It was not until I got to Bu Mungar that I discovered that all the men in my caravan belonged to the Senussia. Qwaytin and his three men, I knew, had always been of that persuasion, and, while in Farafra, Abd er Rahman, Ibrahim and Dahab had all been so worked upon by Sheykh Ibn ed Dris that, just before we left that oasis, they too had joined the order, and showed all the fanaticism to be expected from new converts.
A party of thirty Tibbus, sent from Kufara for my entertainment, by Sheykh Ahmed Esh Sherif, at that time head of the Senussia, were hanging round somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bu Mungar, close enough for Qwaytin to start signalling to them by firing shots at imaginary pigeons and lighting an enormous and quite unnecessary bonfire at dusk—a well-known Arab signal.
Twenty more men had been sent from Kufara to reinforce the Mawhubs at their ezba, in the north-west corner of Dakhla, which I should have to pass in order to enter the oasis on my way to Egypt; while the inhabitants of Farafra—the only other oasis I could fall back upon with my small caravan—were members of the order almost to a man, and were on the look out for me if I returned that way. It was explained to me that they had allowed me to go to Bu Mungar instead of to Iddaila—my original intention—in order that I should leave Egypt, and then, as I had altered my plans, no one would know “where it happened!”
It was a neat little trap that I had foolishly walked into; but it had its weak points. It was nearly dusk when Qwaytin fired his signal shots that led to my enquiries, and, better still, a howling sandstorm was blowing. If once we got out into the desert in these circumstances, I felt confident of getting away without difficulty. But the prospect of having the camp rushed before we could get off gave me such a bad attack of cold feet that I decided to start running as soon as possible in order to get them warm.
Qwaytin and his men, however, when told to do so, flatly refused to leave the hattia. But he and his crowd were such a feeble lot that I had little difficulty in reducing them to order. We lost so little time that I got the tanks filled and the caravan off just after sunset.
Before starting it occurred to me that I might borrow a trick from Abd er Rahman. So finding a sand-free space near the well, I scratched the Senussi wasm with a stick deeply into the ground, and then, to mislead the Senussi when they came as to the direction in which we had gone, drew a line from it pointing towards the west—the direction in which I knew they feared that I should go—and then set out towards the south-east to Dakhla.
Almost immediately after leaving the camp we got on to the sand hills. I then left the road, and, to Qwaytin’s intense disgust, struck out into the dunes to the south, where the tearing gale that was blowing very quickly obliterated our tracks.
After marching for two and a half hours, the dunes became considerably larger, and, as the moon had set, travelling was attended with such great difficulty that we halted till daylight.
But after leaving Bu Mungar our journey to Mut began to get too much in the nature of “adventures” to be described in detail. It took me all that I had learnt, during seven seasons spent in the desert, to get my caravan into Dakhla, without creating that incident that I had been warned to avoid, and which might easily have resulted in something in the nature of a native rising.
No one in the caravan but Qwaytin had been over the road before, and he, of course, got hopelessly lost, and in any case was not reliable, so I had to take over his job and do the best I could as guide.