We might be going to leave our bones in the sand at the end of it all, but taking Aryenis’s cue, we lived in the Present (with the capital P), and three very pleasant days they were, and evenings that ended all too soon when Aryenis finally retired to the tent, and we rolled into our blankets under the open sky.
CHAPTER XI
THE CAVES
“The way lies up there,” said Aryenis, pointing.
“Can we climb up to those caves? I know that is the place, because I remember the arch.”
She was guiding the riding camel, with me as a passenger behind. Her first slight apprehension of the ungainly beasts had quickly disappeared, and for the last two days she had insisted on the front seat and the control of the nose-rope.
We were a few hundred yards out into the sand from the base of the cliffs, where, after marching six miles on the fourth morning, we had found under a projecting shoulder of rock, a little spring-fed pool with a stream running away out into the sands, doubtless to be swallowed up before very far. There was some scant vegetation, and Wrexham had halted the camels for water.
A mile and a half beyond us was a semi-detached hill, which jutted out from the main mass, still steep as ever. It projected a mile or so into the desert—a long hog-back of rock, with sides precipitous enough for the first three or four hundred feet, but which then sloped comparatively gently to the crest.
When we stopped at the water, Aryenis, who had been scanning the outlying hill ever since it first showed up, edged her camel out into the sand, and then gave a cry of joy, as round the shoulder of rock we saw the point where the outlying hill joined the main wall.
“I was right. Look; there is the great arch,” she had cried.
The outlier joined on to the high cliffs at a height of perhaps sixteen hundred or seventeen hundred feet. But at the junction swelled up the most peculiar natural formation I have ever seen. It was a giant arch of limestone, formed of strata bent by some primeval convulsion of the earth, and from which in the course of ages the central softer layers had been weathered away, leaving the hard outer ones as a true arch.