"True," interrupted Terence, who, even in that serious situation, could not resist such a fine opportunity for displaying his Irish humour. "I never think of a Scotchman without thinking of his skin. `God bless the gude Duke of Argyle!'" "Shame, Terence!" interrupted Harry Blount; "our situation is too serious for jesting." "He, all of us, may find it so before long," continued Colin, preserving his temper unruffled. "If that yelling crowd, that I can now hear plainer than ever, should come upon us, we'll have something else to think of than jokes about gude `Duke o' Argyle'. Hush! Do you hear that? Does it convince you that men and women are near? There are scores of both kinds." Colin had come to a stop, the others imitating his example. They were now more distant from the breakers, whose roar was somewhat deadened by the intervention of a sand-spur. In consequence, the other sounds were heard more distinctly. They could no longer be mistaken, even by the incredulous O'Connor. There were voices of men, women and children, cries and calls of quadrupeds, each according to its own kind, all mingled together in what might have been taken for some nocturnal saturnalia of the desert. The crisis was that in which Sailor Bill had become a subject of dispute between the two sheiks, in which not only their respective followers of the biped kind appeared to take part, but also every quadruped in the camp: dogs and dromedaries, horses, goats, and sheep, as if each had an interest in the ownership of the old man-o'-war's-man. The grotesque chorus was succeeded by an interval of silence, uninterrupted and profound. This was while the two sheiks were playing their game of "helga," the "chequers" of the Saara, with Sailor Bill as their stake. During this tranquil interlude, the three midshipmen had advanced through the rock-strewn ravine, had crept cautiously inside the ridges that encircled the camp, and concealed by the sparse bushes of mimosa, and favoured by the light of a full moon, had approached near enough to take note of what was passing among the tents. What they saw there, and then, was confirmatory of the theory of the young Scotchman; and convinced not only Harry Blount, but Terence O'Connor, that the stories of Arab hospitality were not only untrue, but diametrically opposed to the truth. There was old Bill before their faces, stripped to the shirt, to the "buff," surrounded by a circle of short squat women, dark-skinned, with black hair, and eyes sparkling in the moonlight, who were torturing him with tongue and touch, who pinched and spat upon him, who looked altogether like a band of infernal furies collected around some innocent victim that had fallen among them, and giving full play to their fiendish instincts.