They passed their fingers over the rough cross hacked in the rock as a sign of his return by the Christian who, in the fifth century, had been sent upon a mission to the Holy Palladius; then, hobbling the mares, crept in the shadows from rock to rock, up the path leading to the narrowest point of the great cleft, which made the one opening in the mountains, slitting them to a spot midway between the foot and crest.
Famished and almost crazed with thirst, the two men hid in blackest shadow, listening for a sound, peering for a sight of those who had marked the way up with rough crosses cut upon the rocks; then, alert, apprehensive, stopping to listen at every yard, crept noiselessly to the opening of the cleft. Through it they passed like shadows, and on down a steeper, broader path to a great plateau, on the edge of which they stopped, staring in amazement.
“A mirage!” whispered Mohammed-Abd in hoarse tones, then, crouching, ran across the plateau and fell upon his knees and to his full length upon the bank of a sparkling, rushing river.
Whence came the unknown, miraculous water? It flowed from the eastern side of the mountains; it twisted in the shape of a big S in the middle of the fertile plain; it disappeared through a narrow cleft in the western side with the thundering, rushing sound of water falling into space.
The waters of the Wadi Hanifa which flow through Woshim and Ared more or less abundantly, according to the season, have so far not been traced after they disappear in the fertile district of Yemama. Do they flow below the surface to the Persian Gulf? or on into the terrible desert, to be absorbed in the ever greedy sand? Are these the waters which show above ground for a few blessed yards in the secret heart of the Mountains of Death, cut off by the quicksands from the needy sons of the desert who depend upon the scanty, brackish water of deep wells, and vapours carried uncertainly on certain winds from the Persian Gulf, and which are lost once they pass above the hamads, those red-hot, dust-laden, scorching, terrible limestone plains?
Or does a subterranean river flow through the bowels of some chain of mountains stretching below the surface of the Peninsula from sea to sea, wrapped in the desert sand?
Maybe!
And may not the short mountain ranges dotted throughout Arabia’s deserts be the topmost peaks of that great hidden chain, and the miraculous waters hidden in the Mountains of Death be part of that lost river, escaping through its prison walls in the one spot where the rocks have been worn, during the centuries, by the rush and the fret of the waters below and the wind and the storm above?
Fantastic theory. And yet who knows? Who will ever know?