Take your time about bringing 'em
up, while I make the prisoners carry their dead up on to the roof.
I'll take the fakir up there too where he's out of mischief!"
Just as a six-foot-wide pathway ran round and round the outside of
the dome, another one, scarcely more than a yard wide, ran round the
inside, and formed a roadway to the top in place of a stair. It took
the prisoners and Brown's men fifteen minutes of continuous effort
to carry up the dead and the fakir, and lay them on the roof.
"Pitch the dead over!" ordered Brown, and the mutineers obeyed.
"I've a mind to pitch you over too!" he growled at the fakir, and
the strange creature seemed to understand him, for his eyes changed
from their baleful hatred to a look of fear.
The bodies slid and rolled down the rounded roof, and fell with a
thud against the battlements, or else went rolling down the circular
causeway that led to the street below.
Brown seemed to be garnering ideas from watching them. He gazed
down at the noisy tumult of the city, watching for a while the efforts
of an ill-directed crowd to put out a fire that blazed in a distant
quarter of the bazaar.
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