Dahab carried his belongings in a bag rolled up in a rug on which he slept, his kit being of a very workmanlike nature. Khalil’s outfit, however, was largely of an ornamental character, including such trifles as a pink satiny pillow thickly studded with gold stars and covered with a pillow-case trimmed with lace!
In the rough usage inseparable from a desert journey everyone’s clothing becomes more or less damaged. The other men during our halts got their clothes patched and mended, but Khalil never repaired the numerous rents that soon began to appear in his garments. He ultimately became such a scarecrow that when, on one extremely hot day, he seated himself on a rock during our noontide halt, he sprang up again a great deal quicker than he sat down, the reason being that the rock was greatly heated, and, to put it poetically, he had not been “divided from the desert by the sewn.”
While in the Valley, Khalil had been quite a success, for he made a very fair interpreter. But no sooner did he get into the desert, than he appeared at once in his true character, of a dragoman of the deepest die. He was a sore trial, until I got rid of him.
The first few days in the desert with a new caravan are always trying. The men have not got into their work, and the camels, being strangers to each other, spend most of their time in fighting. A savage camel is a dangerous beast and it is of no use playing with him. The right place to hit him is his neck. Hit him hard with something heavy, and go on doing it and he becomes partially stunned and is then amenable to reason. Still, as the gifted author of “Eothen” put it, “you soon learn to love a camel for the sake of her gentle womanish ways.”
The Arabs have different names that they apply to camels according to their age—a one-year-old beast is called ibn esh Sha’ar, or sometimes ibn es Sena; a two-year-old, ibn Lebun; a three-year-old, Heg; a four-year-old, Thenni; a five-year-old, Jedda; a six-year-old, Raba’a; a seven-year-old, Sedis; and an eight-year-old, Fahal. The names apply to both male and female beasts. After eight years a male is called jemel (camel) simply, and the female naga.
On some very bad roads, where there is much rock surface to be crossed, many of the caravan guides carry an awl, string and pieces of leather, for the purpose of resoling a camel’s foot should the whole skin of it peel off, as it sometimes will. Qway resoled a foot of one of my camels once that went dead lame from this cause.
The operation was a simple one and seemed to be quite painless. He bored holes diagonally upwards through the thick skin on the edge of the sole of the foot, cut out a piece of leather slightly larger than the camel’s footprint, and then passed pieces of string through the holes he had bored, and through corresponding holes in the piece of leather and tied the ends of the string together. One or two of the strings got cut through by the rock and had to be replaced. The camel, however, without much difficulty was able to hobble back into the oasis, and after some weeks’ rest to allow the skin on the sole of his foot to grow again, completely recovered.
Camels vary considerably in colour. Among those I bought in my first season in Egypt were a beast of a rather unusual chestnut colour and two other fawn-coloured brutes, one of which had a shade of grey in its complexion, and the other was inclined towards a roan tint. These were called by my men the red, blue and green camels respectively.
The “green” beast was the one I used to ride. He was not a bad mount, but as he had not been ridden before I bought him, and guiding a camel by means of a single rein is always rather like trying to steer a boa-constrictor with a string, my stick at first had to be used pretty often.
In the afternoon of our third day, after leaving Kharga, we passed a mass of eroded chalk jutting up above the sandy ground, which, being a recognised landmark was known to natives from its shape as Abu el Hul—“the Sphinx.” From there we proceeded to the well of ’Ain Amur, close to which I found a few patches of light blue sand.