“If the moon be with thee thou need’st not mind about the stars.”—Arabic Proverb. The desert is the cradle of love!
The love of God or the love of solitude, or the love which seeks its soul-mate and finds it, in the immensity of the sands. There is no room for doubt in the minds of those who love and who pass their days together in the desert’s great spaces. If the love is that which endureth, which floods cannot drown nor many waters quench, which looks ever towards the horizon where the light is born heralding the day, then will the desert be as a book filled with much wisdom; a book in which the handwriting is visible only to those who radiate the love which sees the mountain peak above the swirl of mist; the truth of the dream in which, blindly, we stumble and fall, until enlightenment comes to us so that we rise once more and reach the end of the road at last.
The desert is a background against which love blazes as a torch or shines with the glimmer of the rushlight; a journey into it either fills the mind with the wonder of God or overwhelms the traveller, when the novelty has passed, with a crushing sense of boredom; the sunset, the sunrise, and the stars are either the thoughts of the Creator, or merely a means by which to mark the passing of the endless hours; whilst the stillness, silence, and far horizon teach life’s wayfarers the stupendous lesson of Eternity or fill the gregarious globe-trotter with a deep longing for the noise and bustle of great cities.
For the westerner there are no half-way measures in the desert.
[91]
He may have been born in the glamour of the East and have lived the best part of his life with the vast stretches of sand around him, and yet have heard no voice calling in the noonday, nor seen the slender hand beckoning in the shadows of dawn and dusk. He may come from the counting-house upon holiday bent, with guide book in hand and passage booked for the return journey to the city, yet see the spirit of the desert, remote, mysterious, beckoning him out of all the merry, personally conducted crowd.
He will either follow the beckoning figure with hungry heart until he falls, to die, clutching at its robes which slip ever from between his fingers, or he will return to the counting-house to pass his life in a great longing which will never be appeased.
In either case, he will have answered the call of the desert to his own undoing.[1]
[1] Instances have been known where Europeans have ridden out into the desert upon seeing it for the first time, and have not been seen or heard of since.
Helen Raynor and Ralph Trenchard sat looking out across the Robaa-el-Khali, or Empty Desert, or the Red Desert, as it is called by the Arabs on account of the colour of its sands.
She sat with her hand in his, watching the strange effect the wind from the north has upon this desert, which rolls away to the horizon in great, sandy ridges, and of which no one has explored the heart. When this wind blows gently, it skims the surface of the great ridges and lifts the topmost layer of the sand, carrying it down into the hollows and up on to the crests for mile after mile, until the desert looks like an ocean of great, glittering billows surging towards the distant horizon.
“The sky seems to be covered with a transparent, diamond-encrusted veil,” whispered Helen, as she lifted her face to the moon, and smiled when the man she loved drew her to him and kissed her.
[92]
“It is the effect of the sand in the air, beloved,” he whispered, “under the moon which shines for all lovers.”
“Look at that wave out there”—she pointed to the east as she spoke—“breaking into spray. How wonderful—how wonderful it all is, Ra!”
“I expect a big rock lies just there, beloved, if we could only see it, so that the sand is blown against it and higher into the air. How I love the name you have given me, dearest; it seems to belong to the country where I found you waiting for me, all those months ago, alone, in the desert, under a moon like this.”
“I really expect it was the same moon, Ra; it is only we who have moved,” laughed Helen softly. “Yes, I think your nickname suits you; it’s strong, with the strength of dead Egypt, like you, with your tremendous will power which can even dominate the camel.”
They laughed as they talked of the long journey with its scenes and contretemps, during which Ralph Trenchard had had to exercise every bit of will power and every scrap of patience he possessed, so as to triumph over the splendid camels which composed the caravan, and which had aroused admiration and no little jealousy in the hearts of the inhabitants of the different villages they had passed through, from the Port of Jiddah to Hutah in the Oasis of Hareek.
“Do you remember when Mahli ate Grandad’s best tussore coat and pretended to die, and then, suddenly, got to her feet and rushed at you, because you offered Duria a whole lump of dates and took no notice of her in her tantrums?”
“Sheer jealousy and greed, sweetheart. I believe no woman who loved could be as jealous, or as vindictive, as a female camel in a rage. Look straight ahead, beloved; can you see something moving through the waves?”
Helen sat forward and stared due south.
“Yes, I think—I do. Yes, it looks like mounted men.”[93] She shivered suddenly and turned and caught her lover by the arm. “Ra! I’m frightened.”
“Frightened! Dear heart, what at?”
“I don’t know—I don’t really know. I just felt a tremendous premonition of danger. Ah! look, they’ve gone. I wonder who they were? So near us, yet taking no notice of our big camp with its fires and its white tents.”
“Yes. I wonder!”
If only he had known it, they were the advance guard of a woman who was to show him that there is no jealousy or vindictiveness to equal that of a woman whose love is not returned.
They sat silently, looking out across the sandy ocean until they could no longer see the phantom figures moving eastwards in the far distance; then they talked of the journey behind them and the enterprise ahead.
To gain full control over the staff and, as much as is humanly possible, over the animals, Ralph Trenchard had preceded Sir Richard and his granddaughter, landing in Jiddah a month before them. Death by thirst, exhaustion or violence being a recognized risk to be taken by those who travel off the beaten track in Arabia, he had intensely disliked the idea of Helen Raynor accompanying the expedition; had argued the question; pointed out the dangers; emphasized the added responsibility her safekeeping would entail, insisting upon the intense discomfort she would have to endure, only to find himself up against the mule-headed obstinacy for which Sir Richard was famous.
He had resigned himself to the inevitable at last and had discovered, after one week spent in the company of the camels and their drivers, that for nothing on earth would he undertake the excursion into the unknown, unless she took it with him, riding at his side. He knew that love had come to him that night when he had seen her sitting on a hummock of sand, alone in the desert under the moon; he knew that that love had come to possess him[94] utterly when he had succumbed to the entreaties of Sir Richard to join the expedition; but he had not known how much he really loved her, or what she really meant to him, until he had been separated from her for weeks.
He had counted the days, the hours, the minutes, and then, jubilantly, thankfully, had rushed down to meet the boat Sir Richard had chartered, as she docked, and happy beyond telling, had started out on the foolhardy enterprise, with Helen at his side.
There is nothing so calculated to make life-long friends or sworn enemies of two people, as a long journey on camels and surrounded by camels. A trip into the desert on camelback for so much an hour, or day, is vastly romantic, causing you to feel one with Pharaoh or Queen Hatshepu, Abraham or Jezebel, according to your sex. It’s ten to one you write an ode to the Sphinx or the Pyramids or the Voice of the Past as you sit on the sand, smoking your Simon Artz; it’s certain that your camel driver tots up the different items of your toilet in an endeavour to hit upon the right amount of extra baachseesch he may extract from you, whilst wishing to goodness you’d get through with your foolishness and return to your comfortable, or otherwise, hotel; but it’s an altogether different thing when you make part of a caravan composed of the ill-mannered, ill-natured brutes. No matter how well they are handled, or how far you ride apart from their odorous bodies, you will never be able to count upon a moment’s peace as long as they are likely to panic for nothing, or fight for less, whilst filling the air with sounds that resemble the emptying of gigantic, narrow-necked bottles, nests of angry snakes, battalions of spitting cats, moans of incurable invalids and shrieks of insufferable children.
They lie down or get up or refuse to move just as their hateful fancy dictates; they follow obediently one behind another, if in a string, or peacefully together, if in a herd, then stop dead and look on indifferently,[95] whilst one, for no apparent reason whatever, reduces the patience of its driver to shreds and its pack to bits. Some drivers are cautious and hobble the lot at night, others take the risk and hobble the worst offenders; ’twere, however, wise to be cautious so as to prevent one, suddenly possessed of the devil, from either clearing for the open with the gifts you intend for your host upon its offensive back, or from lifting the flap of your tent in the still watches of the night and, whilst taking a survey of your heat-disturbed person, banqueting off your boots.
If your temper is not of the sort that can come out unruffled from ever-recurring and heated arguments with your companion and the distracted drivers; if your looks cannot withstand the long moments ’twixt heat of sand and sun and wrath, as you sit perched above the turmoil upon the back of your own thrice-accursed beast, then ’twere wise to give the desert an extremely wide berth. Lay down the law to your companion and he will learn to loathe the very sight of you; upbraid the long-suffering driver and he will league himself with the camel to spite you in every way; hit the camel so as to cause it pain, and you will never again feel any security about the welfare of your person. You won’t recognize that camel one or five or ten years hence as you saunter through some Bazaar, but it will recognize you all right, and will meet its teeth in the tenderest portion of your anatomy it can find, or, if it gets the chance, will seize, worry, and throw you and deliver the coup de grace of its long-waited-for revenge by rolling upon you until you are an unrecognizable pulp.
Grin and bear with it all, and your servants and your camels, your companion and your days, will not appear so insufferably obnoxious or so outrageously long, in the land of the Pharaohs.
The caravan was a big one on account of the multitude of gifts Sir Richard carried, with which to buy[96] peace, if not plenty, as it journeyed from Jiddah, skirting the territory sacred to the Holy City, down through the mountainous, fertile district of Taif and southwards along the Wady Dowasir, with its many villages, up to Hutah in the Oasis of Hareek, where commences the Great Desert.
It is wise not to reckon altogether on gifts and a smattering of the langu............