Once away from the valley of the Nile, all between the fourteenth degree and the shore of the Mediterranean, a tract of more than eight hundred thousand square miles is desert, treeless, waterless, without streams or rivulets, and almost without wells, which, when they exist, are scanty, few, and far apart. 'The first thing after reaching a well,' says a recent writer, 'is to ascertain the quantity and quality of its water. As to the former, it may have been exhausted by a preceding caravan, and hours may be required for a new supply to ooze in again. The quality of the desert water is generally bad, the exception being when it becomes worse, though long custom enables the Bedouins to drink water so brackish as to be intolerable to all except themselves and their flocks. Well do I remember how at each well the first skinful was tasted all round as epicures sip rare wines. Great was the joy if it was pronounced moya helwa, "sweet water;" but if the Bedouins said moosh tayib, "not good," we might be sure it was a solution of Epsom salts.'
The desert now traversed by Skene was composed of coarse sand, abounding in some places with shells, pebbles, and a species of salt. In some parts the soil was shifting, and so soft that the feet—even of his camel—sank into it at every step; at others it was hard as beaten ground. Here and there grew a few patches of prickly plants, such as he remembered to have seen in botanic gardens at home, with small hillocks of drifted sand gathered round them; and as he rode on he felt as if he had about him the awful sensations of vastness, silence, and the sublimity of a calm and waveless ocean—but an ocean of sand, arid, and gloomy, dispiriting and suggestive of death—but to the European only; as the Bedouins, whose native soil it is, are, beyond all other nations and races, gay and cheerful.
During August and September the winds in Egypt retain a northerly direction, and the weather is generally moderate; but Malcolm Skene was in the desert now, and under the peculiar influences of that peculiar region.
Then at times is to be encountered the mirage, or Spirit of the Desert, as the Arabs call it, when the eyes of the wanderer there are deluded by the seeming motion of distant waves; of tall and graceful palms tossing feathery leaves in the distance, when only the sun-scorched sand is lying, mocking him with the false show of what his soul longs for, and his overheated brain depicts in glowing colours.
Riding mechanically on—uncomfortably, too, all unused as he was to the strange ambling action of a camel—oppressed by thirst which he could see no means of quenching, and knowing not when he might be able to do so—oppressed, too, by the glare of a cloudless sun growing hotter and hotter—more mighty than ever it seemed to be before—Malcolm Skene was soon to become conscious that the sense of vision was not the only one by which the mysterious desert mocks its sojourner with fantastic tricks; and once he became sensible of that strange and bewildering phenomena referred to by the author of 'Eothen' in his experiences of Eastern travel.
He seemed, overpowered by the heat, to fall slowly asleep—was it for moments or minutes?—he knew not; but he seemed also to be suddenly awakened by the familiar but far-off sounds of drums beating, to the wailing of a bagpipe playing 'The March of Lochiel,' as he had often heard it played by the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, in the citadel of Cairo.
He started and listened, his first idea being naturally that he was partly under the power of a dream; but it seemed as if minutes passed ere these sounds, in steady marching cadence, became fainter and then died away.
Utterly bewildered, he was quite awake now. Under the same influence, and in the same place, it was the bells of his native village that were heard by the writer referred to, and who says: 'I attribute the effect to the great heat of the sun, the perfect dryness of the clear air through which I moved, and the deep stillness of all around me. It seemed to me that these causes, by occasioning a great tension and susceptibility of the hearing organs, rendered them liable to tingle under the passing touch of some new memory that must have swept across my brain in a moment of sleep.'
And so doubtless it was with Malcolm Skene, who, sunk in thought and lassitude, was pondering deeply over the strange dream—if dream it was—when he was roused by the voice of Hassan Abdullah, as it amounted to something like a shriek.
'The Zobisha—the Zobisha!' he exclaimed, with a terror that was too genuine to be affected in any way.