Things began to look uncommonly lively in and about that station containing five thousand troops—horse, foot and artillery.
Chapter Twenty.
At Darkest Hour.
Away in the Kharawan desert the dust columns are whirling heavenward in many a tall spiral shaft; more like the hissing steam jets of some vast geyser than anything so dry and unadhesible as mere sand.
A dead flat level, stretching afar into misty distance on the skyline on every hand—its only vegetation a low scrubby attempt at growth; the fierce sun at a white heat overhead; the sky as brass—what life can this awful wilderness by any possibility support? Yet so wonderful, so inexhaustible are the resources of Nature that even here both man and beast can fare along, and that moderately well.
Camels, with their loads, kneel on the sand, resting from their labours; with their ugly heads and weird snaky necks and unceasing guttural snarling roar, conveying the idea of hideous antediluvian monsters somehow or other forgotten by the Flood in this desert waste. A flock of black goats, cropping daintily at the sparse attempt at herbage, or crouching in groups chewing the cud, represents the other phase of animal life there, unless three or four gaunt Pathân curs employed at assisting to herd the same. Here and there a tent, or mere shelter of tanned camel hide, blackened by the heat of innumerable suns, stretched upon poles, affords a modicum of shelter from the arid baking heat.
It is the hour of prayer. Grouped together the believers are kneeling—facing towards the holy city; whose exact direction they have a marvellous faculty for determining with accuracy. As one man they sink down in their twofold prostration, forehead to the earth, then rise again, and the droning hum of voices goes out upon the shimmer of the scorching air. One, in front of the rest, leads the devotions, a little, shrunken, aged figure, and by his side is another, but it is the form of a man in all the vigour of his prime.
With more than ordinary unction the prescribed formulae are repeated. No abstraction or looking round is here, such as the faithful when individually devout may occasionally give way to. Perhaps it is the holy character and reputation of the leader that ensures this edifying result, for the Syyed Hadji Aïn Asrâf is justly invested with both of these.