At last, as we emerged into the bright moonlight on a little platform of rock at an angle of the path, we paused. Ram Lal, who seemed to know the way, was in front, and held up his hand to silence us; Isaacs and I kneeled down and looked over the brink. Some two hundred feet below, on a broad strip of green bordering the steep cliffs, was picketed a small body of horse. We could see the men squatting about in their small compact turbans and their shining accoutrements; the horses tethered at various distances on the sward, cropping so vigorously that even at that height we could hear the dull sound as they rhythmically munched the grass. We could see in the middle of the little camp a man seated on a rug and wrapped in a heavy garment of some kind, quietly smoking a common hubble-bubble. Beside him stood another who reflected more moonlight than the rest, and who was therefore, by his trappings, the captain of the band. The seated smoker could be no other than Shere Ali.
Cautiously we descended the remaining windings of the steep path, turning whenever we had a chance, to look down on the horsemen and their prisoner below, till at last we emerged in the valley a quarter of a mile or so beyond where they were stationed. Here on the level of the plain we stopped a moment, and Ram Lal renewed his instructions to me.
"If the captain," he said, "lays his hand on Isaacs' shoulder, seize him and throw him. If you cannot get him down kill him--any way you can--shoot him under the arm with your pistol. It is a matter of life and death."
"All right." And we walked boldly along the broad strip of sward. The moon was now almost immediately overhead, for it was midnight, or near it. I confess the scene awed me, the giant masses of the mountains above us, the vast distances of mysterious blue air, through which the snow-peaks shone out with a strange look that was not natural. The swish of the quickly flowing stream at the edge of the plot we were walking over sounded hollow and unearthly; the velvety whirr of the great mountain bats as they circled near us, stirred from the branches as we passed out, was disagreeable and heavy to hear. The moon shone brighter and brighter.
We were perhaps thirty yards from the little camp, in which there might be fifty men all told. Isaacs stood still and sung out a greeting.