“I don’t know—I don’t really know. I just felt a tremendous premonition of danger. Ah! look, they’ve gone. I wonder who they were? So near us, yet taking no notice of our big camp with its fires and its white tents.”
“Yes. I wonder!”
If only he had known it, they were the advance guard of a woman who was to show him that there is no jealousy or vindictiveness to equal that of a woman whose love is not returned.
They sat silently, looking out across the sandy ocean until they could no longer see the phantom figures moving eastwards in the far distance; then they talked of the journey behind them and the enterprise ahead.
To gain full control over the staff and, as much as is humanly possible, over the animals, Ralph Trenchard had preceded Sir Richard and his granddaughter, landing in Jiddah a month before them. Death by thirst, exhaustion or violence being a recognized risk to be taken by those who travel off the beaten track in Arabia, he had intensely disliked the idea of Helen Raynor accompanying the expedition; had argued the question; pointed out the dangers; emphasized the added responsibility her safekeeping would entail, insisting upon the intense discomfort she would have to endure, only to find himself up against the mule-headed obstinacy for which Sir Richard was famous.
He had resigned himself to the inevitable at last and had discovered, after one week spent in the company of the camels and their drivers, that for nothing on earth would he undertake the excursion into the unknown, unless she took it with him, riding at his side. He knew that love had come to him that night when he had seen her sitting on a hummock of sand, alone in the desert under the moon; he knew that that love had come to possess him utterly when he had succumbed to the entreaties of Sir Richard to join the expedition; but he had not known how much he really loved her, or what she really meant to him, until he had been separated from her for weeks.
He had counted the days, the hours, the minutes, and then, jubilantly, thankfully, had rushed down to meet the boat Sir Richard had chartered, as she docked, and happy beyond telling, had started out on the foolhardy enterprise, with Helen at his side.
There is nothing so calculated to make life-long friends or sworn enemies of two people, as a long journey on camels and surrounded by camels. A trip into the desert on camelback for so much an hour, or day, is vastly romantic, causing you to feel one with Pharaoh or Queen Hatshepu, Abraham or Jezebel, according to your sex. It’s ten to one you write an ode to the Sphinx or the Pyramids or the Voice of the Past as you sit on the sand, smoking your Simon Artz; it’s certain that your camel driver tots up the different items of your toilet in an endeavour to hit upon the right amount of extra baachseesch he may extract from you, whilst wishing to goodness you’d get through with your foolishness and return to your comfortable, or otherwise, hotel; but it’s an altogether different thing when you make part of a caravan composed of the ill-mannered, ill-natured brutes. No matter how well they are handled, or how far you ride apart from their odorous bodies, you will never be able to count upon a moment’s peace as long as they are likely to panic for nothing, or fight for less, whilst filling the air with sounds that resemble the emptying of gigantic, narrow-necked bottles, nests of angry snakes, battalions of spitting cats, moans of incurable invalids and shrieks of insufferable children.
They lie down or get up or refuse to move just as their hateful fancy dictates; they follow obediently one behind another, if in a string, or peacefully together, if in a herd, then stop dead and look on indifferently, whilst one, for no apparent reason whatever, reduces the patience of its driver to shreds and its pack to bits. Some drivers are cautious and hobble the lot at night, others take the risk and hobble the worst offenders; ’twere, however, wise to be cautious so as to prevent one, suddenly possessed of the devil, from either clearing for the open with the gifts you intend for your host upon its offensive back, or from lifting the flap of your tent in the still watches of the night and, whilst taking a survey of your heat-disturbed person, banqueting off your boots.
If your temper is not of the sort that can come out unruffled from ever-recurring and heated arguments with your companion and the distracted drivers; if your looks cannot withstand the long moments ’twixt heat of sand and sun and wrath, as you sit perched above the turmoil upon the back of your own thrice-accursed beast, then ’twere wise to give the desert an extremely wide berth. Lay down the law to your companion and he will learn to loathe the very sight of you; upbraid the long-suffering driver and he will league himself with the camel to spite you in every way; hit the camel so as to cause it pain, and you will never again feel any security about the welfare of your person. You won’t recognize that camel one or five or ten years hence as you saunter through some Bazaar, but it will recognize you all right, and will meet its teeth in the tenderest portion of your anatomy it can find, or, if it gets the chance, will seize, worry, and throw you and deliver the coup de grâce of its long-waited-for revenge by rolling upon you until you are an unrecognizable pulp.