It was on one of these occasions that I expressed my fears as to the heat of the desert journey.
“It won’t be as bad as this, really,” Edmund said. “We’ll land you in the evening when Jakoub has got the camels together and loaded. You’ll travel through the night and make for a place where you can spend the day under shelter. Then it will be only one trek of a few hours to the nearest station on the railway. I’ve never been on that Western Railway, but I’m afraid they’re fairly rotten old carriages. If you get a day-train it will be beastly hot and dusty. Five or six hours will get you into Alexandria.”
“That certainly does not sound alarming.”
I had a twinge of something like disappointment at the idea of my adventure dwindling to such modest dimensions. Once it was over, I should have liked to tell people at the Athenæum and other comfortable places at home about “the long trek on camel-back across the burning sands.”
I would have welcomed quite a considerable degree of real discomfort as a basis for exaggeration within the limits proper to a clergyman.
“I shouldn’t mind trying a part of the journey in the daytime,” I said.
“Perhaps not,” said Captain Welfare. “But the natives won’t allow their camels to work in the heat.”
“I thought a camel could stand any amount of heat!”
“Not them. They’re the softest beasts that walk. They drop in their tracks in the heat, and if it’s cold at night they have to be rugged up better than a horse.”
“There is more rot believed by people at home about camels,” said Edmund, “than about any beast of the field. What do you suppose is a camel’s load?”