Diana was growing impatient. It was very fine to watch,
but time and the light were both going. She would have been glad if the
demonstration had occurred earlier in the day, when there would have
been more time to enjoy it. She turned again to Mustafa Ali to suggest
that they had better try to move on, but he had gone further from her,
back towards his own. She wrestled with her nervous mount, trying to
turn him to join her guide, when a sudden burst of rifle shots made her
start and her horse bound violently. Then she laughed. That would be
the end of the demonstration, a parting salute, the decharge de
mousqueterie beloved of the Arab. She turned her head from her
refractory horse to look at them ride off, and the laugh died away on
her lips. It was not a farewell salute. The rifles that the Arabs were
firing were not pointing up into the heavens, but aiming straight at
her and her escort. And as she stared with suddenly startled eyes,
unable to do anything with her plunging horse, Mustafa Ali's men were
blotted out from her sight, cut off by a band of Arabs who rode between
her and them. Mustafa Ali himself was lying forward on the neck of his
horse, who was standing quiet amidst the general confusion. Then there
came another volley, and the guide slid slowly out of his saddle on to
the ground, and at the same time Diana's horse went off with a wild
leap that nearly unseated her.
Until they started shooting the thought that the Arabs could be hostile
had not crossed her mind. She imagined that they were merely showing
off with the childish love of display which she knew was
characteristic. The French authorities had been right after all.
Diana's first feeling was one of contempt for an administration that
made possible such an attempt so near civilisation. Her second a
fleeting amusement at the thought of how Aubrey would jeer. But her
amusement passed as the real seriousness of the attack came home to
her. For the first time it occurred to her that her guide's descent
from his saddle was due to a wound and not to the fear that she had at
first disgustedly attributed to him. But nobody had seemed to put up
any kind of a fight, she thought wrathfully. She tugged angrily at her
horse's mouth, but the bit was between his teeth and he tore on
frantically. Her own position made her furious. Her guide was wounded,
his men surrounded, and she was ignominiously being run away with by a
bolting horse. If she could only turn the wretched animal. It would
only be a question of ransom, of that she was positive. She must get
back somehow to the others and arrange terms. It was an annoyance, of
course, but after all it added a certain piquancy to her trip, it would
be an experience. It was only a "hold-up." She did not suppose the
Arabs had even really meant to hurt any one, but they were excited and
some one's shot, aimed wide, had found an unexpected billet. It could
only be that.