Chapter XXI

“And have you ever in the midnight hour

All lonely sought in after days the spot

Where first you met and after wooed and won

The being loved, the being Death loved too?”

* * * * *

BACK TO SOTAIRE.

One of our party missed. — A dreadful night. — Found at last. — Dry wells. — We change our route. — An insolent guide. — Kadjah. — Stolen camels. — An Arab shiekh made prisoner. — The beginning of the rains. — The clouds. — Sotaire. — Solitude. — Good-bye!

SINCE leaving Old Dongola we had consumed more than four months’ stores, and our camels were all light; we were, therefore, in a position to give up without much inconvenience the fifty camels we had hired at El Fasher. The Khartoom party not having had to cut their way through so many thorns or to travel over such rough ground, had preserved their full number of camels in unimpaired health, and were fortunately able to assist us with such few as we required, as well as with some water- skins, many of our own having long since been rendered useless.

On our homeward journey we travelled with the Wady Milkh near on our right. There was plenty of game in the valley, and our table was kept well supplied with gazelles, ariels, antelopes, &c.; we scarcely felt the want of sheep and fowls.

On the evening of the second day we had been an hour in camp, when we discovered that one of our party was missing. He had been last seen, shortly after lunch, in the Wady Milkh with his gun on his shoulder, followed by Mohommed Rhannem, the lunch soldier, the last man in the world likely to be of the slightest assistance to him in finding his way about the desert. The ground, owing to the recent rains, had become consolidated, and then quickly drying under the burning sun was hard, and our camels had left no traces of their march. His position was one of real danger. Darkness came down soon upon our fears, still he came not. Grass, wherewith to make a blaze round the camp, there was none; and the thorn-bushes, quickened into sudden life by the water that had fallen, burned, when ignited, very slowly, and gave no light to bring him home. The soldiers were ordered out, and at intervals of every ten minutes every rifle in camp was fired in volley, making the night ring with the noise of war. We had six rockets in the camp; one of these was discharged every half-hour high into the sky; the stars were, however, too bright for them to shed much light at a distance. All the means known to travellers for bringing stray wanderers home were exhausted; he could not be within several miles of us. Our hearts were growing sick with fear.

That night there was no sleep in camp. We sat over the table, each of us pale, wearied, and anxious, either in helpless silence or making suggestions to be abandoned as soon as made. To give us hope, the rifles fired all through the night every ten minutes till early dawn, but the sound was only thrown away on the air. At length the morning came to bring new life and hope into our hearts. The whitest tent on the camp was packed on to a camel, and sent off to be pitched on the summit of the highest mountain near, in the hope that it might afford him some indication that help was near. Every Arab at all familiar with the desert, each with a rifle to fire, was sent off on the way we had come, not to go together, but to spread themselves right and left over a width of ten or twelve miles, and to proceed in that order until he was brought back. We had water in camp only for three days; we were three days from Bagghareeyeh and two from Om-Badr. If he was not found that day it would be necessary to proceed on our journey the next. We knew that he had but a little water with him, and the doctor said, and he spoke from experience, that wandering about under the sun for two days without water would inevitably lead to the death of anyone but an Arab. Learning this the light had brought us no solace; it only served to make the fears of each more distinctly visible in his face, and to tell us that with every hour that passed hope was drawing to an end.

He came into camp late in the night; Mohommed Gadderab had found him. He was lying on the sand ten miles away, powerless to move; his tongue was thick and dry in his mouth; his unconscious camel was browsing near on the thorny trees, with the parched water-skins hanging at his side. Mohommed Gadderab had taken water with him, and in a few minutes my poor friend was restored. Mohommed Rhannem was about a hundred yards behind in as bad a predicament. He, too, after a gallon or so of water, was brought back to such elementary senses as niggardly nature had bestowed upon him. He held, tightly clutched in his hand, the bridle-rope of his camel, and as he lay dying of thirst on the ground, the stately brute stood motionless, like a statue of stone, peering into the desert. When our friend, a favourite in all the camp, came back, we dined; we had not dined the day before. He was the hero of the dinner, and never, in all my experience, did ever one of us enjoy a dinner more.

On the morning of the 21st, one day beyond our last melancholy site, while we were performing our early ablutions, a few Arabs wandering in the Wady Milkh, told us that the wells at Bagghareeyeh were dry, and that it would be perfectly useless to continue our journey in that direction.

After the late rains there were, in parts, many pools of water which the sun had not yet dried up. These were, however, only known to the Arabs, the Hamr, living in this desert, and for us to have proceeded on our journey on the mere chance of finding them, would have involved a risk of life which none of us were willing to encounter. Kadjah, in Khordofan, two days’ journey distant in a south-easterly direction, was, we were told, the nearest place where wells containing water were likely to be found, and even these wells in some seasons were dried up. We had now but one day’s water; that which was poured out into our basins for the purposes of ablution was poured carefully back into the tanks. It was necessary to economise every drop. No one in our camp knew the road to Kadjah; “would the shiekh who had imparted to us the information send us a guide, we would pay him two dollars,” an enormous sum for an Arab, who, under ordinary circumstances, would have to work for a month to become possessed of a sheep. The shiekh complied with our request, and shortly after the guide came into camp—a truculent, ugly, bumptious, impudent Hamr Arab, insulting every one of the Kabbabbeesh he passed on his way. He came to our tent, and in an insolent tone said he would guide us for fifty dollars. I question whether we had fifty dollars in camp. It was, however, not a time for haggling. A rope was tied round his neck, and the other end was fastened to the back pommel of a soldier’s saddle, a thick stick was placed behind his back, to which his elbows were fastened, and his hands were drawn towards his breast and firmly tied together. The soldier started on the camel on what we supposed was the true direction. Had the guide stopped he must have been strangled; had he led us the wrong way, he feared that the far end of the rope might have been tied to a branch of the nearest tree, and that his soul would have flown straight away to Allah to give an account of his sin in refusing hospitality to the stranger in the desert. His insulting spirit was curbed, he was now like a dog. He led us straight to the wells of Kadjah, which we reached in two days.

The water in the Kadjah wells was very limited and very bad. One poor Arab of our set was seized with cholera, and died in four hours.

A party of Arabs—a branch of the Hamr whom we had not met at Om- Badr—stopped in their travels near us in the night. As a result four of our camels were missing in the morning. These we could ill afford to lose, as we were already short, and those that we had were heavily laden; it was absolutely necessary to get the stolen camels back. As soon as the discovery of the loss was made, a request was sent to the shiekh of the tribe that he should come over to our camp. On his arrival the circumstance was communicated to him.

“As Mohommed is in Heaven with Allah, this thing, O Effendim, is not known to me. I speak the truth, I fear the judgment; there are no dishonest men in my tribe.”

“O venerable shiekh of the rascally Hamr, we are travellers, and our camels have been taken away by your people who are thieves. When the camels are brought back you shall be allowed to return to your camp and to your family and your friends. Until then, O venerable shiekh, you will stop with us and we will take care of you.”

“Allah, O Effendim, is above us, I speak only the truth; none of my men are bad. But I will go back and see if the camels are with us.”

To let the pious old thief go back until the camels were restored was, however, not our intention. He was placed in charge of two soldiers, who carefully guarded him with loaded rifles and revolvers. That night we slept with arms under our beds, ready to meet any sudden surprise from the hostile Hamr, who were four or five times as numerous as ourselves. No attack was, however, made. Next day six camels were brought into our camp, not those that had been stolen from us, others equally good, or rather better, which had evidently been stolen from some other people, as the Hamr marks were not upon them. To have returned our own camels would have been an admission of guilt, which the old shiekh feared might have had serious consequences to himself. He was wise in his generation. Our wrath was appeased. We gave him a cup of coffee, started him off about his thieving business, and proceeded on our journey.

Shortly after this time the rains began to come down. A circumstance that afforded me much surprise was the smallness of the different areas over which they first fell. In travelling over the burning sand we would come upon a patch, perhaps a mile, or less, square, over which a heavy shower had recently fallen, and the ground on that part gave unmistakable signs of being willing and anxious to put forth something approaching in colour to green. In other parts we would suddenly come upon a large pool of water, six inches or perhaps a foot deep, while the ground all round was absolutely barren, and other hollows near were perfectly dry. On some days a small cloud would begin to show itself in the north. As we approached, and as it slowly travelled towards us, it would hour by hour grow larger, thunder would at length be heard, and as the evening began to fall, vivid forked lightning would dart fiercely from its every side, upwards and downwards, to the right and to the left; some great rocky mountain would at last exert its attracting influence upon it, arrest its southward progress, and then down would come its waters. In a few more minutes the cloud was no more, and the sky was full of the moon, which served to show us that a few miles behind the first another cloud was travelling slowly along with its thunder and lightning, to empty its rains where those of its brother had just before fallen.

We reached Sotaire on the 13th July. One of the wells had fallen in, the other was dry. We were, however, fortunately not in want of water.

I walked over in the night to the site of the Arab camp and of the grand “fantasia.” The place seemed very lonely; all the people with their flocks and herds were gone; Rebecca was, of course, not there. I have never seen her since; I could not hope that we should ever meet again. She is for me now dead as much as though I had breathed her latest sigh—as though her heart’s last throb had been echoed in my breast; as though I had mingled my tears with Death’s icy dew on her brow; as though I myself, full of anguish, had laid her deep into the grave. For me she only exists in my long-enduring memory.

What though our home be fixed in sorrow’s reign,

It is through faithful recollection’s voice

Not wholly one of pain; for when the soul

Has lost that All for which God gave it birth,

There is a melancholy pleasure still

In memory of the past; I cannot deem

As sad Francesca deemed amidst her tears,

Shed in the memory of her guilty love,

“No greater pain than when we are in pain

The recollection of a time of joy.”

I love not as she loved, where joy has dwelt

In thought to dwell, at least to me, is joy.

Perhaps, however, Rebecca is now married, and lives with an unwashed husband and three ophthalmic children in a grimy mud-hut on the banks of the Nile, and sits all day on an “angereb” drinking much “merissa” full of dead flies and beetles’ hind-legs.

I do not like to think of her like this, but as I saw her, simple-souled and beautiful, as, half tearful, all absorbed, she sat and watched the hideous fantasìa, and as, after that, when we were alone, she raised her large dark eyes,

“With heaven all star-clad babied in their depths,”

and, holding forth her small and perfect hand for me to shake, said, softly and sadly, “Good-bye!”

[Decoration]