Jaffa, excited for the first time, told me that twenty or thirty armed
Arabs were climbing up the zigzag. I wished that fifty or a hundred were
coming--the more the better. They could not possibly see to aim at us,
nor could they know how few we were, and as they emerged from the gloom
we could pick them off like starlings on a fence.
Several more camels were hit and fell. Absolute panic had broken out
among the unarmed men; many of those on the upper zigzags began creeping
and crawling downwards, and I knew that when they met the Arabs coming
up to attack us, the confusion on that awful path, and in that awful
obscurity below, would be appalling.
After this events began to follow each other very rapidly.
The number of bullets whizzing round us was great, and proved that very
many men must have been withdrawn already, back into the hollow; I felt
certain that the noise of the Maxim gun seemed louder. If this meant
anything it meant that the Arabs were gradually being forced back and
that the line of bluejackets was advancing.
Very shortly afterwards the character of the noise of rifle firing
altered entirely. There was very little of that muffled rumbling which
we had heard before; the noise was sharper and very much louder, and
amongst it, quite distinct, I could hear the most distant sound of our
own rifles, much like tin tacks being driven into wood with single blows
of a big hammer. The bottom of the ravine, too, was lighted up with
hundreds and hundreds of rifle flashes, and shells began bursting there
again. This made it certain that the Arabs had actually fallen back
into the bottom of the "coffee-cup", and I knew that they must be so
bunched up together that the shrapnel bullets would soon compel them to
scatter up the lower legs of that zigzag. Once there it would be
difficult to reach them, but I did not bother about that. They would
have to come up and attack us if they wanted to save a single camel.
Jaffa quietly told me that they were already beginning to do this, and
then, almost before he had spoken, I heard the faint sound of cheering,
and knew that the _Intrepids_ were rushing the mouth of the ravine.
Oh, what a grand, comforting sound that was!
The nine-pounder had stopped firing; so had the Maxim. Probably the
guns' crews could not keep pace with the last rush of our fellows, or
could not fire without hitting them.
Then I saw spurts of rifle flame spitting out into the gorge, in the
very opposite direction from which they had been spluttering before, and
knew that they came from our own people.
It was grand! It meant absolute victory and the capture of the entire
caravan. I turned and grinned at Jaffa and Griffiths.
"Bedouin come up very fast--plenty come," Jaffa said.
"Well, let them come; so much the better," I thought; but then it struck
me that in my excitement I had not noticed how rapidly the sun was
setting. The shadow of the ridge above us had long since swallowed up
the whole of the opposite face of the walls of the "coffee-cup". What
with the powder smoke and the shadow I could not see farther down than
about the third zigzag. In the morning it had taken us a full hour to
scale the path when it was clear; now these people had to do the same
thing when it was blocked with camels. They could not possibly do this
in less than two hours, and by then I knew that the sun would have set
and that it would be completely dark before one of them could put foot
in the gap.
This difficulty now faced us, and I had not foreseen it.
If those Arabs intended to abandon their camels, scale the path, and
endeavour to escape back to their horses in the valley, what should we
do, or, rather, what would become of us?
So long as they only thought of escape, all would be well. They were
probably well beaten now, but directly it became impossible for our
people to keep them "on the move" with rifle fire--owing to the lack of
light to aim at them--they would begin to recover from their panic.
Once they came up to where we were we dare not fire on them, because the
flashes of our rifles would have told them immediately that there were
only five of us.
If we did not fire they would imagine that we had evacuated the ridge,
and the obvious thing for them to do was to occupy it themselves, and
wait until morning. If they did that, I realized very well that we
could not escape, and, more important still, I knew that it would be
impossible for Commander Duckworth to remove a single camel from the
path under the fire of their rifles, and that all the nine-pounders and
Maxims in the Navy could not dislodge them.
Already rifle fire was dying down at the bottom. It was too dark to aim
there, and it would soon be too dark for us to aim either. No bullets
had come our way for some time, so I had not them to disturb me as I
tried to think what to do.
At first I thought that we all should gather in the gap itself and
defend ourselves there, but I gave up that idea because I felt sure they
would scale the ridge above it on either side, shoot down, and make an
end of us pretty soon.