[color=4682B4]Approximately forty-five miles into Lower Egyptian territory's north-westernmost stretches.[/color]
[hr]
They had long ago forgotten about their broken sleep, their unwilling blundering about in the dark, their wet feet and even their heaving lungs; now it was a matter of minutes - would they knock out the perseverance of these continued border infringements or wouldn't they? Who would come out on top? It was touch and go. Every man understood this, every man the himself into the spirit of the attack and Ibrahim with them. Their pouches crammed full of ammunition, they fired with reckless enthusiasm, deafened by the sound of their own shots, choking on their own excitement as they slashed and slashed at the mist with bullets. Wherever he could, Ibrahim did his best to stop his platoon from firing at their own side. He suddenly noticed that he was firing from his own side-arm, although this was completely pointless. Then over a ditch and through a hedge they jumped, and now they were having to leap over bodies too - not Douleur, but Egyptian bodies. 

Fear and pride gripped him at the same time: [i]keep it up, we're doing fine - say what you like, but we know how to fight[/i]. Now they were fighting in a village, taking cover behind houses, sticking their heads round corners, outflanking Egyptian strongpoints. There was no holding the guerrilla forces as they charged in with fixed bayonets, and Ibrahim felt as strange satisfaction as he blazed away. He hit and wounded a signaler, who was at once taken prisoner. All the while a yellow orb on their left had been growing brighter and brighter, until it finally burst through - the sun. A faint crack was heard from behind a distant wood, the sound grew nearer and an Egyptian shrapnel shell burst in a similarly yellow cloud ahead of them, slight above the town's towering minaret and to the left of it. Soon after the enemy had once more retaliated, after a short bombardment, by advancing on them from the north, not in a skirmishing line but in a column of march, so confident were they after their earlier success that day. 

At once however, all twenty-five of the Berber guns having completed their registration shots, opened up with an oblique hail of shrapnel on the advancing troops from five concealed firing positions, dousing them with black fountains of high explosive and driving them back until they disappeared into the surrounding scrubland and behind the folds of the far-off desert dunes. Meanwhile the Douleur infantry battalions hurriedly dug themselves in while the Egyptians were halted and silenced. The sun crawled slowly above the low-lying clouds of dawn.Everything was still obscured in swirling mist, but it now began to thin out and everything grew clearer. 

They could see the heavy dew which had settled on their rifle-bolts and bayonets, some of which were streaked with blood. As they were on such high ground, the fog was rapidly dispersing in wisps and the men's faces were plain to see, panting, elated with the savage joy of battle. And Ibrahim felt the same. Blue, red and orange droplets glinted on what little grass overcame the otherwise cripplingly arid conditions here, and the sunshine of the new day was already shedding its warmth over them - the victors. Somehow it was all over with surprising ease. 

This was no hollow boast, no hearsay account of other men's deeds: a guard detail drawn from men of their own battalion was escorting through the village a column of about three hundred prisoners and a handful of officers, squinting glumly into the sun, some without caps, some having lost their carbines. And after the roll-call only three men in Ibrahim's battalion were reported killed and a dozen or so wounded, only on of whom was from his platoon. His men had kept together and were now cheerfully strolling about and swooping stories. Meanwhile the surrounding countryside was slowly emerging from the fog like a cunningly lit theatre set: height, depth and perspective began to fall into place. Right down into the nearby dunes everything stood precisely delineated and contrasted - things and creatures, living and dead, sunlight above and shadow in the valley, the greenery and the colors of field and garden. 

From the top of the slope where they stood in the village, they could clearly see a column of several hundred turbans being led away, and beyond it piles of corpses struck down by Berber precision-shot. No longer in a hurry, no longer running, no longer afraid, Ibrahim sat watching it all from a bench behind a garden fence where he sat down to rest. Still possessed by a strange sense of triumph, he was bursting with elation at having had a part in a victory which had not been merely scored in verbal debate but won with his body, his own arms and legs. He sat there as though he was the great commander-in-chief in whose honor the deafened enemy was being led past in triumph below. The troops were given no time to rest; they had been ordered to dig in on the edge of the village. Ibrahim had to pass the order on to them, but he was not expected to do any digging himself and could stay sitting on his bench to admire the theatrical spectacle of the captured village and the blindingly bright swells of the orange dunes reflecting the sun's rays. In the silence around him (all firing in the vicinity had stopped), he was able to savor his oy and analyze his sudden, new-found emotion.