Our departure for Gara bu Gerara though had to be postponed for a short time owing to the camel developing another attack of whatever the complaint was that she was suffering from, necessitating that she should be again bled—this time from the nose. The operation having been successfully performed, we started off to look for our treasure.
Much to my surprise, we found a very well marked road branched off from the Derb et Tawil, though, judging from its appearance, it had not been used for a very long time. Away to the east of our route—by the side of the Derb et Tawil—was a small, but very conspicuous mound of bright yellow earth—probably ochreous—which I was told was the Garet ed Dahab (golden hillock).
Shortly after we passed through a tract of desert thickly studded with stones. Through this stony area ran a made road. The stones had all been cleared off its surface, which had then been smoothed over with a thoroughness that made it extremely unlikely that the work had ever been done by the bedawin, whose contempt for all forms of manual labour always induces them to put up with a bad part in a road, if they cannot circumvent it by a slight detour.
After traversing this stony part of the desert, we reached the top of a steep descent, where again it was evident that some more civilised race than the desert bedawin had been at work, for the road down on to the lower level had been notched out of the side of the scarp in a way that would not have done discredit to a modern engineer. After that I felt prepared for any developments.
After negotiating the Negeb Shushina, as the descent from the plateau to the level of the depression is called, we came on to a level sandy plain, where for a time Mohanny, who had been acting as guide by following the directions Qwaytin had given him from his wonderful book, succeeded in getting completely lost. After wandering about for a time, seeking the marble palaces and gilded domes of Bu Gerara, we at length caught sight of two figures in the distance, who, when examined through the glass, proved to be Qwaytin and Abd er Rahman.
CHAPTER XXII
WE found Abd er Rahman and Qwaytin diligently engaged in grubbing about in the ground. In reply to my question as to whether they had seen anything of Bu Gerara, I was told that we were standing on it. Qwaytin pointed out the foundations of several walls that could just be seen showing above the sandy surface of the ground and a lot of broken pottery lying about on the desert. He then led me a few yards away to where a circular patch of unusually sandy soil, a few feet in diameter, was to be seen, which he said was the mouth of a well, and produced as the first instalment of the “treasure” to be found, a piece of broken purple glass, that had apparently once formed part of a cup or bowl, and a copper coin of the Ptolemaic period, which he had dug up.
The sight of that coin was too much for my men. It was all I could do to get them to unload the camels and pitch my tent, before they were all off digging away into the ground for dear life, expecting every moment to find the untold wealth that the book had described. They continued until it was too dark for them to see. They then set to work to cook their evening meal.
Qwaytin’s men were even more primitive in their culinary arrangements than Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim. Their food supply consisted of the usual leathern sack of flour, an earthenware jar, covered with raw hide, which contained clarified butter, that they slung on a camel, and several tin canisters containing a very anæmic-looking cheese. They mixed the flour, water, salt and butter together into a dough, which they rolled out into thick slabs with a stick about three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the top of one of my provision boxes. They then lighted a huge bonfire from the surrounding scrub, and when the sand was sufficiently heated and the wood was reduced to glowing embers, scraped the fire away, laid the slab of dough down on the heated sand and covered it over again with the cinders. After about a quarter of an hour’s baking the bread was considered to be ready to eat. My men cooked their dough on a slightly dished iron plate called a saj.