As yet no rain had fallen: and for ten deafening minutes the little party rode in silence through an inferno of reiterate light and sound. Once or twice Quita glanced at her husband, cantering beside her, and wondered vaguely when she would hear him speak again; wondered, too, at her own matter-of-fact acceptance of that which a week ago had appeared impossible. But the storm stunned heart and brain, as well as eye and ear. Everything human,--life, death, love itself,--seemed trivial in face of this stupendous battle of the elements. Above them, and on all sides of them, the lightning leaped and darted, like a live thing seeking its prey. It was as if the sombre heavens were bringing forth brood upon brood of fiery serpents, and greeting the birth of each with ear-splitting peals of Titanic laughter. Then came the rain:--not in mere drops, but in a solid sheet of water, blinding, drenching, stupefying. At the same instant the fury of the storm culminated in a blaze of white light that seemed to spring upon them from all sides at once, with a shout as of fiends let loose; and, through the echoing after-roll of thunder, came a sharper, harsher sound,--the death note of a mighty tree. Lenox and his wife faced one another involuntarily with startled looks. "How appalling!--What was it?" she asked between two breaths. "A pine struck somewhere up the _khud_. Not frightened, are you, lass?" he added with tender concern. "It's the very thing you wanted. You've got your thrilling finale with a vengeance!" A clatter of breaking branches made him look up. "Great God!" he cried, on a note of alarm. "Back your pony sharp. It's coming down on the top of us!" And as she obeyed, with the swift instinct of fear, Desmond's voice reached him through the rush of the rain. "Look out for yourself, Lenox! She's safe enough." But before the words were out, the upper half of a great deodar crashed down upon the narrow path, and a long branch struck the Galloway's shoulder with tremendous force. For an instant Shaitan staggered under the blow:--then horse, and man, and tree were hurled headlong down the steep, rain-lashed ravine. A great cry broke from Quita: and in that cry, and the white, rigid repression that followed it, Garth had his answer to the question he had never asked. For the hundredth part of a second all seven sat paralysed by the hideous thing that had happened before their eyes, and by the hopeless nature of the drop down which Lenox had disappeared:--wiped out, as though he had never been. Then Desmond's practical vigour asserted itself, and he sprang lightly to the ground. "Here, take hold of the Demon, some one!" And it was Quita who leant forward and grasped the bridle with a steady hand. Her action gave him the chance he wanted of getting close enough to speak a few words of encouragement in a hurried undertone.