CHAPTER X
By the time the news of the disappearance of Sir George Barclay's party reached England, Pansy was well on her way to El-Ammeh.
She arrived there one night after dark, a darkness out from which high walls loomed and over them strange sounds came; the thin wail of stringed instruments; a tom-tom throbbing through the blue night; the plaintive song of some itinerant musician, and the shuffle of crowded human life.
She was not given much time to dwell upon those things. Her escort skirted the high walls. A big horse-shoe arch loomed up, with heavy iron gates; gates that clanged back as they approached. And the flare of torches showed a long passage leading into darkness.
Into the passage her litter was carried with a swaying, somnolent movement. Then the gates closed with a clang behind her, leaving the escort outside; and she and Alice were alone with the flaming torches, the black, engulfing passage, and half a dozen huge negroes in gorgeous raiment.
With a sickly feeling, Pansy slipped from her litter.
Her journey's end!
The journey had lasted over six weeks. Under other circumstances Pansy would have enjoyed it. It could not have been more comfortable. She had travelled in the cool of the morning and in the cool of the evening. Always for the long midday halt the same sumptuous tent was up, awaiting her reception, taken down again after she had departed, and up again before she arrived at the next halting place.
The country she travelled through was an interesting one, park-like and grassy at first, as the weeks passed becoming ever more sandy and arid, with occasional patches that were wonderfully fertile. Until, finally, like a glowing, yellow sea before her, she had her first glimpse of the Sahara on its southern side—billow upon billow of flaming sand, stretching away to a tensely blue sky, with here and there a stunted bush, a twist of coarse grass, or a clump of distorted cacti with red flowers blazing against the heated, shimmering air—a vast solitude where nothing moved.