In the afternoon we passed camel skeletons lying white on the sands. Strangely enough this is a cheering sign in the desert, for two reasons: first, because in the trackless monotony any sign that others have passed that way is encouraging, and, second, because the camel-bones are more frequent near the wells. Camels are more likely to die near the end of a trek, when, if water is scarce, they have been pushed too hard by their masters. The Bedouins do not like to use the word “skeleton” when they find such a reminder that death has come this way. So they euphemistically call it ghazal, which means gazelle.
Thursday, March 22. Up at 5:30 A.M. I watched the sun rise at 6:27 A.M. and recorded its time. We started at 8 A.M. and made forty-eight kilometers over very flat country, hard sand and gravel. All the morning the Mazoul sand-dunes were on our left twenty-five kilometers distant, but by the afternoon we had passed them.
In the morning I heard Zerwali and Abdullahi discussing this land of astounding flatness through which we were passing.
“Yes, our country is a blessed one,” said Zerwali.
“Yes, indeed, it has a wonderful future,” answered the man from Egypt. “It is here, I believe, that the day of reckoning will be held. It is the only place God could find that would be big enough and so empty.”
The Tebus were running far and wide, ahead and each side of the caravan, in search of camel-dung for fuel. They lived their life a little apart from the others in the caravan, and so they liked to have their own camp-fire at night a short distance from the main camp. Camel-dung was the only available fuel. The Tebus, who are sturdy runners, would go as much as five miles out of their way to find the precious material. But the Bedouins objected to the Tebus’ habit of running ahead and seizing all the dung. It is an inflexible rule of the desert that anything found on the way belongs to him who first touches it, and the Tebus appealed to that rule for justification. The Bedouins, however, had a telling retort.
THE CARAVAN ON THE MOVE IN THE DESERT TO AGAH
“You have no guide ahead, nor do you let your camels go first, where they will not go without the stick,” they said. “You want us to lead the way for your camels, while you run ahead and seize the dung. That dung belongs to us who would come upon it first if you were back with your camels where you belong.”
The controversy grew spirited and was finally brought to me for judgment. I decreed that the Bedouins were right, and the Tebus should have no fire of their own. They should, however, be given a hot meal from the general commissariat every night. The Tebus are quite different in many of their habits and customs from the Bedouins. They often do not use fire in the preparation of their food, though, as I have shown, they do not reject it for comfort and cheer. They dry the inside of the bark from the top of the date-tree over a fire and powder it, to use as material for a kind of pudding. They mix it with dates and locusts, also powdered. They invite no one to share their meals as the Bedouins invariably do, nor are they resentful if others do not ask them to share their food. The Bedouins criticize vigorously this failure in hospitality, as they consider it. The Tebus leave nothing behind them on the track, having a superstitious fear that whoever picks up what they have dropped will get hold of them too. They are fine physical specimens and good workers, but extremely simple in their habits of life and mind. They are mixing more and more with the Bedouins, however, and learning the Bedouin ways.