“Well, eventually I went back to camp.
“I’m not a fanciful bloke, and I don’t believe in spooks or all this spiritualistic tosh, most of which is faked. But I am ready to admit that there are lots of things we don’t understand, things like telepathy and so on; and do what I could, I could not get rid of the feeling that some one was calling to me out in the desert.
“Although I tried to put it down to the aftermath of a vivid dream, I could not rid myself of it; and further, something seemed to keep on reminding me that I hadn’t really been to sleep, and the reasonable part of me that insisted on the dream theory couldn’t say that I had either.
“Eventually I decided that I would do something—for me—quite mad. I would push out a little into the desert. I had chagals[1] and things to take enough water for myself and a couple of men for four days, and the camels could do without any for that time. That meant about thirty miles out and back.
“So I told Sadiq, my head camel fellow, and another man that I wanted to look at the desert a bit, and left old Firoz—you remember him in my company in France: he’s with me now as sort of orderly since he left the army—to look after the camp.
“We went out two days in the direction I figured out that my old relative must have taken.
“By the way, the most extraordinary thing was that the moment I gave my orders to Sadiq, the feeling of some one wanting me suddenly vanished.
“We found nothing either day, absolute dead desert. The third morning, while the men were roping up things for our return, the feeling suddenly came on again. Only this time, for some unaccountable reason, it seemed as if the thing or person were close at hand. It worried me a lot. I couldn’t go on, of course; we had only enough water to see us back.
“There was a particularly high dune about six hundred or seven hundred yards from the camp, and finally I said to myself that I’d go up and have a last look from the top with my glasses. I told the men to finish loading up and then wait for me.
“The feeling was very strong as I trudged over the sand, and then, just as I got to the top, it absolutely disappeared again. It never came back either.