Perhaps the man was telling lies." "He had the chain mark on his ankles," said Durrance.
The cavalcade turned to the left into the hills on the northern side of the plateau, and climbed again over shale.
"A letter from Gordon," said Durrance, in a musing voice, "scribbled perhaps upon the roof-top of his palace, by the side of his great telescope--a sentence written in haste, and his eye again to the lens, searching over the palm trees for the smoke of the steamers--and it comes down the Nile to be buried in a mud wall in Berber.

Yes, it's curious," and he turned his face to the west and the sinking sun.

Even as he looked, the sun dipped behind the hills.

The sky above his head darkened rapidly, to violet; in the west it flamed a glory of colours rich and iridescent.

The colours lost their violence and blended delicately into one rose hue, the rose lingered for a little, and, fading in its turn, left a sky of the purest emerald green transfused with light from beneath rim of the world.
"If only they had let us go last year westward to the Nile," he said with a sort of passion.