These hampers contained the chosen apparatus.

Wires were attached, and run back to the ship, and proper connections made at once by Leclair and Menendez, under the Master's instructions.
The machine-guns were dismounted and taken "ashore," to borrow a nautical phrase.

These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ball were served to them.
About a quarter of a mile to north of _Nissr's_ position, one of the small watercourses or irrigating ditches that cut the plain glimmered through a grove of Sayhani dates.[1] To this ditch the Master sent two men in search of the largest stone they could find there.

When they returned with a rock some foot in diameter, he ordered it placed half-way between _Nissr_ and the palm-grove.
[Footnote 1: Sayhani (the Crier), so called because one of these palms is fabled to have cried aloud in salutation to Mohammed, when the Prophet happened to walk beneath it.] These preparations made, the Master lined up his Legionaries for inspection and final instructions.

Standing there in military array, fully armed, they made rather a formidable body of fighters despite their paucity of numbers.