At that very moment Ralph Trenchard rode into the holiday camp pitched by Helen Raynor and her grandfather—Egypt’s Water Finder. They had pitched it some fifty miles west of Ismailiah whilst they waited to start upon an expedition into Arabia, which had for its object the discovery of water hidden in the heart of a range of mountains, as described upon vellum inscribed by the Holy Palladius.
CHAPTER V
“A rose issues from thorns.”—Arabic Proverb.
The desert looked like an immense mosque with vast purple dome inlaid with silvery stars, spread with a carpet of many colours—grey, amethyst, saffron, fawn—stretching to Eternity for the feet of worshippers to tread. It held the peace of great spaces and the prayer of the everlasting, and changed, in the twinkling of the stars, to the likeness of a fairy meadow, in which flowers of every shape nodded and curtsied and bowed to each other, as far as eye could see; flowers formed by the light breeze which twisted and turned the sand into little spirals, until the desert seemed covered with dancing, silvery poppies across which love came as silently, as unexpectedly as it comes in country lanes or the city’s crowded thoroughfares.
Helen Raynor looked over her shoulder towards the camp, pitched under the isolated palms which formed the so-called oasis, and smiled at the sound of her “boy’s” voice raised in what he termed a love song, but which had all the monotonous ring of a long-drawn-out litany of personal woes.
She sat on a hummock of sand, dazzlingly fair in the starlight, with a smile of content on her broad, humorous mouth, and the expectancy of youth in her great, blue eyes, whilst the golden sand trickled between her fingers as she counted the seconds of the hour in which love and adventure were to come to her.
She thought lazily of the hot-weather months just passed, spent quite happily in the big, old palace in Ismailiah bought by her grandfather who, in his wanderings in the desert, had acquired some of the attributes of the salamander and an unconscious thoughtlessness towards the well-being of his neighbour.
Unattracted by the little she knew of the world, she had been intensely grateful at the unconventional turn life had taken three years ago, inaugurating a new mode of existence with vista of unknown lands and good promise of great adventure. She had proved herself of the greatest assistance to her irascible grandfather. There was no doubt about it, that, although he seldom bit, he certainly barked furiously, or rather, yapped without ceasing, driving others almost frantic through the methodical working of a mind which teased the most infinitesimal detail to shreds, wore him to fiddle-strings, led him from success to success and caused his secretaries one after the other to fold their tents and to steal away to less nerve-wracking fields of labour.