As I approached the caravan with my game, I was surprised again. The men came running toward me with waving arms and shouts of joyful congratulation. I understood their present state of mind no more than I had their former one, until the explanation was forthcoming.
Then I learned that among the Bedouins the first shot fired at game after a caravan sets out is the critical one. If it is a miss, disaster is certain to overtake the caravan before the journey’s end. If it is a hit, fortune will smile upon the whole undertaking. The men of the caravan had been reluctant to see me put our luck to the test so soon. If I had remembered the Bedouin travel lore, I should have saved my first shot at game until we reached El Fasher, six months later.
We were three days in Siwa, hiring other camels for the trek to Jaghbub and making a few final preparations. Siwa was the last outpost of the world I was leaving behind. There the postal service and the telegraph end. Beyond that point there is nothing to be bought except the products of the desert, or occasionally a little rice or cloth, perhaps at exorbitant prices. In my three days I enjoyed the hospitality and valuable assistance of the Frontier Districts Administration, in the persons of the mamur and town officials and of Lieutenant Lawler, in command of the troops there.
Siwa is the biggest and most charming of oases; springs of wonderful water, excellent fruit, the best dates in the world, picturesque scenery, and the quaintest and most interesting of customs. For example, if a woman loses her husband she is kept forty days without washing, and nobody sees her. Her food is passed through a crack in the door. When the forty days have expired, she goes to bathe in one of the wells, and everybody tries to avoid crossing her path, for she is then called ghoula and is supposed to bring very bad luck to anybody who sees her on that day of the first bath.
In the date market, called the mistah, all the dates are piled together, the best quality and the most inferior. No one thinks of touching one date that does not belong to him or mixing the dates together with a view to gaining an advantage thereby. On the other hand, anybody can go into a mistah and eat as much as he likes from the best quality without paying a millième, but he must not take any away with him.
THE JUDGE OF JALO
He studied as a boy under the Grand Senussi, the founder of the sect. He can quote from memory all the incidents that took place in his time, giving day and year of every event.
In Siwa there is a shrine of a saint where people may deposit their belongings for safety. If a man is going away he can take his bags with the most valuable things and put them near this shrine, and nobody would dream of touching them. Literally, if any one left a bundle of gold there, no one would touch it, because of the very simple but unshakable belief in them that if you touch anything near that shrine and it does not belong to you, you would have bad luck for the rest of your life.
When I was ready to leave Siwa, my little group of personal retainers had doubled in number. At Sollum I had added to Abdullahi and Ahmed a man of the Monafa tribe named Hamad. He was the hardest-working individual in the entire caravan. I never saw him tired. He took charge of my camel and later of the horse which I secured at Kufra. The fourth member of the group was Ismail, a Siwi. He looked like a weakling, but on the trek he was always the last man to give in and ride a camel. Ismail was the one whom I used to take with me when prospecting for geological specimens or making elaborate scientific observations. Coming from an oasis in Egyptian territory where the post and the telegraph made connection with the outside world, he had less of the wild Bedouin’s suspicion that interprets every simple action of the stranger into something with an ulterior motive. Why should the bey be chipping off bits of rock, the Bedouin might say to himself, unless there were gold in it, or he intended to come and conquer the country? Not so Ismail. If the bey wanted a bit of rock, that was for the bey to say.