Meantime, onward they journeyed, day after day; sometimes, night after night; sleuths with their eyes to the ground clinging to the slightest fragment of sign of the robbers’ old trail. No check, and they had many, could shake them from their purpose nor confuse their wonderful intelligence in tracking. Ever they held on, out into the wastes of sand, out into the Unknown, far beyond the limits of their territory. Whither they were going they knew not! _That_ the faint tracks at their feet alone could ultimately answer. III A band of Ehaggaran natives, engaged in tending to the grazing of their herds of goats and camels, were camped beneath the eastern slopes of the Ahaggar mountain-range near Tiririn, not vastly distant from Ghat, on the borders of the Fezzan. In the cool of late afternoon the women were bestirring about the tasks of camp; voices floated softly into the great space of the surroundings; wood-smoke rose from freshly nourished camp-fires, untroubled by wind; and altogether the scene was pastoral and peaceful. None would suspect that the camp sheltered bandits. Yet it is often thus that, mingled with the commonplace simplicity of rural atmosphere, gangs of robbers of the Sahara, when off the trail, live and protect themselves against discovery at the hands of unfriendly neighbours. Surrounded by peaceful occupation and circumspect behaviour, they live the routine life of their camps, their weapons of warfare carefully hidden, and all other traces of evil-doing; while they retreat behind a curtain of deceit, and cunning, and secrecy; in which they are past-masters. And, in this camp near Tiririn, behind the veil of placid scene, lay Kahena, the bride of Rali. Among a group of congested hutments Kahena, her cotton shawl drawn closely about her features, was hidden in a dark chamber, free from bonds, but hourly watched over by the women of the robber band so that she should not endeavour to escape; though escape in such a wilderness, should she be desperate enough to attempt it, could only spell death. Poor child! no longer had she the proud bearing of belle of her tribe. Distress and fear in long enduring her terrible position had left little of youth’s freshness and vigour, and she had come near to collapse and absolute surrender, though to this hour unsubmissive and fiercely antagonistic to the advances of her captors. But her plight, and everything sinister in the inner life of the camp was, for the time being, securely hidden behind the disarming atmosphere of natural peacefulness of the scene.