He came up the slope as fast as the sand would let him, and got just a glimpse before the clouds veiled it again, a faint, tiny peak like a distant pearl in the dark mass of clouds. Then the heavy masses veiled it once more, and it disappeared from our gaze.
One more entry of the old diary was verified. We felt almost reckless now, though there must be many marches ahead, and our fatigue fell from us like a wet blanket as we glissaded down the sand-slope among the men. The two Punjabis seemed to take it as all in the day’s work. Doubtless if we expected snow ahead, there would be snow. They were of the pre-war type, with a prodigious belief in anything their sahibs said.
In a short while the wind had sprung up again, and we travelled on over the same high wind-tossed dunes of yellow grey sand. As much of the sky as was visible showed broken wisps of cloud. I remarked on this to Wrexham, and wondered whether there was any chance of rain. Such rainy season as there is in the desert was practically finished.
We were just going up the highest dune we had yet struck, a toilsome effort, when the question of rain arose. As we got to the top, Wrexham stopped and looked ahead. The wind had dropped a little once more.
“What’s that?” he said, pointing; “it looks like rock.”
I looked in the direction he indicated, and there, about a mile ahead, what seemed to be a low hillock of rock, dark in colour, broke the monotony of the grey landscape.
“Is rock, I think,” said I. “If so, it will be a pleasant change to camping on sand.”
“Seems as if we must have got on to the line the great-great-uncle followed on his way back.”
“It’s quaint finding an outcrop like that in the middle of the desert. I suppose it must be a peak in the buried strata that joins the hills on either side. Let’s go on and see what it is.”
Pushing ahead, we climbed to the top of the rocky hill, and to our amazement found a sort of rock basin perhaps three hundred yards long by fifty to sixty yards broad with jagged edges of limestone. It looked for all the world what it probably was, the top of a long ridge which had either broken through the earth at some prehistoric period, or else been gradually silted up on all sides as the sand encroached. It stood perhaps one hundred feet above the tops of the highest dunes, and on a clear day must have been a fine vantage point.