CHAPTER IX
IN the journey from which we had just returned, we had been a rather long time away from water for that time of year, and the camels were in a very exhausted condition from the hard travelling in the heat on a short allowance of water. It was then May, and March is usually considered in Egypt as being the last month for field work, so I decided to give them a rest to recover their condition, and then go back to Kharga Oasis and the Nile Valley.
The men, with the exception of Khalil, had all settled down to the routine of desert travelling, and were working well. The mainstay of the caravan was Qway. He was a magnificent man in the desert, and was hardly ever at fault.
Finding that the caravan was rather overloaded at our start for our third journey, I left, on our second day out, a tank of water and two sacks of grain in the desert, to be picked up on our way back to Mut. From that point we had gone three days to the south. We had then gone two days south-west; then two days west; another day towards the north-west, and then three days north-east. All but the first four days of this journey had been over ground which was quite unknown to him; but when at the end of this roundabout route I asked him to point out to me where our tank and sacks had been laid, he was able to indicate its position without the slightest uncertainty.
At first sight the faculty that a good desert guide has of finding his way about a trackless desert seems little short of miraculous. But he has only developed to an unusual degree the powers that even the most civilised individual possesses in a rudimentary state.
Anyone, for instance, can go into a room that he knows in the dark, walk straight across from the door to a table, say, from there to the mantelpiece, and back again to the door without any difficulty at all, thus showing the same sense of angles and distances that enabled Qway, after a circuitous journey of a hundred and sixty miles, to find his way straight back to his starting-point. The Arabs, however, have so developed this faculty that they can use it on a much larger scale.
The bedawin, accustomed to travelling over the wide desert plains, from one landmark to another, keep their eyes largely fixed on the horizon. You can always tell a desert man when you see him in a town. He is looking towards the end of the street, and appears to be oblivious of his immediate surroundings. This gives him that “far-away” look that is so much admired by lady novelists.
It would be rash, however, to assume that a desert guide does not also notice what is going on around him, for there is very little indeed that he does not see. He may be looking to the horizon to find his next landmark during a great part of his time, but he also scans most closely the ground over which he is travelling, and will not pass the faintest sign or footprint, without noticing it and drawing his own conclusions as to who has passed that way and where they were going. He may say nothing about them at the time; but he does not forget them.
Nor will he forget his landmarks, or fail to identify them when he sees them a second time; a good guide will remember his landmarks sufficiently well to be able to follow without hesitation, a road that he has been over many years before, and has not seen in the interval.