“No.” I lowered my binoculars.
“’Straordinary!”
Lady Sarah spoke casually but I detected the undertone of anxiety in her voice.
We had now been three days in the desert. To put the matter shortly, we were lost. Gaze as we might there was no sign of the Hammababa station nor of any other. Ab-Domen Allah’s defection had doubtless been well-meant. Under more sophisticated conditions he had acted similarly before; but his absence now was deadly serious. Versed as he was in the art of star-reading, a member in good standing of the Desert Trails Club, it would have been simple for him to set us on the right track. Also, relying on his knowledge I had taken no pains to look up constellations, distances, or direction. Our progress was a blind advance, made the more so by our blinding love.
Ah, Sarah, my desert dish, canst thou forget that joyous pilgrimage neath the myriad eyes of night, throughout which I ever remained thy slave, reverent, respectful, devoted?
Be that as it may, we should have come up with Hammababa long ago but never so much as a palm frond had we seen. The devil of a camel is that once off the proper direction he keeps right on in the wrong one without the slightest deviation. Nothing like instinct ever troubles them. The desert is sprinkled with the bones of fool beasts that have pursued this single-track policy into places where there wasn’t a sign of sustenance and where they have just naturally died.
This thought did not cheer me any more than the condition of our water supply. I figured that if we had overshot Hammababa we might possibly hit the water-hole at Rhat, but this was a long chance which I should have hated to back with any real money.
When one is lost in the desert one doesn’t say much about it. It is not at all like being on the wrong road in a motor where a man’s wife always knows he is wrong and loudly proclaims it. Lady Sarah was a trump; she never peeped. We just kept plodding on late at night and early in the morning, resting during the heat of the day and neither of us voicing our suspicions. Finally on the morning of the fourth day I thought it was up to me to say something.
“Do you know, Lady Sarah,” I began—“I suspect that this sort of thing isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Nowhere that matters apparently,” she said calmly. Then, pointing skyward. “Have you seen those kites?”