"Tents, sahib; many tents, like flowers in a field." It was at least a minute before Bob’s less keen eyes were able to confirm the man’s strange announcement. Then he recognized that a huge brown patch, which he might well have mistaken for an outcrop of rock, or some other natural feature of the landscape, was in reality an aggregation of nomad tents, similar to those which he had passed on the hill-side behind. If he had felt dismay at the sight of the force assembled in the valley, his feeling now bordered on stupefaction. His brain was in a whirl. The misdeeds of Nurla Bai were as a pebble cast into a pond. The spreading circles had embraced a troop of Kalmuck horsemen, then a regiment, finally what appeared to be an army. The motive had developed from the spite and revenge of a single man to the greed of a company, and now--to what? Surely the inhabitants of this vast array of tents were not assembled for the puny purpose of snapping up a solitary silver mine. What design had brought them to this remote and barren tract in a desolate land? [Illustration: RECONNOITRING IN THE AEROPLANE] These were questions to which Bob was utterly unable to guess at the answers. His surprise and alarm did but increase as he approached the scene. Around a point where a small tributary joined the river from the south-east, extended a large bare space several miles in area. Of this open tract a portion that must have been at least a square mile in area, bounded on one side by the left bank of the tributary and on the other by the right bank of the river, was dotted with a series of encampments, arranged in regular order, and looking in the distance not unlike a kind of chess-board. Counting them as he drew nearer, Bob found that there were twenty of these separate camps. As he approached the nearest, he tried to number the rows of tents, and the individual tents in each row. But his pace was too swift and his mind too bewildered to allow of an exact reckoning. His impression was that there were twenty rows of tents about ten deep. The tents were apparently small; if he were not deceived by the distance, none of them could harbour more than five or six men. But as his eye ranged over the whole encampment, and he made a rapid calculation, he came to the staggering conclusion that the total force there on the ground beneath him could not be far short of twenty thousand men. CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH THE FIGHT AT THE BRIDGE