This catastrophe rather cooled Allan's humane ideas of succouring the wounded. Very few of the Highlanders had been touched, and these but slightly. However, it seemed as if Cameron was dying. He was speechless, and his mouth at times was filled with blood. It was impossible then to ascertain the exact nature of his wounds, or what part of the body was injured. Allan, full of tenderness, anxiety, and the deepest commiseration, formed a pad of his handkerchief, and, using his sash as a bandage, endeavoured, so far as in him lay, to stop the bleeding, while a litter was improvised by a couple of rifles, with a blanket stretched over them; and the party began to fall back on Matarieh, but often had to halt, for the agony of Cameron was great, and Allan began to despair of getting him conveyed in life to Matarieh, which, as we have said, was nearly ten miles distant, while, to enhance their difficulties, a troop of nearly a hundred Bedouins were visible, pouring down a rocky gorge of the Jebel Mokattam range; so nothing was left to Allan but to continue his retreat, which they seemed slow or disinclined to follow up. Yet their presence was fraught with danger, especially after the sun, with its usual rapidity in these regions, went down like a red, fiery ball, and the lurid haze exhaled from the flat desert on which the darkness fell. The stars were coming out in the blue zenith; the dew was already beginning to fall; long and dark shadows lay across the plain, but the line of the railway was a sure guide back to Matarieh and the vicinity of Heliopolis. Every step of his bearers elicited a moan of pain from Cameron, and these went to the heart of his friend as if they had been the utterances of a brother, while now and then the sufferer muttered his thanks to the soldiers for their care and kindness, and his regret for the trouble he gave them after a day of toil, and his fears that he was retarding their retreat and thereby involving them in danger. Of his own pain or peril he never uttered a word. Constellations new to him and his comrades were in the sky now--a vast blue dome that stretched far, far away, all bright with glorious stars. At last it was absolutely necessary to halt for a time, for all thought the sufferer was dying, and the Highlanders said that if the Bedouins came on again they would form square round him; and soon it became too evident that Evan Cameron was lying 'on the bleak neutral ground between life and death.' Accustomed though they were to suffering and slaughter, the Highlanders stood around him leaning on their muskets, full of commiseration, and looking attentively at the pale face of the dying officer and back to the desert where they had last seen the enemy hovering; and more than one wished that the Bedouins would only come on again. 'Has no man among us here any water?' asked Allan, for by this time the tin bottles of the detachment were empty.