Again, with rude storms past, the elements lapse drearily to their accustomed routine, governed, without heart, by the Power of the Sun.
And it is under those conditions that the traveller in the desert must chiefly toil, or, failing to toil, sink beneath the weight of undermining, brain-drugging heat and monotony.
Wherefore a commonplace day finds me toiling the sand in a God-forgotten recess of the world. I have killed some meat for the camp, but that hardly interests me. I am aware that I am “off colour”—almost ill. But I am more disturbed still by the knowledge that I am weary, and not so strong as I was; and that slowly, insidiously, the sun is sapping my life-blood.
A Tuareg stranger is with my follower, who carries the gazelle. I hear the man being told exaggerated stories of my shooting capabilities:
“He kills whether they stand or run.”
And again:
“If a man walk for two days this white man still fit to reach him with gun.”
I wanly smile; in no mood for laughter.
Slowly we trudge toward camp. It is about noon, and desperately hot. But I am thinking neither of the remorseless sting of the sun nor of the desolation of Africa: I am wondering if I dare break into one of our last bottles of whisky if I go under again with fever. It is the priceless medicine of the exhausted and malaria-stricken, and the meagre store cannot last to the end.
On entering camp, however, my thoughts are turned into other channels. The camels have just been watered, and recline on the sand. About half of them have sores to be doctored, ugly, suppurating saddle wounds and foot wounds, fly-ridden and ill healing; so bad that every now and then they claim a victim in death. For an hour I work with scissors and knife among filth and disinfectant: crude, intimate surgery that might have turned me sick if it had not been a daily task for a long time.