He did not know
that one of the Englishmen was trying to climb the tower, and would not
for an instant have believed that any human being could reach the upper
chamber, if suddenly a light had not flashed out, at the top, seventy
feet above his head.
Dazed already with absinthe, fantastic ideas beat stupidly upon his
brain, like bats that blunder against a lamp and extinguish it with
foolish, flapping wings. He thought that somehow the enemy must have
stolen a march upon the defenders: that the hated Arabs had got into the
tower, from a ladder raised outside the wall, and that soon they would
be pouring down in a swarm. Before he knew what he was doing, he had
stumbled up the stairs on to the flat wall by the gate. Scrambling along
with his torch, he got on to the bordj roof, and lit bonfire after
bonfire, though Victoria called on him to stop, crying that it was too
soon--that the men outside would shoot and kill him who would save them
all.
The sweet silence of the starry evening was crashed upon with lights and
jarring sounds.
Stephen, who had climbed the tower with a lantern and a kitchen
lamp-reflector slung in a table-cover, on his back, had just got his
makeshift apparatus in order, and standing on a narrow shelf of floor
which overhung a well-like abyss, had begun his signalling to the
northward.
Too late he realized that, for all the need of haste, he ought to have
waited long enough to warn the drunken Frenchman what he meant to do.
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