11. The Wilderness
The trail was rough, but Ben Akbar's saddle remained a veritable bed of feathers as the big dalul continued at the same swift trot he had started two hours ago. Ali turned in the saddle to look behind him.
There was nothing there, but neither was there anything ahead except the same boulder-strewn, scrub-grown, sun-baked land that he saw when he glanced around. The place had no visible attractions, but it did furnish reason anew to marvel at the vastness of America. Ali knew some self-contained nations, complete from Pasha to slaves, that were not as large as this forbidding corner of America wherein the entire expedition was presently lost.
Never jarring his rider, Ben Akbar continued without a noticeable variation in gait. Ali turned back to face the west.
The anxiety that clouded his eyes deepened, but it was not for himself that he worried. As far as he personally was concerned, by far the happiest days of his life began when the expedition left Zuni, west of Fort Defiance and the last settlement this side of California, on the thirty-first of August. That day, a lifelong dream finally came true.
Illiterate, Ali had developed skills vital to those who may never consult written records. When necessary to do so, he had only to close his eyes and see in memory a map of all the caravan routes he'd ever traveled. It was invariably in proper detail—the shortest route was never omitted and the longest was never extended beyond correct proportions. Every mile of every trail was again as it had been when Ali went that way with the camels.
For various reasons, some of those journeys had been very exciting. But this promised far more than any other trail Ali had traveled.
Wild and dangerous though they had been, and some still were, the camel trails of Ali's native country were almost as ancient as the land itself. Caravans had certainly been traversing them since recorded history, and fable told of camels on the march long before any recording. Thus there had never been even a faint possibility of doing anything that had not already been done over and over, or of going anywhere not already visited by multitudes.
This route must forever stand apart. Even though people had come this way, with very few exceptions, they were wild as the wild beasts that slunk from their path. Certainly there had never been a caravan, and for that reason alone there must be the challenge of the mysterious and unknown. In addition, Ali found something else he'd never known before.