Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a
flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even
the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.
Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frowning ledge of
rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade
behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on
that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of
leveled, waiting muskets.
Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them
a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory
tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy
blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still
in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular
pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing
guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts. And causing thus
to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive
engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had nothing to
lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They might be driven into
the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they
would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now far and wide over
the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them;
they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy,
they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a
flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as
he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty
miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique must cover
ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course
lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and
sprung.
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