any suspicion in the minds of such Dooranees as might be observing them; for they were still within an unpleasant distance of the long rifles of those who were posted on the towers of the fort; and still more were they within range of those ginjauls which are still used in India, and are precisely similar to the swivel wall-pieces invented long ago by Marshal Vauban, and throw a pound ball to a vast distance. On descending the other side of an intervening eminence, that was covered by wild sugar-canes and aromatic shrubs, the leaves of which were tossing in the evening breeze, he curtly desired her to place her right foot upon his left within the stirrup-iron, and then, with the aid of his hand, he readily placed her on the holsters of his saddle before him. He now applied the spurs with vigour to his strong, active, and long-bodied Tartar horse, and, with a speed which its double burden certainly served to diminish, it began quickly to leave behind the dreaded fort of Mohammed Saleh. As the latter began to sink and lessen in the distance, Mabel Trecarrel felt as if there was a strange and dreamy unreality about all this episode. Many an officer and Indian Sowar had ridden into the Khoord Cabul Pass with his wife or his children before him, even as she was now borne by Zohrab; she had heard and seen many wild and terrible things since her father, with other officers of the Company's service, had come, in an evil hour, "up country," to command Shah Sujah's Native Contingent; she had read and heard of many such adventures, escapes, flights, and abductions in romance and reality; but what might be her fate now, if this should prove to be the latter--an abduction of herself--some trick of which she had permitted herself to become the too-ready victim?