Burning Sands

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

The old man smiled. “The Prophet has written: ‘Seek wisdom even if it were only to be found in China’,” he said.

Daniel looked into the kindly and, indeed, saintly face with perplexity. He was wondering what was to come; and, raising his arms, he clasped his two hands at the back of his neck, an attitude he was wont to assume when he was puzzled.

The four others, who had been hovering shyly at a little distance, came forward; and the Sheikh, as though emboldened by their support, bared his heart without much further preamble. He pointed out, as Daniel well knew, that there was a feud of many years standing in the Oasis, between the family of the speaker and that of a former Sheikh who had been dispossessed of his office. The quarrel had become almost traditional; and though, up till now, no very serious incident had occurred, there was a growing danger that a brawl might take place in which somebody might be shot, and that thus the feud might become an endless vendetta with its reciprocal crimes of violence.

Stripped of its pious and flowery decorations, the proposition put forward by the Sheikh was of the simplest character. He proposed that the Englishman should act as judge and mediator between the two families, and should hold a court at which the whole trouble should be ventilated; and so insistent was he that Daniel was obliged to acquiesce.

“Praise be to God!” exclaimed the old man, when at length he had received the definite answer he desired; and with many pious ejaculations of gratitude he and his friends turned to enter the mosque, while Daniel passed out through the gateway into the rustling palm-grove beyond.

His way led him for four or five hundred yards through the shade of the thickly growing trees—a dusty shade, pierced by innumerable little shafts of sunlight; but presently he came out once more under the dazzling sky, and, bearing off to the left, mounted a rugged path which ascended the sloping side of a sandy hill, till, reaching the summit, it passed over level ground towards his house which stood upon a spur of rock overlooking the Oasis.

Two years ago, when he had come to reside at El Hamrân to make, for the Institute which had commissioned him, a study of the manners and customs of the Bedouin, he had here found the abandoned ruins of an ancient Coptic monastery, dating from the days when Christianity was still the religion of the Egyptians; and he had established himself in their shelter, and later had rebuilt some of the rooms, so that now his place of abode had come to be a much-loved desert home, where month after month was passed in quiet study, and the days slipped by in placid contentment.

From the windows of his rooms he could look down over the whole extent of the dreamy little Oasis, with its sun-baked palm-groves, some three miles in length and half a mile in breadth, its houses and tents, its dozen wells, its few acres of tilled ground, and its miniature mosque. All these lay in a kind of basin, surrounded by the cliffs and low hills of the vast desert; and from his vantage-point he could look over the swaying green sea of the massed palm-tops to the barren plateau around about, and on a clear day he could just discern, far away to the east, the first of the ranges of the hills which rose between his isolated home and the far-off valley of the Nile.

At the ruined gateway of his dwelling he was met by his three yellow dogs who had been with him since they were puppies, and were fairly well-mannered considering their low pariah breed; and while he was playing with them, his servant, Hussein, came out to tell him that his luncheon was served. Therewith he crossed the courtyard of the old monastery, with its shattered row of cells to right and left, and its still lofty walls of unbaked bricks, and entered the large refectory which he had caused to be roofed over with palm-beams and dried cornstalks spread in a loose thatch, and which now served as a kind of entrance hall to his apartments. Upon its plastered walls some of the ancient frescoes were still visible; and here and there a Coptic inscription in dim red paint recorded the names of pious sentiments of long forgotten monks; while over the ruined doorway there was an indistinct figure of St. Michael, the patron saint of the place, whose pale eyes and smudged lips seemed to look down on him with faded and vacant mirth.

A rebuilt doorway in the right-hand wall led into his whitewashed living room, at the northeast end of which two large casements framed the splendid view over the Oasis and the desert.