The Quest of Julian Day

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘But hang it all,’ I protested, ‘You’re terribly good-looking Sylvia. You know that as well as I do; and you must have had some chaps fall for you.’

  ‘Oh yes; but the ones with money have been twice my age or married already and the only man I really cared about hadn’t got a bob. He was an excavator and even his expenses out here were paid by one of the University Archæological societies, although he was one of the most brilliant young men Father ever had on his staff. I had a darned good mind to burn my boats and marry him; but Father said he’d sack him if I did, and I just couldn’t face starting married life practically on the dole.’

  ‘I think you were right about that,’ I told her. ‘Love in a cottage can’t be much fun after the first few weeks, and there’s always the possibility of children turning up to make things more difficult than ever.’

  She turned a glowing face to me. ‘Oh, but I adore children. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so terribly keen to marry. I’m determined to have at least four and I wouldn’t mind working my fingers to the bone in the nursery. I’m sure I’d make a good wife, too, because I am the faithful kind and I’ve learnt to be economical. It’s only this wretched business of thinking up meals and cooking which I hate so much; and if I couldn’t afford to have servants to do it for me I should be driven stark, staring mad after the first few months.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get some sort of job yourself which would help pay for a couple of servants?’ I suggested.

  ‘I thought of that ages ago but there are so few jobs I’m fitted for which would bring in decent money. My only special subject is Egyptology and there are plenty of young men from the Universities or the wives and daughters of archæologists who’re able and willing to do that sort of clerical work for nothing. I’m no good at modern languages and I’ve never learnt shorthand so I couldn’t get a post as secretary. I could serve in a shop or become a mannequin, I suppose, but the pay wouldn’t amount to much and if I were out at work all day, who would look after the children? No, Julian; my one real hope is this expedition. If it’s successful I’ll have enough to live decently and marry anyone I choose. If it’s not, this will be my last season in Egypt and I’ll have to drop out of things to become a daily-breader at about two pounds a week living in some London suburb.’

  ‘What happened to your chap?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said bitterly. ‘He quarrelled with Father, mainly about me; and he went home to try out some scheme by which he hoped to raise the wind; but he’s not very practical, poor darling, and from the last I heard of him I’m afraid he’s made a mess of things. It’s not easy to get rich quick on an academic education and I’ve pretty well given up hoping that he’ll ever come back into my life at all.’

  After this chat Sylvia and I seemed to slip quite easily into a much greater degree of intimacy and she told me a lot about the wretched shifts to which they had been put in order to maintain her father’s position in the eyes of the outer world, while looking twice at every penny expended on food and clothes.

  One is always inclined to regard a very pretty girl as an exceptionally fortunate person because one assumes automatically that her good looks more or less place the world at her feet, and that she can get anything in reason that she sets her heart upon; but I saw now that it didn’t necessarily work out like that. In spite of her natural attractions Sylvia seemed to have had a rotten deal and my sympathy for her drew us together during the many hours we spent in each other’s company.

  In the minor crises, which are natural to such expeditions, she never lost her head; and I admired tremendously the calm way in which she brought order out of chaos among the jabbering, excited Arabs. I felt she was right, too, when she had said that she was the faithful kind and would make a good wife. I wondered what the chap was like whom she had fallen for and decided that, in any case, if she fell for someone else, he would be a darned lucky fellow; providing he had just sufficient income to provide her with servants for her kitchen which, after all, wasn’t a very unreasonable thing for a girl to ask when brought up as she had been.

  She seemed impervious to sunstroke and while we sweated under our solar topees she went about bare-headed most of the time, her pale gold hair gradually bleaching to an even lighter blonde cendrée in the strong rays of the sun. I had thought her attractive from the beginning and the sight of her tall, slim figure clad in riding-breeches, top-boots and an open shirt, which was never long out of my range of vision, consoled me more and more as the days went on for the lack of variety in the landscape.

  Day after day we trekked over the endless sand, mounting crest after crest to see wave after wave of others, undulating before us. Sometimes we managed only a little over twenty miles in a day and at others nearly forty, according to the amount of time we had to devote to getting the cars and lorries out of soft patches where they had stuck.

  It was on our eleventh day out from Dakhla that we arrived at our destination. Somehow I had vaguely expected that there would be something to indicate it, just as a child thinks that the North Pole must really have an ice-coated flag-staff set up to show the Arctic explorer that he has really reached his goal. I don’t know what I expected, a bit of ruin or a small oasis, perhaps: but I was quite disappointed when, an hour and a half after we had set out from our midday rest on the eleventh day. Sylvia called a halt and said: ‘Here we are!’

  The column drew up on a ridge and in every direction as far as the eye could see, the landscape was the same incredibly monotonous waste that we now seemed to have been trekking through for half a life-time—just endless waves of hump backed, yellow dunes.

  I moved the convoy down into the next valley in order that our camp should be sheltered from the wind as much as possible and, when I had started the porters setting up our tents, I trudged back up the hill. Sylvia had taken her usual observation of the sun at midday but she was now taking another as a final check on our position, which she worked out by the same process, having allowed for the difference of time registered on our chronometers.

  ‘We’re not far out,’ she said when she had done. ‘The actual point is about three-quarters of a mile further south along the ridge here, as near as I can make it.’

  With Harry and Clarissa we walked along to the place she had pointed out and began to look about us; hoping that even a casual survey might enable us to find a solitary spearhead or some other indication of the thousands of men who had perished there. But the sands were as smooth and unbroken as those of the innumerable dunes we had traversed in the preceding days.

  Although I had not said so, as I did not wish unduly to depress the others, I had never felt particularly optimistic about the success of the expedition after Sylvia had told me in Cairo something of the natural laws which govern the sands of the Libyan Desert. Apparently, although the countless waves of dunes appear quite stationary, they are actually in slow but constant movement. This is caused by the prevailing wind which gradually shifts the sand from the windward sides of the dunes, over their tops to their leeward sides, which has the effect that, in the course of time, the whole of each dune turns right over, gradually moving forward as it does so. As every ridge does the same the whole sandy ocean slowly advances in one direction. During a period of centuries the dune upon which we were standing might gradually have rolled to its present site from a spot many miles further northwest of us. In consequence, the bottoms of the valleys also change their position so that one section of low ground is uncovered at one time and another a few years later, which results in any particular point being alternately an exposed valley bottom or buried five hundred feet deep below the crest of a dune which consists of millions of tons of sand.

  The last camps of the lost legions would obviously have been in the valley bottoms of their time so that the legionaries might get as much shelter from the bitter night winds as possible. Within a few months, or at least years, of their foundering, all traces of their camps would have been obliterated by the movi
ng forward of the nearest dunes. Year after year the sand above their remains would have got deeper and deeper, until they lay buried hundreds of feet below its crest. Then, after a further period of years, the sand that buried them would gradually have moved on until they were fully exposed in a new valley bottom once more.

  How often they became exposed was difficult to calculate and perhaps if one had flown in an aeroplane over the spot upon which we were standing in the year of Queen Victoria’s jubilee one might have seen mile upon mile of metal debris stretching along the valley bottoms for anyone to pick up who came along. On the other hand, in that particular year all traces of the lost legions’ passing might have been at their maximum depth below the sand; or again only buried some ten feet deep, in which case they would be comparatively easy to get at.

  I had no doubt whatever that the stuff was there but it seemed to me that the whole success or failure of our expedition hung upon the blind chance as to how deep it was buried during the particular year in which we had arrived on the scene. The only thing really in our favour was that an army of 50,000 men would have occupied a very considerable area, more particularly as they must have scattered at the last in their desperate endeavours to find a way back out of the trap into which they had fallen; so, although many of their remains might be buried beyond all hope of recovery others might possibly be found in these or neighbouring valleys.

  We spent a couple of hours prospecting the valley in which we had set up our camp but none of us could find anything at all and, as Sylvia pointed out, even a small miscalculation on the part of the Egyptian astronomer on whose bearings we were relying to find the spot where the treasure had been abandoned might have thrown us out by several miles. Taking the site or our camp as the centre of operations, therefore, our next job was to go out in the cars during the succeeding days and survey the whole territory within as big a radius as we could section by section.

  The following day we set about it, taking the south-eastern sector over which we had advanced as the most likely; for this would be the direction in which the army would have retreated Harry suggested halving our labours by letting the two cars take different directions but I would not agree to that as I thought it was much too dangerous. Even on picnic expeditions from the Nile Valley the Egyptian Government have made it a law that not less than two cars may proceed into the desert, since if one breaks down its occupants may lose themselves in trying to get back, and formerly the government was put to much expense in having to send out aeroplanes to locate stranded parties. We had no aeroplane to search for one of the cars if anything went wrong with it or even if it got stuck in a bad patch of sand, and if the second car failed to find it that might cost the occupants of the stranded car their lives. In consequence, I had my way and it was agreed that both cars should set out together.

  As time was an important factor, now that we had arrived in the area where we believed the treasure to be, we decided to take our lunch with us each day and carry on through the rigours of the blazing noontides, in order to cover as great amount of ground as possible. Without the lorries we were able to go much faster, covering up to seventy miles a day, but although we scoured the surrounding valleys, literally from dawn to dusk for the next five gruelling days, we did not find a single thing; and at the end of that time we were beginning to fear the expedition would prove a failure.

  Each of our two water-supply lorries was equipped to carry 300 gallons and they had been filled to capacity with filtered water before the expedition had left the last wells in the Oasis of Dakhla. Their horsepower was capable of transporting a much greater weight of water over roads but we had deliberately, and wisely, cut their loads down to the maximum we thought they could carry through trackless country. On a basis of a gallon per head per day for all purposes the 600 gallons were calculated to last the eighteen of us just over 33 days. When we had first settled upon the quantity we should take we had hoped that our caravan would be slightly fewer in numbers, and that, reckoning ten days for the journey from Dakhla to the site of the treasure and ten days for the return journey, we should have well over a fortnight in which to prospect the territory in which the army had foundered and put in the necessary digging to collect as much of the treasure as we could carry, if we could find it.

  Unfortunately the water-ration of the additional men whom Amin had considered necessary reduced our time limit on the spot by a day or two and, as we had taken eleven days to get there, I felt that we ought to allow ourselves at least twelve to get back, in case of accidents. That cut our stay on the spot down to ten days; five of them had already gone without result and only five were now left us if we adhered to our original arrangements.

  A gallon a day per head for all purposes was a fairly liberal allowance seeing that the natives did not wash; but they used considerable quantities in their cooking and as, apart from the two guides they were not desert-bred men, they were apt to be careless and wasteful of water in spite of the strict supervision exercised wherever possible by Amin and myself. Even so, we should have been well in hand if the radiators of the motors, which were constantly boiling over in the steep climbs up the sand-dunes, had not consumed much more than I had reckoned upon. That about evened things out so on this, our sixteenth night out from Dakhla, we had just a decent margin over half our original water-supply remaining.

  Petrol did not worry for, in addition to a whole lorry devoted to it, each vehicle had set out with a full tank and an additional reserve lashed to its carrier. In our journey we had not consumed anywhere near half our supply and for the last five days the four lorries had been idle, so we had more than sufficient to continue our exploration in the cars and get the whole convoy back.

  Water was the difficulty. If we did not strike lucky in the next few days we should have no time left in which to dig, unless we increased the length of our stay on the spot and I knew that there would be overwhelming temptation to do so should we come across any indications of the lost army. To remain there longer, once we were due to set out on our return journey, meant one of two things; either cutting down our daily ration of water, which could be done but might prove a very dangerous proceeding if some unforeseen occurrence held us up on our return journey; or heading north by west for the Oasis of Siwa instead of south-east to Dakhla.

  Siwa lay only about eighty miles distant and was by far the nearest inhabited territory in any direction; we could reach it in three days at the most instead of the eleven days we should need to get back to Dakhla. This possible alternative would give us another clear week at any ‘dig’ on which we might be working; but, as against that, Siwa is the capital of the fanatical Senussi who fought against the British and played such havoc with our columns during the Great War.

  A state of peace now exists between the Senussi and the Egyptian Government but Siwa is still a forbidden city to Europeans. The Sheik who rules this powerful people and is, at the same time, the head of the strictest of all Mohammedan sects, will not endanger the morals of his nation by allowing the infiltration of Whites who carry the forbidden alcohol and the taint of commercial slavery to native races wherever they penetrate.

  It has been only with the very greatest difficulty that a few European explorers have managed to secure permits to visit Siwa, even in recent years, and to do so without the signed warrant which shows one to be under the direct protection of the Lord of the Oasis would be to court death in the outlying villages, since Christians are still regarded as the living images of the Devil by its fanatical inhabitants.

  It seemed to me, therefore, that whatever happened, we must turn back in another five days, or six at the very outside, although I knew how bitterly Sylvia would feel about having to do so. The failure of the expedition meant so much more to her than to the Belvilles or myself as, after Clarissa’s capital outlay had been repaid from any treasure that we might find, she had expressed her willingness that Sylvia should have the lion’s share of the spoils.

  When I thought of the drea
ry existence she had led through lack of money and the fact that somewhere within a few miles of us there must lie literally millions of pounds’ worth of antiquities, gold and jewels, I could well understand how she must be feeling. Even a tiny fraction of such a vast treasure would be sufficient to pay the costs of the expedition and set her up with a pleasant income of her own for life. Sir Walter had had practically nothing to leave her and now that he was dead she would have little further chance of even meeting likely young men with a certain amount of money. After this last flutter in Egypt she would have to go home and eke out a microscopic income by buckling down to any sort of job she could get. Therefore to her our success or failure meant either a new lease of life with the realisation of some, at least, if not all of her dreams; or the grim outlook of a search for work at some unskilled job which would leave her little leisure and barely keep her when she got it.

  It was this knowledge and my absolute insistence that we must turn back after six more days which led me, very much against my better judgment, to give way to Sylvia and the others when they pressed that, nearly half our time already having gone, we should, in future, divide our forces and let the two cars take different routes each day so that we could prospect double the amount of ground.

  The cars having been specially equipped for such work were as fool-proof as possible and Harry always ran over their engines personally each morning before they went out, so there was really very little danger of a breakdown. The principal risk was getting in a soft patch of sand but the huge balloon tyres with which the cars were fitted considerably lessened the chance of this misfortune, and having had over a fortnight’s experience of desert driving we were now able to judge with considerable accuracy the good sand from the bad by the slight variation in its colour. In the last event, if we did get stuck, we felt that although it might necessitate a long and tiring walk, we should not be in any really serious danger because we could always follow the tracks of the car back to our camp.