The footmarks of the three mids were still easily traceable--even on the ground already trampled by the Arabs, their horses, and maherries. The "cloots" of a camel would not have been more conspicuous in the mud of an English road, than were the shoe-prints of the three young seamen in the sands of the Saära. The Arab trackers had no difficulty in making them out; and in a few minutes had traced them from the mouth of the gorge, almost in a direct line to the sea. There, however, there was a breadth of wet sea-beach--where the springy sand instantly obliterated any foot-mark that might be made upon it--and there the tracts ended.
But why should they have extended farther? No one could have gone beyond that point, without either walking straight into the water, or keeping along the strip of sea beach, upwards or downwards.
The fugitives could not have escaped in either way--unless they had taken to the water, and committed suicide by drowning themselves! Up the coast, or down it, they would have been seen to a certainty.
Their pursuers, clustering around the place where the tracks terminated, were no wiser than ever. Some of them were ready to believe that drowning had been the fate of the castaways upon their coast, and so stated it to their companions. But they spoke only conjectures, and in tones that told them, like the rest, to be under the influence of some superstitious fear. Despite their confidence in the protection of their boasted Prophet, they felt a natural dread of that wilderness of waters, less known to them than the wilderness of sand.
Ere long they withdrew from its presence, and betook themselves back to their encampment, under a half belief that the three individuals seen and pursued had either drowned themselves in the great deep, or by some mysterious means known to these strange men of the sea, had escaped across its far-reaching waters!
Short time as their pursuers had stayed upon the strand, it seemed an age to the submerged midshipmen.
On first placing themselves in position, they had chosen a spot where, with their knees resting upon the bottom, they could just hold their chins above water. This would enable them to hold their ground without any great difficulty, and for some time they so maintained it.