Here then we are comfortably housed under one of these bushes, where there is a delightful lull. The soil is all deep sand, white as snow, and the tent which we have rigged up is already half buried in it, so that we might imagine ourselves at home snowed up on Boxing Day. We have made a fire of tarfa sticks inside the tent, and have been enjoying Hanna’s delicious coffee. Where is one ever so much at home as in one’s own tent? Awwad surprised us very much to-day by objecting, when we proposed to pitch the tent, that it would be impossible to do so in the sand. If Mohammed or any of the townspeople had done so it would have been natural, but Awwad is a Bedouin born, and must have pitched camp hundreds of times in the Nefúd. Yet he had never heard of burying a tent peg.
One misfortune has happened in the storm. The old rogue of a camel we bought at Mezárib, who has been trying all along to get back to his family, has given us the slip. Taking advantage of the darkness, and knowing that the wind would obliterate his track at once, he decamped as soon as unloaded, and is gone. Mohammed and Awwad, each on a delúl, are scouring the country, but without a chance of finding him; for at best they can only see things a hundred yards off, and he was not missed for the first half hour. Mohammed has vowed to kill a lamb, but I fear that will do no good.
December 27.—We have arrived at Kâf after a long march, twenty-seven or twenty-eight miles. Course about south-east!
In the night a little rain fell, and the wind moderated. At eight o’clock we started, crossing a wide plain of coarse sand interspersed with low sandstone tells. At noon we came upon a well-marked track, the road of the salt caravans between Bozra and Kâf, which, after crossing a rather high ridge, brought us to a very curious valley; an offshoot, we were told, of the Wady Sirhán. The geological formation of this is singular; the crest of the ridge on either side the valley is of black rock with detached stones of the same—then yellow sandstone, then another black layer, then pure sand, then sand with isolated black stones, then a calcareous deposit, and at the bottom chalk. The actual bed of the wady is a fine white sand sprinkled over with tamarisk and guttub bushes. As we were crossing this our dogs started a jerboa, and, little creature though it is, it gave them much trouble to catch it. Its hops were prodigious, and from side to side and backwards and forwards, so that the dogs always ran over it, and snatching, always missed it; till at last, as if by accident, it jumped into Shiekhah’s mouth. Abdallah and the rest were very anxious to eat it, but it was so mauled as to be beyond cooking. At three o’clock we crested another ridge, and from it suddenly came in sight of the great Wady Sirhán, the object of so many of our conjectures. It seems, however, to be no wady, but the bed of an ancient sea. A little black dot on the edge of a subbka or salt lake, now dry, and just under a tall black tell, marked the oasis of Kâf, an infinitesimal village of sixteen houses, and a palm garden of about an acre.
I have had the misfortune to sprain my knee, an awkward accident, and very annoying in the middle of a journey. My delúl, always a fidgety animal, gave a bolt just as I was leaning over to arrange something on the off side of the shedád, or saddle, and pitched me off. The pain is indescribable, and I fear I shall be helplessly lame for some time to come. But here we are at Kâf.
CHAPTER V.
“Rafi ran after her with his sword drawn, and was just about to strike off her head, when she cried ‘quarter.’”—Abulfeda.
Kâf and Itheri—More relations—The Wady Sirhán—Locust hunting—Hanna sits down to die—Tales of robbery and violence—We are surprised by a ghazú and made prisoners—Sherarât statistics—Jôf.
December 28.—Kâf is a pretty little village, with a character of its own, quite distinct from anything one sees in Syria. All is in miniature, the sixteen little square houses, the little battlemented towers and battlemented walls seven feet high—seventy or eighty palm trees in a garden watered from wells, and some trees I took at first for cypresses, but which turned out to be a very delicate kind of tamarisk. [84] Though so small a place, Kâf has a singularly flourishing look, all is neat there and in good repair, not a battlement broken or a door off its hinges, as would certainly have been the case in Syria. There are also a good many young palms planted in among the older ones, and young fig trees and vines, things hardly ever found in the North. The people are nice looking and well behaved, though at first they startled us a little by going about all of them with swords in their hands. These they hold either sloped over their shoulders or grasped in both hands by the scabbard, much as one sees in the old stone figures of mediæval martyrs, or in the effigies of crusaders.