"What are you going to do?" asked Craven with a backward glance at the dismounted tribesmen clustering round the well and busily employed in making preparations for rest and food. Saïd beckoned to a passing Arab and dispatched him with a hurried order. Then he turned again to Craven. "The horses must rest though the men would go forward at a word. I am sending two scouts to reconnoitre the defile and bring back what information they can," he said. And as he spoke the two men he had sent for appeared with disciplined promptness and reined in beside him. Having received their brief instructions they started off in a cloud of dust and sand at the usual headlong gallop. Saïd turned away immediately and disappeared among the jostling crowd, but Craven lingered at the edge of the oasis looking after the fast receding horsemen who, crouched low in their saddles, their long white cloaks swelling round them, were very literally carrying out their orders to ride "swift as the messengers of Azrael." He had known them both on his previous visits, though he had not recognised them in the dark hours of the dawn when they joined the troop, and remembered them as two of the most dare-devil and intrepid of Mukair Ibn Zarrarah's followers. A moment since they had grinned at him in cheery greeting, exhibiting almost childlike pleasure when he had called them by name, and had set off with an obeisance as deep to him as to their leader.