'I trust he will spare my life, at all events.' 'What does your life, or the lives of all the accursed Franks in the world, matter?' exclaimed another Bedouin; 'may you all perish by the hand of God by drowning, as Pharaoh and his host perished, or by His causing the earth to open and swallow you up, as, the Koran tells us, happened to Korah!' Whether a rumour had reached them of the sharp manner in which Colonel Warren overtook and punished the Arabian assassins of Professor Palmer and his companions in misfortune, Allan knew not. One fact was evident, that they were resolved to lose no time in carrying him off to their tents among the sandy recesses of Jebel Dimeshk. They ambled on their way so fast, keeping him at a species of run, that he was on the point of sinking, and besought them to spare him a little; so, at the command of their leader, they halted for a little time in the starlight, and, weary and worn with toil and many emotions, he threw himself on the ground to rest. He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to think over his new and calamitous position, and the chances of achieving an escape from it. If money was required--unless the sum demanded proved too enormous--he could produce a ransom, and he turned uneasily on his sandy couch as he thought over all his chances of success. How like a horrible dream--a nightmare it all appeared--as those terrible hours spent in the vault at Dundargue had done. What would be thought of his disappearance by the regiment, and at home, and memory flashed back to his soldierly father and tender mother--for, with all her aristocratic pride, tender she had ever been to him--so his first thoughts were of her. 'In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues;' so--a captain now, and in such savage hands--his first ideas were of his mother's grief, rather than of poor, repentant Olive. He might be butchered in the desert, and never heard of again, for his life was at the mercy and caprice of the most lawless people in the world. His disappearance as a mystery would soon become public property at home. There would, he knew, be all manner of newspaper paragraphs, suggestions, and surmises for a few weeks, and then, when these ceased, his story and his fate would be as much forgotten as last year's snow. Again his captors began their march towards the mountains; and times there were, as he struggled forward to keep pace with them, when, in fierce revolt against the whole situation and its dreadful uncertainties, he felt as if his heart would burst, and a kind of agonised hopelessness crept into it.