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even with the briar still between my teeth I began to feel my eyelids droop. Before I knew it, I was out like a light…
    I had the queerest dream. This was unusual for me -I’m not a dreaming type – but the one I had that night seemed uncommonly real. I imagined that the woman, our prisoner, was by my side. I stood quite transfixed; I had a gun in my hand, but as I stared into her face I found I was slowly loosening my grip. The gun dropped to the ground, and its clattering woke me from my trance. I looked around and realised that I was in a palisade, and that the enemy were breaking in waves against our fire. But my men were falling – surely soon they would be utterly submerged. I had to help them -I had to man the walls – otherwise we would be broken and the regiment destroyed! But I couldn’t move, that was the damnedest thing; for when I tried I found that I was frozen by the woman’s eyes, trapped like a fly in a spider’s web. She laughed. I looked around again, and I saw that everyone was dead – my own men, the enemy, all dead apart from me. Even the woman beside me was dead, I saw now, and yet she still moved, walking away from me as though she were some hungry pantheress. I felt drawn to her most terribly and I tried to follow her, but then I felt cold hands pulling on my legs. I looked down. The dead were everywhere reaching for me. Their eyes had the idiot stare of Eliot’s disease, and their flesh was white, and chill as the grave. Helplessly, I felt myself being pulled down, submerged beneath soft, cold limbs. I saw Compton. His face was pressed against my own. He opened his mouth and a look of the most damnable greed suddenly burned in his eyes. His lips seemed to suck like a pair of hungry leeches as he brought them closer and closer towards my face. I knew he was going to feed on me. They touched my cheek… and I woke up to find Eliot was shaking me.
    ‘Moorfield,’ he was saying in a low, desperate voice, ‘get up, they’ve gone!’
    ‘Who?’ I asked, rising at once to my feet. ‘Not the woman?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Eliot, giving me a queer look. ‘Have you been dreaming of her?’
    I stared at him, astonished. ‘How the devil did you know?’
    ‘Because I did too. And that’s not the worst,’ he added. ‘Compton is gone as well.’
    ‘Compton?’ I repeated. I stared at Eliot in disbelief and then, I’m afraid, such was my shock at the tidings he had brought that I rather bawled the good Doctor out. But he merely studied me, his eyes keen and his head angled so that he had even more the look of a hawk.
    ‘Are you still determined to press further on?’ he asked, when my anger had at length blown its course.
    I didn’t answer immediately, but looked up at the mountain peaks and the road that led towards them through the Himalayan night. ‘There is a British soldier missing,’ I said slowly. I clenched my fists. One of my soldiers, Eliot.’ I shook my head. ‘Damn it, but it would be a pretty poor show if we were to draw stumps now.’
    Eliot stared at me, and for a long time he made no reply. ‘You realise,’ he said at last, ‘that if you continue to take the road you are on, they will wipe you out?’
    ‘Do we have any other choice?’
    Again Eliot stared at me wordlessly; then he turned and began to walk towards the cliff. I followed him; he had the air of a man who was wrestling with his conscience, and I wasn’t altogether too upset to see it. At length he turned to face me again. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Captain,’ he said.
    ‘But you are going to?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes. Because otherwise you will certainly die.’
    ‘I am not afraid of death.’
    Eliot smiled faintly. ‘Don’t worry – I am only reducing the certainty of it to the level of high probability.’ Then his smile faded, and he looked at the mountain wall which lay beyond the pass. Now that we were more directly below it, I could scarcely see to its summit, so high it rose. Eliot pointed.