Wherefore the Open Road may lead toward a goal, and nomadic restlessness be more than mere inherent instinct.
However, to return to the subject of travel in the Sahara, we, as islanders, can clearly comprehend the vastness of the oceans, and the importance of the routes across them, and thereby understand the conditions that confront the inhabitants of the shores and in the “ports” of the Sahara who seek, at times, to find passage across the grim, silent wastes of the desert. But ocean and desert to-day present diverse phases of travel. The one has all that modern science and civilisation can command to make travel easy, while the other remains unchanged from the darkest ages, and is wholly primitive.
A HALT AT AN OLD WELL
It is with the latter that this narrative has to deal in endeavour to give a few impressions of camp-fires I have known in out-of-the-way places while moving through the land, living as a nomad, carrying trivial possessions by the aid of humble beasts of burden, and camping wherever chance befell when the sun swung into the western sky—a life where one experiences the rugged edge of existence and comes to be vastly content with little pleasures, since these occur but seldom.
I
One of the rarest occurrences in the Sahara is rain, and the nomads tell that they have known seven years and even ten years pass without any in some localities. Twice, on the trail, I have witnessed the coming of the greatest boon that the Sahara can know; on 3rd August 1920, and again on 13th July 1922. They were memorable occurrences, and one is herein described as an incident of outdoor life not readily forgotten.
We were camped for a few days on a small, rocky knoll on the bank of a dry, deep-channelled river-bed. For months past the heat of the desert had waxed greater and greater, until the weather had become unbearably stifling and oppressive. There was no relief in the surroundings; a wasteland of sad colourings, made up of pale sand and occasional sun-bleached grass tufts. It was the kind of environment that drives men to madness if the mind is not occupied.
There was a subdued tenseness abroad; and almost a gesture of mute appeal, for in truth the whole land was overstrained and panting for relief—and rains were due, if they were to come this year.
For an evening or two heat lightning lit the eastern horizon, and a few distant clouds hung about. . . . And then the great gift of the gods was delivered.