I eventually engaged a man called Qwaytin, who was stated to be reliable. Haggi Qwaytin Mohammed Said—to give him his full name—though a native of Surk in Kufara Oasis, at that time was living in the Nile Valley, in the Manfalut district, near Assiut. For some time he had acted as a tax-collector among the Bedayat for ’Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur, and when he was inclined to be communicative could impart a considerable amount of information about unknown parts of the desert. He seemed to have led a fairly wandering existence and to be at home in most parts of North and Central Africa; at any rate he had a Bedayat wife in Darfur, a Tawarek one somewhere near Timbuktu and one—if not two—others near Manfalut.
He was a queer fellow, and I did not altogether take a fancy to him. When I told him that I already had two camel drivers and did not want more, he was very much put out and declared that he could not trust his camels to strangers. Eventually we compromised the question by arranging that he should take three men and that I, in addition, should bring Abd er Rahman, Ibrahim and Dahab.
I asked to see the men he was going to bring with him. The three he produced—Mohanny, Mansur and ’Abd el Atif—were even less prepossessing than Qwaytin himself. They were typical specimens of the low-class bedawin camel drivers that the camel owners engage on nominal wages, to take charge of their beasts when they hire them out. They proved to be most indifferent drivers. But Qwaytin and his men were such an obviously feeble lot that, with my three men to back me up, I had no doubt of being able to deal with them, if they gave any trouble.
I intended to pump Qwaytin as dry as I could of the information he could give me of the unknown parts of the desert and, with the assistance of my own men, to compel him, by force if necessary, to take me within sight of Dendura, after we had left Farafra.
These preliminaries having been gone through, I sent for Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim to come up and join me in Assiut—Dahab was already with me. While waiting in the little Greek pub, where I stayed for the arrival of my men, I made the acquaintance of an educated Egyptian, who was engaged in some sort of literary work, the exact nature of which I was unable to discover. His English was excellent, and he was evidently anxious to practise it, for he stuck to me like a leech.
He was never tired of dilating on the beauties of Arabic as a literary language. In Arabic literature, he said, the great thing was to use as many metaphors as possible, and the best metaphors were those that were the most obscure or, as he expressed it, that made the reader “work his brain” the most. Certainly some of the examples he gave left nothing whatever to be desired in that direction.
He insisted in coming to see me off at the station, where he explained that he had lain awake for a considerable part of the night, in order to be able to think of a really good metaphor for me at parting.
It certainly was a poser. If, he said, he described a man as having a very cowardly dog, what should I think he meant? I suggested various possible solutions: that he was a brutal man who thrashed his dog unmercifully; that he was a very poor man who could not afford to buy a good one; or a very mean man who nearly starved the beast to death. As none of them was correct, I asked him to explain. But he preferred to keep me on tenterhooks and declined to do so, chuckling with delight at the way in which he was making me “work my brain.”
Sheykh Senussi.—Clerk to the Qadi in Mut and the village poet. ([p. 44]).