The others returned from the well and we loaded the camels. The sun was warmer now and I felt more cheerful, reassured by the good spirits of my companions, who laughed and joked as they worked. Before leaving, we climbed the rocky hill near the well, and Sadr’s uncle, a scrawny old man in a loincloth, showed us once more the direction to follow, pointing with both his arms. With his wild hair, gaunt face, and outstretched arms he looked, I thought, like a prophet predicting doom. I was almost surprised when he said in an ordinary voice that we could not go wrong, as we should have the Aradh escarpment on our left when we reached the Jilida. Standing behind him I took a bearing with my compass. As we climbed down the hill Ali told me that there had been another fight between the Yam and the Karab near al Abr two days before, and that the bin Maaruf had now decided to abandon Manwakh and to move tomorrow to the Makhia. He said that this was why there were already so many Arabs filling their skins at the well.
We were leaving only just in time. The camels lurched to their feet as we took hold of the head-ropes, and, after each of the Rashid had tied a spare camel behind his own, we moved off on foot. The Saar on the well stopped work to watch us go and I wondered what they were saying. Ali came with us a short distance, and then, after embracing each of us in turn, went back. We had started on our journey, and holding out our hands we said together, ‘I commit myself to God.’
Two hours later Sadr pointed to the tracks of five camels that had been ridden ahead of us the day before. At first we wondered if they were Yam, but after some discussion Sadr and Salih were convinced that they were Karab and therefore friendly Muhammad asked me to judge which was the best camel. I pointed at random to a set of tracks and they all laughed and said I had picked out the one which was indubitably the worst. They then started to argue which really was the best. Although they had not seen these camels they could visualize them perfectly. Amair, bin Ghabaisha, and Sadr favoured one camel, Muhammad, bin Kabina, and Salih another. I knew nothing about Sadr and Salih’s qualifications, but felt sure that Amair and bin Ghabaisha were right since they were better judges of a camel than Muhammad or bin Kabina. Not all Bedu can guide or track, and Muhammad was surprisingly bad at both. He was widely respected as the son of bin Kalut and was inclined to be self-important in consequence, but really he was the least efficient of my Rashid companions. Bin Ghabaisha was probably the most competent, and the others tended to rely on his judgement, as I did myself. He was certainly the best rider and the best shot, and always graceful in everything he did. He had a quick smile and a gentle manner, but I already suspected that he could be both reckless and ruthless, and I was not surprised when within two years he had become one of the most daring outlaws on the Trucial Coast with a half a dozen blood-feuds on his hands. Amair was equally ruthless, but he had none of bin Ghabaisha’s charm. He had a thin mouth, hard unsmiling eyes, and a calculating spirit without warmth. I did not like him, but knew that he was competent and reliable. Travelling alone among these Bedu I was completely at their mercy. They could at any times have murdered me, dumped my body in a sand-drift, and gone off with my possessions. Yet so absolute was my faith in them that the thought that they might betray me never crossed my mind.
We travelled through low limestone hills until nearly sunset, and camped in a cleft on their northern side. The Rashid did not trust the Saar whom we had left at Manwakh, so Amair went back along our tracks to keep watch until it was dark, while bin Ghabaisha lay hidden on the cliff above us watching the plain to the north, which was a highway for raiders going east or west. We started again at dawn, after an uneasy watchful night, and soon after sunrise came upon a broad, beaten track, where Murzuk and the Abida had passed two days before.
Bin Kabina and Amair stayed behind to try to identify some of the looted stock by reading the confusion in the sand. We had gone on a couple of miles when they caught up with us, laughing as they chased each other across the plain. They appeared to be in the best of spirits, and I was surprised when bin Kabina told me that he had recognized the tracks of two of his six camels among the spoil. He had left these two animals with his uncle on the steppes. Luckily, Qamaiqam, the splendid camel on which he had crossed the Empty Quarter the year before, and the other three were with his brother at Habarut. He told us which animals they had been able to identify, but said that there had been so many animals that it was only possible to pick out a few that had travelled on the outskirts of the herd. As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu. Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God.
We rode across gravel steppes which merged imperceptibly into the sands of the Uruq al Zaza. By midday the north-east wind was blowing in tearing gusts, bitter cold but welcome, as it would wipe out our tracks and secure us from pursuit. We pressed on until night, hoping in vain to find grazing, and then groped about in the dark feeling for firewood. Here it was dangerous to light a fire after dark, but we were too cold and hungry to be cautious. We found a small hollow, lit a fire, and sat gratefully round the flames. At dawn we ate some dates, drank a few drops of coffee, and started off as the sun rose.
It was another cold grey day, but there was no wind. We went on foot for the first hour or two, and then each of us, as he felt inclined, pulled down his camel’s head, put a foot on her neck, and was lifted up to within easy reach of the saddle. Muhammad was usually the first to mount and I the last, for the longer I walked the shorter time I should have to ride. The others varied their positions, riding astride or kneeling in the saddle, but I could only ride astride, and as the hours crawled by the saddle edge bit deeper into my thighs.
For the next two days we crossed hard, flat, drab-coloured sands, without grazing, and, consequently, had no reason to stop until evening. On the second day, just after we had unloaded, we saw a bull oryx walking straight towards us. To him we were in the eye of the setting sun and he probably mistook us for others of his kind. As only about three Englishmen have shot an Arabian oryx, I whispered to bin Ghabaisha to let me shoot, while the oryx came steadily on. Now he was only a quarter of a mile away, now three hundred yards, and still he came on. The size of a small donkey – I could see his long straight horns, two feet or more in length, his pure white body, and the dark markings on his legs and face. He stopped suspiciously less than two hundred yards away. Bin Kabina whispered to me to shoot. Slowly I pressed the trigger. The oryx spun round and galloped off. Muhammad muttered disgustedly, ‘A clean miss,’ and bin Kabina said loudly, ‘If you had let bin Ghabaisha shoot we should have had meat for supper’; all I could say was ‘Damn and blast!’
I little realized at the time that by missing the oryx I probably saved our lives. A year later bin al Kamam joined us on the Trucial Coast. He told us that he had been at Main in the Jauf, when news arrived that the Christian and some Rashid were at Manwakh, preparing to cross the sands. The Governor of the Jauf, Saif al Islam al Hussain, one of the Imam Yahya’s sons, sent off two parties of Dahm to kill us. The larger party of twenty occupied some wells on the desert’s edge, which they thought we might visit, while the other party of fifteen went into the Sands to pick up our tracks. Bin al. Kamam said that he and his companion had been imprisoned to prevent them from escaping and giving us warning. He had been certain that the Dahm would intercept and kill us, and when eventually he saw them riding back across the plain towards the town he was waiting to hear that we were dead. Suddenly he realized that they were riding in silence, instead of singing their war-songs, and that they must have failed to find us. The smaller party reported that they had picked up our tracks, which were two days old; they had
followed us for two days, but as we were travelling very fast they had been afraid that they would run out of water before they could overtake us. They said that at our camping places they had seen marks in the sand where we had put down our bags of gold. If I had shot the oryx we should have delayed for a day to dry its meat, and the Dahm would probably have caught up with us. We thought at the time that we were far enough into the Empty Quarter to be safe, and we were not keeping a good look-out. If our pursuers had been from the Yam they would certainly have overtaken us, but the Dahm are afraid of the Sands.
For the next three days we rode across sands where there were only occasional abal bushes and a few dry tufts of ailqi or qassis, the remains of vegetation which had grown after rain four years before. We were now in the Qaimiyat, where parallel dune chains ran from north-east to south-west. These dunes were only about a hundred and fifty feet high, but their steep inclines faced towards us, and the successive floundering ascents exhausted our camels, as they had eaten practically nothing for six days. When we left Manwakh they were very fat, and this gave them reserves on which to draw, but their very fatness distressed them in this heavy sand. They were fresh from pasturage and their backs were soft and unaccustomed to the saddle. Now they were heavily-loaded and doing very long marches. We knew that under such conditions they were certain to develop saddle swellings, which would turn all too easily into ulcers. We would gladly have rested them for a day if we could have found grazing and if our water supply had allowed it. The sheepskins, which I had bought in ignorance, sweated very badly, but we had already finished the water that was in them. Even the goatskins had not been long enough in use to become watertight and we were making constant but ineffectual efforts to check the alarming drip. We passed fresh tracks of oryx and of rim, the large white gazelle which is found in the Sands, and knew that if we followed these tracks they would lead us to fresh grazing, but we could not afford to lengthen our journey.
In the afternoon of the sixth day the dune chains turned into gentle downs, but we had already climbed over sixteen of them that day and on one of them a baggage camel collapsed, only moving again when we unloaded her. Bin Kabina’s camel went lame in the shoulder, and all the others showed signs of exhaustion. I knew that it would be another ten days before we reached the Hassi and I began to wonder if we should get there.
Next morning we came on the fresh tracks of a pelican which had walked in a straight line across the sand. I tried to remember what it said in the Bible about a pelican in the wilderness. Amair told me that five years earlier he had seen several very large white birds near Mughshin, and that they had left tracks like these. While he was describing these birds we topped a rise and saw that the rolling sands ahead of us were green with qassis, growing in tasselled tufts a foot high. We unloaded and turned our camels loose. I knew that this grazing was going to make all the difference to our chance of reaching the Hassi, since it would not only satisfy the camel’s hunger but would also alleviate their thirst.
We camped on a floor of hard sand in the shelter of a small dune. Two twisted abal bushes, one of them with a broken branch drooping to the ground, three clumps of qassis, beside which I had placed my saddle-bags, a pile of camel-droppings, and a low bank of sand, marked with a tracery of lizard’s tracks, combined, with our scattered possessions to become our home. There were similar places all around us, but, because bin Ghabaisha happened to call out ‘Stop over there’ and we had gone where he had directed, this particular spot acquired a temporary significance. This camping place was memorable because of the grazing, but I always thought each one distinctive at the time. The curious shape of some sticks beside the fire, a sprinkle of white on golden sand where bin Kabina had spilt flour, a rope lying where a camel had jerked it as she rose, such trifles seemed to distinguish each camp from others, but in fact the differences were too insignificant and the memory of them soon blurred. All but a few tended to become just one of a thousand others.
Bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha were preparing food, and they called out to us, where we lay idly in the sun, that they were going to make porridge flavoured with sugar and butter. Porridge was wasteful of water, but now, contentedly watching the camels ripping succulent mouthfuls from the rich feeding around them, we cheerfully condoned the extravagance. After the meal, bin Ghabaisha and Sadr went off to hunt, but came back empty-handed at sunset, saying they had seen a herd of twenty oryx and many rim, but could not get near them. We decided to leave the camels out to graze during the night, feeling that here we were safe from attack. In the morning ‘the Red One’, the best of our baggage camels, had strayed and it took Amair two hours to find her and bring her back. No camel will ever remain contentedly in one place, however good the grazing, but, even though hobbled, will wander farther afield looking for something better. ‘The Red One’ was particularly bad at straying, and the others usually followed along behind her. Bin Kabina’s camel and Amair’s had become inseparable, while mine showed a preference for the mirri, an ugly grey, which we had bought in the Raidat because she was in milk. At first she refused to give us any, although her calf had already been weaned, but Amai sewed up her anus, saying he would not undo it until she let down her milk. After that she gave us about a quart a day.
These Bedu allow a camel to suckle her calf without interference for about six weeks; they then cover her udder with a bag, only allowing the calf to drink before they milk her in the morning and evening. They wean it after nine months. A camel will remain in milk for as long as four years provided she is not served by a bull. She may have as many as a dozen calves and has a working-life of about twenty years. These Arabs keep a piece of skin from a calf which has been slaughtered or has died before it was weaned, and allow the camel to smell it before they milk her; otherwise she would not let down her milk.
It was a crisp morning with a gentle breeze. A few white cumulus clouds deepened the blueness of a sky no longer tinged with yellow. Muhammad looked critically at the camels as Amair and bin Ghabaisha drove them towards us, and remarked, ‘They look better now. God willing they will be able to reach the Hassi. Anyway, we may find more grazing. It looks as if there is a lot in the Sands this year, but it is very scattered.’ It only took us ten minutes to load, and as we moved off I thought how pleasant it was to be free from the burden of possessions.
We walked across the red downs, and half an hour later came to the end of the grazing. Sadr told me that we had been camped on its eastern edge and that it only extended for four or five miles to the west. We could easily have missed it. A little later, finding some broken ostrich eggs, bin Kabina and Amair argued whether ostriches were lawful food, a purely academic point since ostriches had been extinct in southern Arabia for more than fifty years, although a few survived until recently in the Wadi Sirham in northern Arabia. When I was in Syria a Bedu told me that the Rualla had shot one there just before the war; it may well have been the last of them. My companions stopped to show me what their tracks looked like, saying that their grandfathers had known these birds. I had seen plenty of the tracks of the African ostrich, a larger bird than the Arabian, in the Sudan, and the copies which Amair made in the sand were correct. It is sad to think that the Arabian oryx and rim are also doomed as soon as cars penetrate into the southern desert. Unfortunately oryx prefer the hard, flat sands and gravel plains to the heavy dunes. Since they differ from the four species to be found in Africa, it means that yet another kind of animal will soon be extinct. In Saudi Arabia during the last few years even gazelle have become rare. Hunting-parties scour the plains in cars, returning with lorry-loads of gazelle which they have run down and butchered.
Every mile or so I checked our course with my compass; it was difficult to hold everything – the compass, notebook, pencil, camel-stick, and head-rope, especially when the camel fidgeted. I had dropped my stick for the second time when bin Kabina, who jumped down from his camel to pick it up, said as he handed it back to me, ‘Really, Umbarak, this is too much. If I were yo
u I should divorce her as soon as you get back.’ The Bedu have a saying that whenever a man drops his stick his wife is being unfaithful.
We went on till evening without finding pasturage. When we camped we could see the dark plain of the Jilida six miles away. Bin Daisan had told me that the Jilida linked up with the plain of Abu Bahr, which in turn merged into the plains running down from the Hasa to Jabrin. He had also told me that when we reached the Jilida we should be half-way to the Hassi, but that the big and difficult sands would still lie ahead of us. He had explained that the Aradh escarpment, which ran south from the Hassi, would then be about fifty miles to the west.
Arabian Sands Page 26