Agar shut up the diary, which book Ben Abdi had been taught to regard as
strictly official, laid it aside, and passed out of the tent, the little
Goorkha following close upon his heels with a quick intelligent interest
in his every movement which somehow suggested a dusky and faithful little
dog.

For some moments they stood thus on the edge of the small plateau, the
big man in front, the little one behind--alert, with twinkling, beady
eyes. Behind them towered a bleak grey slope of bare rock, like a cliff
set back at a slight angle, so treeless, so smooth was the face of it. In
front the great blue-shadowed valley lay beneath them, stretching away to
the south, until in a distant haze the sharp hills seemed to close in and
cut it short.

Perched thus, as it were, upon the roof of the world, these two men
looked down upon it all with a calm sense of possession, and to him of
the dominant race standing there some thousands of miles from his native
land--alone--master of this great stretch of an alien shore, there must
have come some passing thought of the strangeness of it all.

There was something wrong--he knew that. His orders had been to press
forward and occupy this little ridge, which was vaguely marked on the
service maps as Mistley's Plateau, named after an adventurous soul, its
discoverer. He had been instructed to hold this against all comers, and
if possible to prevent communication between the two valleys, connected
only by this narrow pass. All this Agar had carried out to the letter;
but some one else had failed somewhere.

"It will be three days at the most," his chief had said, "and the main