I then shot a few of them just as they were alighting, and cut them open. They had all been feeding on seeds—grass seeds apparently—and olives. The seeds were in an almost perfect condition, but the olives were in such an advanced state of digestion as to be hardly recognisable.
I next bought some doves of the ordinary kind kept in the oasis from the villagers, and confined them in a cage. At sunrise the following morning I fed them on olives and then, towards midday, took them out one by one, at intervals of an hour, killed them, and cut them open to see the state of the olives. Those of the one killed at three o’clock seemed in the state most resembling those taken from the kimri sifi I had shot, showing that it required about nine hours’ digestion to reduce them to that condition.
The kimri sifi is a weak-flighted bird, and, judging from the numbers we put up in the desert from places where they had settled down to rest, spends a considerable part of the day during the flight to Mut from the oasis where the olives grow, resting upon rocks in the desert. I consequently concluded that its average speed, including the rests, during its journey from the olive oasis, would be about twenty-five miles an hour.
Applying the principles of Sherlock Holmes to the case I deduced—I believe that to be the correct word—that the oasis the kimri came from lay in the direction of the mean of the bearings I had taken, viz. 217° mag., at a distance of nine times twenty-five, or two hundred and twenty-five miles, and that it contained olive trees. Some years later an Arab told me that there was an oasis off there that contained large quantities of olive trees. Boy scouts will, I trust, copy!
CHAPTER VIII
HAVING given my caravan sufficient time to recover from their previous journey, I set out again into the desert. On this occasion the camels were much more heavily loaded, as I had determined to cover as much ground as possible.
But we had not proceeded for more than four hours from Mut when one of the camels fell dead lame again. As it was obviously hopeless to think of taking him along with us, and we had proceeded such a short distance, I decided to turn back and make a fresh start.
On reaching Mut we fired the camel and then the poor brute was cast loose. He hobbled painfully about for a few minutes, and then with a grunt knelt down on the ground. Musa, with the idea perhaps of relieving his sufferings, squatted on his heels in front of him, and proceeded to warble to him on his flute.
This was an expedient to which he often resorted in order to soothe the beasts under his charge. Frequently, after an unusually heavy day in the desert, when the camels had been fed, he would squat down among them and discourse wild music from his reed flute to them, till far into the night. As this generally had the effect of keeping me awake, I rather objected to the proceeding.