After staggering some paces over the ground, his thoughts returned to him; and he more clearly comprehended his situation. Escape was out of the question. He was prisoner to a party of wandering Bedouins, the worst to be found in all the wide expanse of the Saaran desert, the wreckers of the Atlantic coast. The sailor might have felt surprise at seeing a collection of familiar objects, into the midst of which he had wandered. By the doorway of a tent, one of the largest upon the ground, there was a pile of paraphernalia, every article of which was typical, not of the Saara, but the sea. There were "belongings" of the cabin and caboose, the 'tween decks and the forecastle, all equally proclaiming themselves the debris of a castaway ship. The sailor could have no conjectures as to the vessel to which they had belonged. He knew the articles by sight, one and all of them. They were the spoils of the corvette that had been washed ashore and fallen into the hands of the wreckers. Among them Old Bill saw some things that had appertained to himself. On the opposite side of the encampment, by another large tent, was a second pile of ship's equipments, like the first guarded by a sentinel, who squatted beside it. The sailor looked around in expectation to see some of the corvette's crew. Some might have escaped, like himself and his three companions, by reaching the shore on cask, coop, or spar. If so, they had not fallen into the hands of the wreckers; or if they had, they were not in the camp, unless, indeed, they might be inside some of the tents. This was not likely. Most probably they had all been drowned, or had succumbed to a worse fate than drowning--death at the hands of the cruel coast robbers who now surrounded the survivor. The circumstances under which the old sailor made these reflections were such as to render the last hypothesis sufficiently probable. He was being pushed about and dragged over the ground by two men, armed with long curved scimitars, contesting some point with one another, apparently as to which should be first to cut off his head! Both of these men appeared to be chiefs, "sheiks", as the sailor heard them called by their followers; a party of whom, also with arms in their hands, stood behind each sheik, all seemingly alike eager to perform the act of decapitation. So near seemed the old sailor's head to being cut off, that for some seconds he was not quite sure whether it still remained upon his shoulders. He could not understand a word that passed between the contending parties; though there was talk enough to have satisfied a sitting of parliament, and probably with about the same quantity of sense in it.