As he came nearer—perhaps sighting us from afar off and wishing for our company—we saw that he was white, or a very pale grey. He was not an ordinary pack-camel, but was of the aristocratic type, a mehari, well bred, with graceful swaying movements and long slender legs. My first year in the army I had spent in Egypt, where I'd picked up some Arabic and Turkish, and had been enough impressed with the strangeness of native life to remember many customs and superstitions. As the white mehari approached, a timid air of wildness mingling with its longing for society, I realised that it had been a pampered beast, dear to the heart of its vanished owner. Round its neck was an elaborate collar of beads and shells, with dangling fetishes of all sorts: brass and silver "Hands of Fatma," metal tubes for texts from the Koran, horns of coral and lumps of amber.
It seemed to me that there was something strange about the beast. It held its head in a singular way, shaking it from time to time, and my camel man thought as I thought. "This animal has been looked on by the Evil Eye," he said. "It brings misfortune where it goes. Perhaps it has had a fit of madness, and how comes to us in a quiet interval, only to deceive and then attack us. I have seen such things in the desert. A camel goes mad, kills its master, and seeks other victims for the demon that has entered into it. I will drive it off."
"No," I said, as the Arab would have threatened the camel with his stick. "Keep out of the creature's way if you like. I'm going to see if it will let me touch it."
Very cautiously, in order not to frighten the wild-looking beast, I urged my own mount a few steps forward, and held out a handful of dates. The camel eagerly fixed its eyes on the food and moved towards me as if magnetised. It stretched its neck so that the queer, purse-like nostrils and loose lips quivered above the dates: it hesitated: in another instant it would have snatched a mouthful had I not exclaimed aloud at a thing I saw.
Among the tubes and horns and Hands of Fatma hung a gold bangle with the name "Maida" in emeralds, Madeline Odell's birthstone. I recognised the ornament at a glance. She wore it always, even with the uniform of the Grey Sisterhood. I knew she had ridden this camel and that this was her call for help. She had hoped desperately that I might follow, and feeble as was the chance that I should ever see the bangle, she had snatched it because there was no other.
"Good God!" I cried sharply—and foolishly, for the camel took fright, and went loping away into the cloud of sand. "Come along!" I yelled to my man, and rode after it. "We must keep up with the beast. We must see where it goes."
I explained no more. Doubtless the Arab thought me as mad as the white camel, but I didn't care. The mehari had come to me as a messenger from Maida, and to lose sight of it would be, I felt, to lose her.
Fortunately, after the first sprint, the creature slackened speed, even turning its long neck now and then to see if we followed. So we went on, behind the shadowy form in the sand-cloud, until we came to the high adobe wall of a desert inn, a borg which my camel-man knew well. Outside the closed gate our quarry paused: as we drew closer it bounded away, stopped and hovered as if watching to see whether the gate would be opened to let us in. It was opened; and we were greeted by the landlord, a dull-faced fellow, half Arab, half French, who looked as if his favourite tipple were absinthe. In the act of letting us into the big, bare courtyard he spied the white camel in the distance. "Oh, it's you again, is it?" he muttered, and would have shut the gate quickly as my camel leader and I with the three animals of our tiny caravan entered.
"Is that white mehari yours?" I inquired.
The landlord shook his head. "But no!" he protested. "It is mad. It is a beast of evil omen."