Harilek

by Martin Louis Alan Gompertz

At first we passed over ground covered with fine soft dust, here and there splashed with white and grey salt deposits that crackled underfoot, and now and then small terraces of friable clay, last relics of the days when all this area was the bottom of the great inland sea. Then, after an hour or so, we got into low sand-ridges, the high-water mark of the restless ocean, which stretched before us on three sides as far as the eye could reach.

A little farther and we were well out of our depth—to continue the simile of the sea—in ridges and ridges of sand from ten to fifteen feet high, like the breakers along a coast, swelling up gently from the direction of the prevailing northeast wind, and steeper-faced—sometimes almost concave at the top—on the south and west where we approached them, for all the world like waves about to break and solidified in the process.

All day we travelled hour after plodding hour through this trackless sea of fine greyish sand. The last of the scanty vegetation had been left behind when we made our midday halt, not a blade of grass, not a tamarisk, nothing but sand, utterly void of life. The sun beat down on to the sand, and the glare was blinding, but even at midday the heat was not oppressive. We were thankful for our coloured glasses, and even the two Punjabis were glad to put on those we had brought for them, much as they had jested at the idea at first.

We covered eighteen miles that day, and camped in a little valley among the dunes, where by good fortune we found some dried-up tamarisk roots, which gave us a good fire, for the evening temperature fell fast once the sun was down, and we were glad enough to slip into our poshtins once more. The heat absorbed by the sand in the day radiates off at an immense pace after dusk, if one can talk about that period of the day, almost non-existent in sand countries.

After our evening meal that night, we decided—as we had previously arranged—to tell the men something about our destination. We began with the two Punjabis.

“Listen, Payindah and Firoz,” began Wrexham, “to an old tale of my father’s grandfather’s brother, who was once in the army of John Company Bahadur. He left the army and came up here travelling, even as I have done, and he came by the same road into this very desert.

“After many days he found in its very heart high hills with snow mountains, and at the gate of the hills he found an old fort and outside that a dead man. And the dead man was white, even as I or as Lake sahib or as Forsyth sahib.

“But when he wished to enter the hills the two men with him became afraid, so that he had to return across the desert, and the water he had was finished, and first his camels and then his men died. And he himself all but died. And not wishing to tell the people here aught of his discovery until he should have searched more, he said nothing but returned to Hind, to his brother who commanded a regiment; and there he also died.

“Now, we three desire much to see these hills, for, as you know, the sahibs consider greatly the finding of strange lands and of strange peoples.

“And of these hills and of the people who must live in them because of the white man my great-grandfather’s brother saw, there is nothing known either to the people living around the desert or even to the sahibs who have travelled in this part.