"No such luck!" laughed the other; "that's what we should all like, but Mahmoud knows better."
However, Jones would listen to no advice. He hired camels for himself and his servant, and started in the cool of the evening to cover as much of the thirty miles or so which lay between him and the haven of his desires as could be done before the heat of the morning, leaving his kit to follow as quickly as blacks and donkeys would condescend to bring it along.
But more misfortunes attended the bimbashi.
Jones was very weary and half torpid with the heat of the past days. He fell asleep on the top of his billowy, bumpy mount, and presently, sliding off into the sand, lay and snored, with the Soudan for a bed, unconscious as a log, and so remained for some hours. His servant, dozing also on the back of his beast, which followed a score of paces behind that of his master, saw nothing of the bimbashi's collapse into the sand, and jogged past the place in which he lay sleeping, entirely unconscious of the accident.
As for Jones's camel, that sagacious creature was far too clever to say anything about the circumstance. It was pleased to be rid of its load, though recognizing the fact that the journey must be continued without him. Perhaps it had friends or an important engagement at Fort Atbara. At any rate, it continued its journey not less rapidly than before, keeping well ahead of its travelling companion—perhaps anxious to be asked no questions as to the load it had shot into the sand, for fear of being reloaded.
The servant dozed and waked and dozed again till morning, never so soundly asleep as to fall off his beast, yet never wide enough awake to realize that the bimbashi was not on the top of the camel looming in front of him through the darkness. Only when morning light and the on-coming heat thoroughly roused him did he become aware that his master was gone. Then the man, who was an Egyptian soldier, and had been invalided, like Jones, in Cairo, where he came in handily enough to accompany the bimbashi as servant to the front—the man Ali did the wisest thing possible. After weeping copiously and swearing at Jones's camel until that shocked beast careered madly out of earshot, he covered the remainder of the journey to Fort Atbara as fast as his own animal could be induced to go; and, arrived there, he greeted the first English officer he met, weeping and explaining incomprehensibly.
"Stop blubbering, you pig," said the subaltern, "and say what you want."
"O thou effendim," cried Ali, drying his tears with marvellous suddenness, "I have lost my bimbashi—Bimbashi Jones!"
Explanations revealed that the man had, in truth, started from Berber in company with an English bimbashi, and that the bimbashi's camel had certainly arrived, but not the bimbashi.
A search-party was therefore sent back without delay, but unfortunately a high wind had risen during the morning, and a dust storm was now in full blast, so that though the party thoroughly searched the road on both sides as far as Berber, taking two or three days over the job, and duly execrating the object of their search for possibly losing them the chance of being present at the big event—namely, the battle with Mahmoud, now expected daily—they found no trace of poor Bimbashi Jones.