IV
The caravan is in want of water, and desperately anxious to find it. Having lately detected a frayed rope and some pellets of wasted camel-dung, we are fairly certain that an old trail has been picked up.
Some hours later we become sure of water ahead when we pass a number of heaps of stones piled by human hands; the Token Stones of grateful wayfarers who have slaked their thirst in the desert, and surreptitiously left behind this expression of their thanks. The Tuaregs say that most of these token heaps are the work of slaves, who, in the past, in this way endeavoured to mark the places of water over the route they were borne as captives, in case they should ever escape. Nevertheless, few nomads of the land to-day, having drunk their fill, will pass from place of water without stooping to add further stones to the piles that sit, like symbols of some weird religion, in their path.
Two camels shoot ahead of the line. Wild, saddle-perfect Tuaregs ride them to water at a swinging trot. They mean to return, with goatskins of water, to slake the pressing thirst of the men, long before we camp.
The noon hours recede, but not the oven heat, and slowly under that weight, the long span of the afternoon drags on.
Towards dusk the journey ends, and our column moves into a curious narrow declivity that finishes in a quarry-like space. We descend, and are lost from the landscape above. There is no sign of water or living soul; but the cliffs and dishevelled rocks of the den are literally covered with strange drawings and writings. With whisperings of awe one of the men who had gone in front tells that we are in a secret place of water that he has recognised. “Not many know of it,” he assures me. “A few of my people, and robbers from Ahaggar; but not the robbers from Tibesti. You are the first white man who has seen it.”
A CAMP-FIRE
BENEATH THE SHADE OF ROCKS
“But where is the water?” I exclaim, scanning the rocks and the sand carpet beneath my feet.
He beckoned me to go with him, and we proceeded until we came to the closed end, or cul-de-sac of the defile. Picking the way among giant boulders until the straight cliff base was reached, my camel-man then halted and pointed with a smile to a dark hole in the wall at the ground’s edge, no larger than the den of hyena or jackal. “Ama!” he exclaimed.
I sat down and lit my pipe; the place was unusual and uncanny. “Water in there, Mohammed? How the devil do you get it out? Go back and bring Sili with a waterskin, and ask Sakari to give you a candle: I want to have a look.”
When he got back we wormed our way into the hole. Past the entrance there was a cavern where a man could stand stooping. Crossing it, another long tunnel led to a further cave, lower than the first, and there, in the bowels of the earth, gleaming in the candle-light, lay a black pool of water, clean, clear, and deliciously cool.
In that mysterious haven of secrecy we camped beside water in abundance . . . and thus it came to pass that the camp-fires of the white man lit the eerie, strangely scrawled cliffs of Inzanenet as the fires of those on many an escapade had often done before, if tales of the land be true.
And owls and bats and ghoul-like shadows were companions through the night, but the white vulture that points the places of water and human dwelling, marked not the sky by day, since even from him of the outer world the secret of the cave was hidden.