Here Hilary Joyce slumbered in the heat, and in the cool he
inspected his square-shouldered, spindle-shanked Soudanese, with their
cheery black faces and their funny little pork-pie forage caps.
Joyce was a martinet at drill, and the blacks loved being drilled, so
the Bimbashi was soon popular among them. But one day was exactly like
another. The weather, the view, the employment, the food--everything
was the same. At the end of three weeks he felt that he had been there
for interminable years. And then at last there came something to break
the monotony.
One evening, as the sun was sinking, Hilary Joyce rode slowly down the
old caravan road. It had a fascination for him, this narrow track,
winding among the boulders and curving up the nullahs, for he
remembered how in the map it had gone on and on, stretching away into
the unknown heart of Africa. The countless pads of innumerable camels
through many centuries had beaten it smooth, so that now, unused and
deserted, it still wound away, the strangest of roads, a foot broad, and
perhaps two thousand miles in length. Joyce wondered as he rode how
long it was since any traveller had journeyed up it from the south, and
then he raised his eyes, and there was a man coming along the path.
For an instant Joyce thought that it might be one of his own men, but a
second glance assured him that this could not be so.
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