“Without doubt, sahibs,” said Payindah, “Firoz is a cook of the best after the manner of our folk. It is better that the sahibs should eat decent Punjabi food cleanly cooked by a person of repute than shorten their days by that which one of these half heathen—such as might be got for a price in the bazaars—would prepare.”
“Even so,” chorused Firoz; “and although I know not the ‘side dishes’ and the ‘first-carses’ of the sahibs, still I can cook good pillaus and kababs such as the sahibs have in mess sometimes. Also my chupattis will be far better than the bread that son of perdition used to make, such that Wrexham sahib once broke a knife cutting it.”
This last remark was true, and the resultant disturbance may have been one of the causes of the cook’s going.
Anyway, we heartily agreed that a turn of Punjabi cuisine by Firoz could not be worse and might be far better than what we had suffered at our late cook’s hands. And so it proved once we had broken him of the habit of smothering things in oil.
This disappearance of the cook was in one way a blessing, as it was one less mouth for our expedition across the desert. We were anxious not to take any of the local people with us, since, if we found anything worth having, we wished rather to keep the knowledge to ourselves. We had bought our own camels at Yarkand so as to render us independent. The only local man we kept on continuously was a Turki camel-driver. Since the country we were going into was quite unknown, there was nothing to be gained from the knowledge the local people possessed. Hence we had simply hired extra men for a few stages at a time, replacing them by others as we went along.
The one exception, the camel-driver, a man who had accompanied Wrexham in 1919, Sadiq by name, was passably honest and trustworthy, and seemed to be a wanderer with no particular relatives. He had, however, sufficient local standing to serve to keep us in touch with the countryside on our way up from Yarkand, and was extremely useful in looking after the camels and the hired men. Both Firoz and Payindah had a good knowledge of the beasts, Firoz having learnt much about them in Palestine, where he had been transport lance naik of his unit.
For our journey across the desert we had reduced our kit to a minimum.
The main question was water, and for that we had brought special tanks from India of galvanized iron, holding seventeen gallons apiece, two full tanks making the camel-load. We had four camel-loads of water, making one hundred and thirty-six gallons in all, which, considering men alone, would give us rather over five gallons a day for the seven of us for twenty-five days. If we did not find the hills old John Wrexham had written about, we ought to be able to make our way back all right, since the consumption of food and water would automatically lighten the loads of the camels, and heavier stores could be shifted off the other beasts, who by that time would be pretty tucked up.
Still, I don’t think any of us feared not finding the hills and the stream or water of sorts. We were all thoroughly convinced that the story was true. The coincidence of Wrexham finding the dead man in the desert tallied too much with the account in his great-great-uncle’s diary for the original story to be an invention. Our main preoccupation was how to get into the country, and the kind of reception we were likely to get. We had also arranged to start with one camel-load of full rations for men, which should last us three weeks easily, or a month if we were very careful, and about one and a half camel-loads of grain and oil for camels, giving starvation ration for about the same period. We were chancing our arm over the matter of food for the camels, and they could not possibly stay anything like that period without water; but within five days of starting we could count on ascertaining whether or not there was any snow mountain in the distance, and if so we could safely risk giving part of our water to the camels. If nothing whatever was seen after six days, we should, of course, have to consider the question of returning.
One camel carried our personal baggage, a very limited amount for each, our books, maps, survey instruments, and so on. Another carried ammunition, of which we brought a fair amount. We might, if we got into the country alive, have to fight, and we all agreed that ammunition was a sine qua non. To save complications in the matter we had standardized our armament. There were five .303 rifles, one for each of us, and one each for the two Punjabis. These we carried ourselves. We had two thousand rounds of ammunition, a liberal allowance for eventualities.