midday
The animals , weary to death anyhow , fell rather that walked down the track . The men sat and scrambled . And the heat rose up to meet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet 's lid and the devil busy under it , stoking . It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them , a mile away . Nobody challenged them yet . Khinjan itself seemed dead , crackled in the heat . `` Sahib , let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze ! ''