Very soon I saw the morning star fade out in a red glare that filled the east, and then the sun came up, climbing swiftly from the horizon. For a moment the desert sparkled with the lustre of jewellery; then the effect passed, and its surface settled into the burning yellow and white of the common light of day.
But the smooth shallow sea of the desert’s margin turned from the pearly opalescence of the dawn to a glory of blue such as I had never imagined. It was not the blue of the sea or sky, but the incredible blue of a butterfly’s wing. It brought to my mind childhood’s dream-pictures of the glory of the river that flows round the Throne of God, and my heart ached with the splendour of it.
The sun came as a tyrant. It seemed to take but a few moments before he was clear of the vapour of the horizon, and the heat of the day had begun.
I went below to my cabin. I dressed myself, and sorrowfully bestowed what I needed for my journey in a hold-all.
The hot day seemed intolerably long. I lay on deck trying in vain to read. Their manifest anxiety kept Edmund and Welfare in an irritable silence.
The cases I was to take with me were brought on deck. They were roped and sealed, and the word “Anticas” was painted on the outside in large black letters, with some Arabic characters below which I took to be a translation of this lie.
The boat was lowered and they were stowed in it with my hold-all and all brought ashore and laid on the beach. There was nothing more to do, and by four o’clock our nervous tension was becoming almost unbearable when the sandy sky-line was broken by the tall silhouette of a camel, with a man mounted on it, advancing majestically towards us.
Captain Welfare had a long look at him through the glass.
“Thank God!” he said. “It’s Jakoub all right. The others must be following him.”
Jakoub put his camel into a trot and came rapidly down to the beach. I watched with anticipatory dread the process of making the camel kneel, or as it seemed to me, fold itself up. Jakoub sprang lightly off and tied the animal’s nose-rope round one of its knees to secure it. The camel stretched its long neck along the ground and began nosing in the sand for something eatable.