The mares belonging to this ghazú were small, compact, and active, with especially good shoulders and fine heads, but they were of a more poneyish type than our own Ánazeh mares. Most of them were bay. One I saw was ridden in a bit.
When the Roala were gone we compared notes. In the first place, Wilfrid’s hurts were examined, but they are only contusions. The thick rope he wears round his head had received all the blows, and though the stock of the gun is clean broken, steel and all, his head is still sound. The lances could not get through his clothes. As regards myself the only injury I have received is the renewal of my sprain. But I could almost forget the pain of it in my anger at it, as being the cause of our being caught. But for this we might have galloped away to our camels and received the enemy in quite another fashion. I was asked if I was not frightened, but in fact there was at first no time, and afterwards rage swallowed up every other feeling. Wilfrid says, but I do not believe him, that he felt frightened, and was very near running away and leaving me, but on reflection stayed. The affair seems more alarming now it is over, which is perhaps natural.
As to the others, Mohammed is terribly crestfallen at the not very heroic part he took in the action. The purely defensive attitude of the caravan was no doubt prudent; but it seemed hardly up to the ideal of chivalry Mohammed has always professed. He keeps on reproaching himself, but we tell him that he did quite right. It was certainly our own fault that we were surprised in this way, and if the enemy, as they might have been, had really been robbers and outlaws, our safety depended on our having the caravan intact as a fortress to return to after being robbed. To have rushed forward in disorder to help us would have exposed the whole caravan to a defeat, which in so desolate a region as this would mean nothing less than dying of cold and starvation.
We may indeed be very thankful that matters were no worse. I shall never again dismount while I remain crippled, and never as long as I live, will I tie my horse to a bush.
Many vows of sheep, it appears, were made by all the party of spectators during the action, so we are to have a feast at Jôf—if ever we get there.
Now all is quiet, and Hamdán the Sherâri is singing the loves of a young man and maiden who were separated from one another by mischief-makers, and afterwards managed to carry on a correspondence by tying their letters to their goats when these went out to pasture
January 4.—There was no dawdling this morning, for everybody has become serious, and we were off by seven, and have marched steadily on for quite thirty miles without stopping, at the rate of three-and-a-half miles an hour. We have left the Wady Sirhán for good, and are making a straight cut across the Hamád for Jôf. There is no water this way, but less chance of ghazús. The soil has been a light hard gravel, with hardly a plant or an inequality to interfere with the camels’ pace. At one o’clock we came to some hills of sandstone faced with iron, the beginning of the broken ground in which, they say, Jôf stands. We had been gradually ascending all day, and as we reached that, the highest point of our route, the barometer marked 2660 feet. Here we found a number of little pits, used, so Hamdán explained, for collecting and winnowing semh, a little red grain which grows wild in this part of the desert, and is used by the Jôf people for food.
A little later we sighted two men on a delúl, the first people we have seen, except the ghazú, since leaving Kâf. Wilfrid and Mohammed galloped up to see what they were, and Mohammed, to atone I suppose for his inertness on a recent occasion, fired several shots, and succeeded in frightening them out of their wits. They were quite poor people, dressed only in old shirts, and they had a skin of dates on one side the camel and a skin of water on the other. They were out, they said, to look for a man who had been lost in the Wady Sirhán, one of the men sent by Ibn Rashid to Kâf for the tribute. He had been taken ill, and had stopped behind his companions, and nobody had seen him since. They had been sent out by the governor of Jôf to look for him. They said that we were only a few hours from the town.
Meanwhile, I had remained with our camels, listening to the remarks of Awwad and Hamdán, both dying with curiosity about the two zellems from Jôf. At last Awwad could wait no longer, and begged Hamdán to go with him. They both jumped down from the camels they were riding, and set off as hard as they could run to meet the Jôfi, who by this time had proceeded on their way, while Wilfrid and Mohammed were returning. Wilfrid on arriving held out to me a handful of the best dates I have ever eaten, which the men had given him. The Sherâri and Awwad presently came back with no dates, but a great deal of Jôf gossip.
We are encamped this evening near some curious tells of red, yellow, and purple sandstone, a formation exactly similar to parts of the Sinai peninsula. There is a splendid view to the south, and we can see far away a blue line of hills [110] which, they tell us, are beyond Jôf at the edge of the Nefúd!