“Your uncle’s stream unless I’m a Dutchman,” I said, pointing. “We can camp by water to-night, thank goodness.”
Wrexham looked down without speaking. Then he turned to me. “Considering we marched on a guesswork bearing calculated from a vague entry in a hundred-year-old diary, it’s unfair to call it chance.”
“Yes, I don’t think there’s much chance about it. Not that there really is about anything, for that matter, to my way of thinking.”
Sometimes, especially when things go crooked, one feels that it’s all chance, that the only controlling hand is one vast mocking deity or fate; but, generally, if you look back afterwards, you see that there’s been method in it all through, although at the time there seemed to be none unless it were malevolent. After all, we are but shuttles, and as we drive our way through the loom there doesn’t seem much sense in the whole thing, the steady monotony, over and under, over and under. But later, when perhaps we’re laid on the rack for a space and can see the pattern as a whole, we realize how the apparently aimless movements each had their part to play in the finished pattern of beauty that the weaver had intended.
As we were speaking, the first of the gaunt, weary camels came round the corner of the hill below us, and we watched them pacing slowly along till they came to the bank of the stream, then stopped and buried their muzzles in the water.
“Nice to camp by running water again. I wonder where it goes to,” I said.
“Swallowed up in the sand, I fancy, before very far,” said Wrexham. “Can you see if there is any valley at the far end in the hills?”
“I was looking for that as you came up, but I can’t see any break. If there is one, it must be very narrow. But you remember, according to the diary, it is narrow, and I doubt if you could see it from here unless there was a big dip in the cliffs.”
“There’s a long line of shadow that looks as if it might be something, but, as you say, it’s hard to make out from here. One thing is pretty clear, that the people, if there are people, can’t live below the hills. I can’t make out a single vestige of a field or even a tree, and the hills themselves look absolutely bare.”
“Probably such vegetation as there is on this first ridge is on the other side. You see that very markedly sometimes in hills. One side quite bare and the other all green,” said I.