Sylvia’s province was that of navigation officer; she took the altitude of the sun each day at midday with her sextant, worked out our position from her books of logarithms and gave us our compass course for our next trek forward. She spoke Arabic much better than I did and the guides came under her, advising on which course the convoy should advance as it moved from one grim, sun-scorched valley to another.
I was camp-master, a job that Amin had been doing before my arrival and in which he still assisted me to some extent although he now had time to help with other work as well. It was my job to select the places where we should halt during the midday rest and for the night, superintend the loading and unloading of the baggage and, while we were on the march, to supervise the porter’s operations whenever any of the vehicles got stuck.
All five of us naturally helped each other out whenever possible and, as neither Clarissa nor Harry could speak any Arabic, Amin spent a good part of his time with one or other of them making known their wishes to the drivers or servants when the Arabs’ small stock of English proved insufficient.
By six o’clock we had resumed our journey and it was about half-past eight when two men on camels appeared over a rise ahead of us. Halting their beasts on its crest they remained there waiting for us to draw nearer. Presently they were joined by a dozen others all of whom also brought their long-legged beasts to a halt and sat perched upon them staring at us but making no sign of greeting, friendly or otherwise.
Our guides, who had gone on a little way ahead, came running back to us with excited cries and Amin translated their Arabic, which was partly dialect that I could not follow. The camelmen who had appeared so silently and with such startling suddenness out of a blank horizon were Toureg. I had noticed they were all veiled and swathed in blue burnouses and I remembered then that such a costume was always worn by this scattered tribe of nomads who were rumoured to roam from oasis to oasis throughout the whole of the North African hinterland attacking ill-armed caravans and murdering peaceful traders.
There is no law in the desert except that of strength. We knew before we started that we could expect no quarter if we had to fight some such band of cut-throats, and the little group on the hill-top about six hundred yards away was strangely menacing from its very stillness.
We were well supplied with arms and ammunition. Every one of our fourteen men had a modern rifle as also had Harry and myself; besides which we two and the girls were all equipped with automatics. The Toureg were reported to be wonderful marksmen and they carried long, old-fashioned pieces slung over their shoulders, so that the barrels in some cases projected as much as a foot above their heads; but if it came to a showdown I did not think we should have much difficulty in driving them off with our modern magazine-rifles.
I halted the convoy, formed it into a rough circle and, using it as a screen, we took up our position behind it with our rifles at the ready; but we had no need to use them. Seeing that we were prepared to put up a fight, the tallest Toureg kicked his beast into motion and turned it back down the far slope, upon which the whole band disappeared as silently and mysteriously as it had come.
We continued our march rather warily and put out sentries when we halted for the midday rest about three hours later. Our camp had only just been formed when one of our sentries gave a warning cry and we saw that another party of camelmen had appeared on the horizon. They were more numerous than the first and on studying them through our field-glasses we could see that many of their camels were laden with great bales of stuff and that most of the riders wore the white burnous; so it appeared to be an inoffensive trading caravan.
Half-an-hour later a fine old man, who was its leader, rode up to us crying, ‘Aselamu! Alaikum!’ in friendly greeting, and we duly replied, ‘Marhaba, marhaba!’ in welcome. He introduced himself to us as the Sheik Abu Hafiz of the Oasis of Farafra, and ordered his people to pitch their camp near our own.
Between peaceful travellers desert custom entails boundless hospitality and whenever two caravans meet they must always offer each other a full share of all food and drink they may be carrying. We immediately placed our supplies at the old gentleman’s disposal and he promptly returned the compliment; but on its becoming clear that neither caravan was in want, the ceremony boiled down to an exchange of presents. We sent the Sheik a handsome gift of tea and sugar, sugar being particularly highly prized in the desert and regarded almost as a form of money; while he sent over to us a branch bearing about twenty hands of bananas and a package of sherbet which we found most refreshing.
We settled down to our respective midday meals some little distance apart but during them we again exchanged courtesies by sending him some of our tinned Irish stew in return for a big dish of fatha which is an Arab concoction of carrots, bread and eggs. Knowing the fierce religious fanaticism of all desert-travellers, Sylvia had withdrawn on the approach of the caravan, taking Clarissa with her, and when the two girls appeared for the meal they were both wrapped in the long cotton barracans worn by native women, and veiled. Sylvia had brought these garments in her kit against just such an encounter and, I learnt later, they had used them to avoid causing offence during most of the time they were travelling from Luxor through the two Oases.
Seeing that the faces of our women were respectably hidden, the Sheik asked us to join him for tea after we had finished eating, so we walked the fifty yards which separated the two parties and sat down in the soft sand beside him and his two sons.
Tea-drinking among the Bedouin Arabs takes the place of the cinema, the race-course, the dance-hall and practically every other form of entertainment. It is a solemn ritual and is begun by the servants filling a large teapot half-full with sugar; another quarter of it is filled with the tealeaves and the remaining space filled with water. They then boil the mixture, pour it into another pot, reboil it, add more water, pour it back again and so on, tasting it frequently until the strong, sweet brew is to their liking. It is then drunk out of small glasses with much gusto and noisy sucking of lips to show appreciation.
While the tea-drinking is going on, host and guest discuss every subject under the sun in a pleasurable and leisurely manner until, when the giver of the party feels that the time has come to make a move, he adds some mint to the teapot and the guests take this as a sign that they should say ‘Farewell’ after having consumed a last, mint-scented ration of the potent brew.
The Sheik told us that he was going south to the small Oasis of Ballas, a little over a hundred miles from his home territory, and that for quickness’ sake caravans such as his own skirted the edges of the great Sand Sea with some frequency although they never attempted to cross it.
He was a splendid-looking old pirate with a fine, white beard, a hooked nose and up-turned moustaches. At his belt he carried an old-fashioned revolver with one of the longest barrels I have ever seen on such a weapon, and a dagger in a richly-chased sheath the point of which turned up like the tail of a capital J. His two sons were also armed and I noticed that a number of his men had long, old-fashioned rifles, but I thought it as well to tell him of the band of Toureg we had seen that morning.
Gravely inclining his head, he expressed his gratitude for the warning but said he was not the least perturbed as he had half-a-dozen Sudanese soldiers in his retinue. These are mercenaries hired out by the great lords of the desert to such caravan-owners as will pay for them. They will not do a single hand’s turn on a journey, but they are indomitably brave and will fight to the death if a caravan to which they have been attached is attacked. In consequence the Toureg, knowing this, will nearly always refrain from molesting a caravan that has a Sudanese bodyguard and it has become a custom for nearly all caravans of any size to take a few of these vicious but redoubtable black warriors with them as a sort of insurance.
We spent the best part of two hours at this ceremonial tea-drinking and after many cordial good wishes on both sides for a safe and successful journey, our two caravans packed up and parted. Half-an-hou
r later the Sheik’s long string of laden camels disappeared over a low range of sandy hills and his people proved to be the last humans outside our own company that we were to see for many days.
That night we camped in a valley bottom on the edge of a long stretch of smooth rock which the wind had blown free of sand. After dinner we got out our portable radio and having listened to the news, tuned into a London dance-band; upon which Sylvia suggested dancing. It was rather heavy going on the hard rock but it served to keep us warmer than we had been the night before and between pauses for cigarettes we kept it up for the best part of an hour.
Since the previous night, when I had told the tale of Oonas’ abominable treachery, Sylvia had thawed out quite a lot; she no longer aired the sarcastic witticisms to which her dislike of Oonas had driven her when we were in Luxor, and I found her easier to get on with than at any time since I had met her. She was not a particularly brainy girl except in her one particular subject of Egyptology and I rather suspected that her keenness about that was only the outcome of her long association with her father and his work; but she could be very amusing when she chose to exert herself and since she was very strong and healthy the desert life seemed to suit her and bring out all her best qualities.
On our third day out from Dakhla we entered the real Sea of Sand. Before then there had been plenty of sandy stretches but these were always broken here and there by rocky outcrops or higher land formations which could be definitely identified; whereas now we had begun to penetrate a region which had the additional desolation of lacking even the smallest landmark. It consisted of just line after line of sand-dunes about half-a-mile apart and with sandy valleys in between. On an occasional higher crest we were able to see several miles before us and the ridges of dunes stretched away interminably towards the horizon without any break or variation whatsoever; but most of the time we could see no further than the next ridge as we traversed each shallow valley.
It was no longer possible to follow a zigzag course from one valley to another as the lines of hills stretched for mile after mile in an unbroken series of billows at a diagonal angle across our path. In one way the going was better because it was not so bumpy and, since there was no alternative, we kept a straight course according to our compass; but this necessitated our mounting each fresh ridge which lay before us and going right over it.
As the ridges averaged some five hundred feet in height above the valley bottoms, this meant that, through constantly going up and down, our mileage was actually about half as much again as it would have been on a flat surface; so we did not gain very much by no longer having to make any détours. Moreover, some of the slopes were very steep ones and now and then one or other of the lorries failed to make them, which necessitated our unloading a lot of the gear from another lorry and using it to give the one that had stuck a tow over the crest; after which there was the tiresome business of reloading.
Although our water-supply was ample and we did not suffer from thirst we saw the usual mirages which desert travellers report, with some frequency. Usually they took the form of a large placid lake lying in the centre of a valley bottom we had just sighted, and this is easily enough explained from the shimmering of the hot air on the burning sands. Often they had a greenish tinge round their edge which suggested grassy slopes and sometimes palms, mud-walled villages or even distant cities with white-domed mosques and minarets. There is a theory that these illusions are due to refraction in the extraordinarily clear atmosphere which reflects actual places situated at a great distance; but I am more inclined to think that such mirages are only a trick of the human imagination which, aided by the shimmering heat waves, conjures up the sort of landscape it is craving so desperately to see as a relief to the interminable monotony of changeless sandy vistas.
Our long treks were exhausting work when carried on day after day without intermission and all of us had to go about in sunglasses or our eyes would soon have suffered from the constant glare, but the life was a healthy one as the waterless wastes which have been baked for centuries are entirely free of every sort of germ; the air is clean and exhilarating and we all felt well and cheerful. Very soon the sun had coloured us up to a pleasant brown, although in poor Harry’s case it proved too much for his fair skin and on our fourth night out he became badly blistered, which necessitated Clarissa’s ministrations and a considerable inroad into our supply of witch hazel.
It was on the fifth day that we came upon the first traces of Cambyses’ lost regions. About ten o’clock in the morning one of our guides pointed out a great patch in one of the sand dunes that varied in colour from the rest. It was the only break in the monotony of the yellow ocean which we had seen for over two days so we went out of our way to inspect it.
To our considerable excitement it proved to be the remains of one of the huge dumps of water-jars that Cambyses had had planted out in the desert in advance of his army. Few of the jars were still unbroken and the great patch, which stretched for a mile or more, consisted almost entirely of thousands upon thousands of largish pottery fragments half-burried in the sand.
We spent over an hour there, turning them over and pulling out only partially damaged specimens in the vague hope that we might come upon something else; but evidently the army had only halted there for the night and then passed on, as we could not find a single thing other than these countless potsherds which were all of the same colour and material. Yet it was a thrilling thing to find this absolutely definite confirmation of Herodotus’ report and to realise that the last human beings, and perhaps the only human beings, who had ever stood upon that spot until our coming were those Persian soldiers who had camped there so many hundred years ago.
Apart from the sticking of our vehicles in soft patches of sand or on the slopes of hillsides the principal inconvenience we suffered was the intense cold of the nights and periodical sandstorms which blew up from the south. The gibli, as the sand-laden south wind of the Libyan Desert is called, struck us four or five times after we had entered the Grande Mer de Sable; on each occasion it was necessary to halt the caravan and close the windows of the cars but, even so, the sand penetrated everywhere and a fine golden-red dust made us cough and choke while a thin layer of it coated us and all our belongings, causing us acute discomfort. These storms never lasted long and were not serious except for one which was heralded by the approach of half-a-dozen dust-devils, great columns of sand caught up in the swirling wind which carries them, like moving towers, at a terrific pace over the hills and valleys.
Directly we saw them we hurriedly made our preparations to meet the storm, closing up the cars and wrapping veils round our faces, but we were held up for over an hour during which we could not see any further than one can in a pea-soup London fog; and the storm was of such severity that the driven sand had the effect of emery-paper. When we were at last able to leave the cars again we saw that it had taken every scrap of paint off the windward side of them.
Appearances did not bother us but we were greatly perturbed about our engines as if these had become choked we should have had considerable difficulty in getting them going again; but we had taken the precaution of having the engines enclosed in special sand-protectors before leaving Luxor and, much to our relief, we found that these had functioned satisfactorily.
Experience soon taught us that Clarissa was not a very efficient quartermaster as far as keeping a check on our stores was concerned, so we placed Amin in charge of that very important department. She was, however, an admirable caterer when it came to devising our menus and, owing to he ingenuity and the trouble she took in explaining dishes to Abdulla, we fed much better than might have been expected seeing that nearly all our food came out of tins.
It was just as well for us that Clarissa was such an enthusiast about food since Sylvia would have proved quite hopeless. Soon after we had entered the Sea of Sand she told me one day when we were walking on ahead of the convoy together, that she simply loathed anything to do with cooking and h
ad never been able to raise the least enthusiasm for household management. On my remarking that her dislike of such things would prove a handicap if she ever thought of getting married, she replied:
‘That’s just the trouble. I should never be any good as a poor man’s wife and yet I do want tremendously to marry and settle down. I’m sick to death of the wretched existence I’ve been leading for the last few years—never enough money, always having to scrape and save; trying to keep up appearances because of Father’s position by living in expensive hotels, yet having to beg managers for special terms and suffer the constant humiliation of under-tipping servants because one hasn’t enough to do the job properly. We’ve never had a proper home since Mother died and I’d give my eyes to have one of my own instead of making a parade that I can’t afford out here in the winter, and pigging it in some rotten little boarding-house at home each summer.’
I was a little surprised at this outburst as it showed me a completely different side of Sylvia and an aspect of her life that I had not suspected although I knew that her father had been far from rich.
I nodded sympathetically. ‘That sort of existence must be pretty wearing; but surely if you’d wanted to marry you must have had lots of chances? Even if you’d been hard up yourself, you’ve been moving in moneyed circles out here and I should have thought that in the last few winters you would have come across quite a lot of likely lads.’
‘I can understand your thinking so,’ she agreed. ‘But somehow it doesn’t pan out that way. You see, most of each season I’ve been stuck away up country with Father in some dirty little “dig” and the only men one meets in such places are the young excavators, who’re full of enthusiasm for their job but haven’t got much money. Then, as far as Cairo or Luxor is concerned, only rich people can afford to come so far afield as Egypt for a holiday and the great majority of visitors are middle-aged or old.’
The Quest of Julian Day Page 37