The first hour of the afternoon “shid” is the worst of the day. The swaying motion of the camel, the glare, and the burning sun beating down, makes one terribly inclined to sleep, and the hard, yellowish brown desert is absolutely monotonous. A good “hagin”—riding camel—is very comfortable to ride when it is trotting, but not at a walk. Its action is peculiar, first the two off legs move together, and then the two near legs; this is what causes the swinging motion. There is an idea that when people first ride a camel they are afflicted by a sort of sea-sickness, but although I am a bad sailor I have never felt this, nor have I yet met anyone who did. Camels are very easy to ride; one just sits on the saddle with legs crossed over the front pummel, and there is very little chance of falling off as long as the camel behaves itself. The usual way of mounting is to make the camel kneel down and then step on to the saddle, but if one is long-legged and active it is possible to spring up into the saddle from the ground, which is much quicker and useful when the ground is hard and unsuitable for the camel to kneel on. A camel’s usual pace is a slow trot, about 4½-5 miles an hour, and they can keep up this pace for hours on end. Of course they can go at a sort of gallop, if they like, and when they do this they cover the ground at a terrific speed, but it is rather difficult to ride them, and they have an unpleasant trick of suddenly swerving which generally shoots one over the camel’s head on to the ground. I have known, too, camels that bucked, and others that suddenly knelt down when one did not expect it, both very disconcerting tricks. They are not affectionate animals and they never seem to know their own masters; there was only one among mine that had any “parlour tricks,” and he used to inhale tobacco smoke through his nose, apparently with the greatest appreciation.
We saw several gazelle in the afternoon, but all too far away for a shot. Halted for the night at a place where there were about four small tufts of vegetation. The camels are less fastidious now and condescended to nibble at them.
The best time of the day is the evening when the sun sinks low, the desert becomes a pinkish colour, and our shadows stretch like huge monsters for yards across the ground. Then I begin to look out for a camping place, anywhere where there are a few scraps of dried-up vegetation, or, failing that, a soft-looking patch of ground where the camels will be comfortable. When we halt the baggage is unloaded and the camels are allowed to roam about and eat what they can find; in five minutes my tent is pitched, chair and table unfolded, and dinner is being prepared. Some of the men begin measuring out the camels’ dhurra—millet—and others go and collect bits of stick for the fires, or if there is no wood they use dry camel dung, which is an excellent fuel. Then the camels are driven in again, unsaddled and tied down in a long line; at a given signal the men run along the line and place each one’s food on a sack in front of its nose. Every man squats down by his own camel and watches it eat, preventing the ones who eat fast from snatching at their neighbour’s grain. Afterwards the men have their own supper—lentils, onions, bread and tea, and soon roll themselves up in their blankets, covering face and all, and go to sleep behind their saddles, which they use as shelters against the night wind. The only sound is the munching of the camels and an occasional hollow gurgle as they chew the cud, and the footsteps of the sentry as he moves up and down the line, “till the dawn comes in with golden sandals.”
Abdel Aziz is improving; he produced quite a decent dinner—sausages, fried onions and potatoes, omelette and coffee, followed by a cigar. One sleeps splendidly on the desert. Even in the hottest weather the nights are fairly cool. Towards morning, just before the “false dawn,” a little cool breeze blows over the sand and stirs the flaps of one’s tent, like a sort of warning that soon it will be time to get on the move again.
27th.
We marched for six hours in the morning and about four hours in the afternoon, and camped for the night at the half-way point between Sollum and Siwa, which is a mound ornamented by a few empty tins. The temperature in my tent at midday must have been about 120 degrees, and not a scrap of breeze or fresh air. This is real desert; there is not a vestige of any living thing, animal or vegetable. The ground is hard limestone covered with dark, shining pebbles, and in some places there are stretches of dried mud, left from the standing water after the rains. These mud pans are impassable in wet weather, and one has to make a wide detour to avoid them. Now they are cracked by the sun into a number of little fissures of a uniform size, about 6 inches square. The effect is very curious.
I once motored down to Siwa in a car driven by an English A.S.C. private who had never been out in the desert before. When we were running over one of these mud pans he remarked to me, “It seems wonderful how they have laid bits of this road with paving blocks—don’t it, sir!” I thought he was trying to be funny, but when I looked at him I saw that he was perfectly serious, so I agreed that it was indeed wonderful. Nobody believed the story when I told it afterwards, but it really did happen.
The mirage is very vivid. Almost all the time one sees what appears to be a sheet of shining water ahead in the distance, and one can distinguish bays and islands on it; gradually, as one gets nearer, it recedes and then fades away. It is like the shimmering heat that one sometimes sees at home on a hot day, but greatly intensified. Distances look out of proportion on the desert; little mounds, too small to be called hills, appear like huge mountains. About every thirty miles there seem to be slight rises of a terrace-like formation.
Every evening the men make bread, which they call “khuz.” It is very simply done and quite good when freshly baked. They take flour and a little salt and mix it together with water, in a basin or on a clean sack, kneading it into dough with their hands. When it is solid and firm they smooth it out into a flat, round loaf about 1½ inches thick. Then they go to the fire, scrape aside all the embers, and lay the loaf on the hot sand. Then they put the embers back on the top of the loaf. After a few minutes’ cooking they rake aside the fire again and turn the loaf, replacing the fire on the top as before. The time taken in cooking depends on the heat, but is generally about ten minutes. The bread lasts until the following evening.
All the way we are following what is known as a “mashrab,” a desert road, which consists of a narrow rut about a foot wide, worn by the passage of camels through many centuries. Without specially looking for them one would hardly notice these mashrabs, which are almost identical to the “gazelle paths” that wind aimlessly about the desert, but one is helped by the cairns of stones which are raised by the Arabs on every bit of high ground, sometimes to show the way and sometimes to mark the lonely grave of a less fortunate traveller. Each of these twisting desert tracks is known to the Arabs by a different name. There is the “Mashrab el Khamisa,” from Bagbag to Siwa, called thus because there are five wells on the way; there is the “Mashrab el Akhwan”—the Brothers’ Road, from Jerabub to the coast, which was used by the Senussi Brethren when they travelled from their Zowia at Jerabub into Egypt; and the “Mashrab el Abd”—the Slave’s Road, as according to legend, once upon a time, in the dim ages, a slave who was captured and brought by this route into Egypt from his home in the west, returned to the west and led an army against Egypt by the very road that he had come by as a captive. Often the mashrab seems to fade away, and then the trackers have to ride on ahead and pick it up again. A number of Bisharin from the North-East Sudan were specially enlisted in the Camel Corps as trackers and guides. They are thought to be more skilful at this work than any other tribe, though personally I think a bedouin is cleverer. But when working in a bedouin country it is best not to employ local natives. Some of the Bisharin are almost unnaturally clever, they can follow a footstep over hard, broken ground where anyone else would see no sign of anything. These men have a natural instinct for finding the way, a sort of abnormal bump of locality. When they first arrived on the coast some of them were wearing the usual clothes of their country and the fuzzy-wuzzy coiffure that is so remarkable a characteristic of their race. The Arabs had never seen this type of Sudanese and were intensely interested in them. Small bedouin boys used to stand and stare at these tall brown men with the great mops of woolly hair ornamented with a few skewer-like objects, but the Bisharin were absolutely indifferent.