“Your men claimed him after he came to. They buried him, Moplah style, you know?”
“Rather!”
I could see the wretched creature hands and feet bound, planted up to his neck in hard-packed sand. The eyes invariably went first, toothsome morsels for the vultures,—then came the ants and flies.
“We kept him alive as long as we could,” said my friend, “occasionally that Circassian girl used to go out and sprinkle salt and sand on his sore spots.”
“That will be all for today,” I remarked, for I was still weak.
It was a matter of ten days before I began to feel my full strength and resilience returning, days of short walks and long rests in a shaded chaise-longue. Whinney and Swank had laid out an excellent nine-hole golf course where I was soon able to join them. Golf in the desert is a simple affair, the course being entirely of sand one needs but two clubs, a driver and a niblick. It is like playing in a gigantic bunker and my game soon came back to me. Then there were afternoons of gazelle and gecko hunting with sloughi-hounds, the only dogs which can stand the peculiar conditions of the desert for which nature has equipped them with bushy, protective eye-brows, short beards and curiously splay-toed feet which give them great speed over soft sand. Another pastime of our leisure hours was the Arab’s favorite pursuit of hawking.
No standard Sheik travels without his hawk or hawks, hung in gay cages from their pack camels and the women folk are constantly busy knitting hoods for the poor creatures who spend so much of their time blindfolded. The reason for this constant blindfolding I had never fully understood until Ab-Domen explained it. The theory is that a hawk’s eye is only capable of just so much looking and it would therefore be supremely unwise to let him wear his eyes out in the contemplation of useless objects such as people and camels. Now, however, was the hawks’ holiday and the air was specked with the graceful creatures careering at dizzy heights like motes in a sunbeam. They are recalled by a whistle which they obey with the marvellous intelligence of a day laborer at the noon hour, dropping whatever work they may be engaged in to settle quietly on their masters’ wrists.
An exception to this statement must be made in the case of a hawk in pursuit of an opapa, a desert fowl closely akin to the Australian carpenter-bird which it resembles in its hammer-head, saw-bill and long, nail-like claws. Many a morning in the Cowba district (East of Sydney) I have been awakened by the building operations of these creatures whose nests are solidly framed of gum-wood which is later stuccoed with a mixture of bird-lime and feathers. But I digress....
The opapa of which I started to speak is for some reason unknown to ornithology the deadly enemy of the hawk and once sighted is the object of a relentless attack. Seated one day in the encampment I witnessed a grewsome battle between two of these implacable rivals of the air. The recall had been sounded, but the hawk paid no attention to it. His one thought was the complete annihilation of his antagonist which he accomplished by repeated attacks, closing-in, ripping-off tender strips of flesh and actually devouring the entire carcass save the saw-bill, bony hammer-head and nails; in other words, the hawk, in mid-air ate the artisan and dropped only the tools, after which he returned peaceably to his master.
But our position in the camp was becoming increasingly difficult. Our water supply had been thrice replenished from the Tabala station which was at an inconvenient distance. Moreover the guardian of the wells began to protest against our frequent calls. “Caravans come and caravans depart, but you are repeaters,” he said in effect. My strength now was completely restored; under my folding burnous I could feel the steel contours of hardening biceps, triceps and forceps. Will-power, ambition, the old love of adventure were again in the ascendant.