He expressed himself delighted to see me; but I noticed that he omitted the formality usually made to one returning from a journey, and did not praise Allah for my safety. He made no reference at all to my having been in the desert, beyond saying that his son, Sheykh Ahmed, was very angry, very angry indeed, that I had passed so close to his ezba without partaking of his hospitality. I felt quite sure of his anger, but I rather doubted the cause of it.
Mawhub explained that he was on his way to Cairo to “sell some horses” he had with him. The fact that one of his rare visits to the Nile Valley happened once more to coincide with my return to civilisation after a bother in the Senussi country, was not one that I overlooked. I concluded that he would break his journey to Cairo at Assiut, so as to see Qwaytin through any complications that might arise in the mudiria—he did.
After ten minutes’ conversation, during which we both carefully avoided dangerous topics, his youngest son, ’Abd el Wahad, who was travelling with him, acting as a most attentive and devoted servant, intimated to me, in a whisper, that his father was tired, and as he was an old man and had a long journey before him on the morrow, wanted to sleep. So I took leave of him and we returned to the ’omda’s house, where a meal was served, after which I rode back to the camp for the night.
Shortly after dawn the next day, Mawhub’s caravan—a most wretched-looking collection, consisting of a couple of camels and a miserable horse, passed our camp in charge of two dejected-looking blacks. A few minutes afterwards old Mawhub himself rode up with his son, mounted on two sorry looking screws, that were apparently the horses he was taking into Cairo for sale.
They dismounted on reaching the camp, and the old sheykh suggested, as we were both of us travelling to Kharga, that we should join forces and make the journey together. He was an interesting old fellow, and I felt rather tempted to do so. But though I was ready to let bygones be bygones to a certain extent, I was not prepared to go to this length, so finding that he was intending to travel by the lower or Gubary road, I decided to take the route across the plateau via ’Ain Amur. Mawhub, apparently much disappointed, jumped up again in his saddle with a nimbleness surprising in a man of his age, and rode off wishing me most cordially tarik es salaama (safe road, i.e. journey).
We kept a careful look-out at night and took no risks during our remaining time in the desert, but our precautions were probably quite unnecessary. Our journey to Kharga was entirely uneventful.
Here we found great changes. The English company that had been endeavouring to make the desert blossom like a rose, had only succeeded in gathering the thorns. A shortage in the water supply, leading to interference between the wells, the saline character of the ground, the drifting sand and tearing sandstorms had proved to be too much for them. The company was practically in liquidation. The European staff had mostly gone and taken up work elsewhere. Only one member of it remained, and he was busy in the final preparations necessary before leaving the place in the charge of a native. Finding himself thrown out of a job, he was looking round for a new one, and was hoping to have the old office of Inspector of the Oases revived in his favour—I found myself regarded, in consequence, with a somewhat jaundiced eye as being a possible rival.
He need, however, have had no anxiety on that account. One can put in a fairly interesting time in mapping the unknown parts of the desert, collecting weeds that no one wants, studying the natives’ habits and peculiarities, listening to their stories of buried treasure, and enchanted cities, and in chasing will-o’-the-wisp oases round and round the desert; but to settle down in these wretched oases for the term of my natural life, to seeing that the native officials did not extort more than a reasonable amount of bakhshish from the wretched fellahin under their charge, and to settling disputes as to oranges that fall on the wrong side of a wall, was not one that greatly appealed to me.
The night’s rest that I got in Kharga was most welcome; there had not been a night since leaving Qasr Farafra, a fortnight before, when I had been able to get more than a very limited amount of sleep.
A sleeping man is so utterly defenceless that I had been put to great shifts to get any rest at all on the five days’ journey from Bu Mungar to Dakhla. It was not till we got to Mut that I felt I could trust my men enough to risk being caught by them asleep. Even while inhabiting the old store, Dahab and I took it in turns to keep watch during the night.