We passed through acres of oleander-scrub into a valley twelve miles wide at its mouth, that narrowed gradually until the high red sandstone cliffs shut out the moonlight.

It was like the mouth of hell, and suffocating, for the cliff-sides were giving off the heat they had sucked up through the day.
The surest sign that Ali Higg was either over-confident or seriously engaged elsewhere was that there was no guard in the ravine.

Ten men properly placed could have destroyed us.

Even the great Alexander of Macedon could not force that gorge, and suffered one of his worst defeats there.

The Turks made the same mistake and tried to oust Lawrence in the Great War; but he simply overwhelmed them with a scratch brigade of partly armed Bedouins and women.
Grim called a halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track leading to a ledge.