The order of march was strictly established. At the head were Nasr, Lady Hester and her escort; Bruce, the doctor and the armed servants protected the rearguard, and the scouts extended themselves unceasingly across the sand-hills. The travellers felt then that the journey was serious and disquieting. They were on territory which did not submit to the Turks, and had no succour to expect. Their protectors were Bedouins, conquered by the lure of gain to-day, but changeable, uncertain, unattachable, hostile to-morrow. The caravan was long, the camels loaded with objects calculated to excite covetousness, the servants little numerous. The courage and the decision of a woman, her sang-froid, her energy, her liberalities, the renown which had preceded her, it was this which constituted the surest guarantees for the success of the expedition! And this woman was ill, so much that Bruce and Meryon asked each other, not without trembling, how she would withstand the fatigue. How was physical exhaustion and mental lassitude to keep in good order the quarrelsome and thievish Bedouins? Already there was a struggle, cunning and dissimulated, between Nasr and Lady Hester: the one wishing to compel the other to increase the price agreed upon, ready to employ every means to gain piastres; the other persuaded that, if she yielded, to-morrow her baggage, her arms, her clothes would no longer belong to her. The start took place at daybreak, in the sharp morning air, and they marched under a uniform sky, of an implacable and dull blue. The tawny sands muffled the shoes of the horses, and in the great solitude, the glistening void of the desert, the smallest objects, a tuft of prickly grass, a fox, the flight of a partridge, assumed an extraordinary importance. On a sudden, the alarm disturbed the caravan. An attack was imminent. From the extremity of the horizon a troop of horsemen was rushing towards them at full gallop. Wild excitement! Rumours! Lady Hester, however, examined with her eye the extreme line of the desert, and immediately assured her companions that there were many horses in the distance, but that they were without riders. This assertion, subsequently verified, sensibly increased her prestige with the Bedouins, whose piercing eyes were accustomed, like those of sailors, to watch without intermission for the dangers of them seas of sand.