ten o'clock in the evening
No sooner had the sheik decided to carry out Edgar 's plan than he rapidly issued his orders . In five minutes the whole of the inhabitants of the douar were at work , the boys going out to fetch the camels , the men cutting down the long grass near the well and laying it in great bundles very tightly pressed together , the women cooking a large supply of flat cakes for the party . In two hours the preparations were completed and the twenty men moved off from the oasis . They travelled until ten o'clock in the evening . By the light of the moon , which was four days short of full , the sheik and Edgar selected a point for the erection of the zareba . It was a patch of rock cropping up from the summit of a sand-hill that fell away from it on all sides , and was just about the size required for the zareba . The camels were unloaded and the bundles of forage laid down side by side and formed into a square , the wall being some four feet thick and two feet high .