And the luckless girl wept bitterly. CHAPTER VI. A SKIRMISH IN THE DESERT. Buried in the sand! Yes--it was all true--too true; the gay, handsome, and usually light-hearted Laird of Stratherroch, one of the most popular fellows in the Black Watch--he who had won the V.C. in battle with his good claymore--he whom Eveline had known in the heyday of his life, when the world seemed so fresh and fair to both, whom she had last seen as a despairing and broken-hearted lover, was gone--struck down by a bullet of some nameless Egyptian savage, buried in the desert, and she would never see him more, though the poignancy of his farewell would haunt her for many a day. And thus it all came to pass. A band of Bedouins had been hovering in the vicinity of Matarieh, plundering and looting. These Allan, after a consultation with Cameron, resolved to make a demonstration against, and with Farquharson, his sergeant, and thirty picked men, in light marching order, they quitted the village, and about an hour before sunrise took their way towards the desert. The light of the coming day shone along the latter, a sandy waste, overlooked by Jebel Mokattam, a chain of rocks abrupt and barren that extends from Cairo to the cataracts. They are generally flat, with beetling summits, while below, on the face which fronts the Nile, they are furrowed as if water-worn by the rain of ages. On the other flank, towards Jebel Dimeshk, rises a ridge of sand-hills that follows in the same direction at an equal distance, all the windings and sinuosities of that which lines the eastern bank. Between lay the winding line of the disused railway. In front the horizon seemed foggy or dusty, and along the desert the sun shone for a time, as he rose, like a red ball, shorn of his rays. In rear the party left behind the village of Matarieh, with the clumps of palm-trees, beyond which, with the tall obelisk and the ruins of several sphinxes, rose the great mounds of earth that mark the site of Heliopolis, 'the City of the Sun,' the inhabitants of which worshipped a bull called Mnevis, with the same ceremonies as the Apis of Memphis, and where Apollo had an oracle. Over the same ground where in 1800 a battle was fought between the French and Turks, in which the latter were defeated with the loss of eight thousand men and all their cannon and baggage, Allan's little band marched merrily on towards the desert in hope to 'polish off' a few of the Bedouins before returning to quarters. They were well supplied with ammunition; each man had a day's rations in his haversack, and his water-bottle filled with the red sandy fluid of the Nile. In Exodus we are told that the Egyptians loathed to drink the waters of that river, and, as Cameron said, 'the men of the Black Watch were much of the same mind.'