THE TOLL OF THE DESERT
We mount a rise. We do not see it in the darkness, but we feel our camels ascending. We reach the crest, and, behold! the merriest, most welcome lights in all the world twinkle in the distance. Camp for the night is immediately ahead. All fatigue, for the moment, is over, every trial is forgotten in view of those beckoning lights.
Slowly the great caravan troops in; to camp as they arrive. With incredible swiftness all are busy at once, getting loads off, barracking camels, and lighting tiny fires with a few sticks from precious bundles of firewood. Hurriedly cooked, a meal of sorts is devoured ravenously.
Then the camels are attended to. They are viciously hungry. So hungry that many of them have been muzzled all day, with a net over their mouths to keep them from stealing from the loads en route. They have now to be fed, a little fodder at a time. It is dangerous to let them gulp down the coarse baled tussock-grass over-rapidly. But they can only have a limited ration from the supply, and that disappears almost as quickly as our own repast.
Then to sleep beneath the stars, dog-tired and dreamless, and utterly regardless of the din of incoming camels as the rear of the caravan continues to arrive in the encampment long into the depth of night.
At three or four o’clock, on the morning that follows, feeling more dead than alive, and that we have hardly been asleep at all, we are forced to rise from our couches. Camels are roaring on all sides; the caravan is about to set out again. It is bitterly cold before dawn at this season, and all shiver in thin clothing. A fire is out of the question; we have only a bare supply of fuel. So we busy ourselves reloading and are off again well before daybreak.
Thus the long days, and short nights, passed, as the Taralum held on its steady course across the seas of desert.
Each individual throughout the caravan who had not made the journey to Bilma before was known as Rago (sheep); while, once the journey has been made, a man attains the distinction of the title, Sofo Aroki (Old Traveller).
Many had made the journey during previous years, yet to one man only was entrusted the right to guide, and his judgment was absolute law. No one questioned it, and, without chart or compass, or any mechanical aid whatever, he travelled unerringly to the goal. His name was Efali: a little old man, with remarkable, piercing eyes. He was famous as a traveller and as an old raider; but most famous of all as a guide in the desert. He held the life of the caravan in his hands, and his judgment of direction was uncanny in the exactitude with which he traversed the featureless wastes that each day lay before him like a vacant sea. It was only at rare intervals that anyone in doubt became aware that he was travelling true. At such times, when we were no doubt travelling an old trail, minute signs that might escape the layman were noted by sharp eyes, such as a half-buried pellet of camel-dung, or a thread of frayed and crumbled rope, or a tiny piece of clothing-end. And those sometimes led to something much more tangible—the bleached bones of camels half buried in sand.