But behind the breastworks waited British officers, cool, unemotional, with their men, British and native, seasoned warriors, disciplined, the best soldiers in the world. They watched the advancing horde as it came among the gardens, the moonbeams making a strange play of light and shade. On they came, and the great guns thundered, and the muskets crackled, and shouts and yells mingled with the brazen blare of bugles. Time after time the dusky warriors hurled themselves against the low breastworks that defended the circuit of the Ridge, coming within a score paces of them. Hour after hour the din continued, the sky blazing with the constant discharge of artillery, a shifting wall of smoke making strange patterns in the moonlight. The moon sank, and still the firing did not cease; it was not until next day's sun was mounting the sky that the survivors of the night shambled back, a discomfited mob, to the rose-red walls of the city.
What had they gained by this tremendous fusillade and bombardment? Nothing. Their ammunition had been expended by cart-loads; thousands upon thousands of rounds had been fired; but all the time they had never seen their enemy, who, behind their entrenchments, waited until they saw the whites of the rebels' eyes, and then sent them reeling back with withering volleys. Hundreds of forms lay motionless in the eye of the rising sun, some in red coats, some in white dhotis, some in the chogahs of hill-men, with turbans of many colours, amid muskets and swords and bugles, and everywhere the green flag of the Prophet. And on the Ridge there was great rejoicing; for this bitter lesson to the Pandies had cost their masters no more than a dozen men.
Nowhere did the fight rage more fiercely on that night than at the breastworks before the Flagstaff Tower. But though fierce, the fight was short, for Rahmut Khan was no fanatic; and when he found, after a brief trial, that he was opposed, not by warriors with whom his men could contend in equal fight, but by solid ramparts which burst into flame, though behind it no men were seen, he concluded that this was fighting he did not understand, and drew off his men. And Minghal Khan, approaching with his regiment the spot from which, as he fondly hoped, most of the Feringhis had been withdrawn to meet the attack against which he had warned them, was met by a crashing volley so terrible that a third of his men were stricken down, and he himself barely escaped with his life. A bullet grazed his cheek, ploughing a red furrow through it, and carrying away the lobe of his ear; a spent bullet struck his brow, and he staggered half-unconscious to the ground. And when he regained the city, and learnt that his enemy, Rahmut, had come unscathed through the battle, and, moreover, that the men he had left to raid Rahmut's serai during his absence had been beaten off with great loss by a guard posted there, for some incomprehensible reason, by Bakht Khan himself, he boiled with insensate fury, heaping curses on the heads of those who had betrayed him.