Frequently, after passing a conspicuous hill, I have seen Qway glance over his shoulder for a second or two, to see what it would look like when he approached it again on the return journey, and to note any small peculiarities that it possessed.
In addition to this sense of angles and distances, these desert men have in many cases a wonderfully accurate knowledge of the cardinal points of the compass. This seems at first sight to amount almost to an instinct. It is, however, probably produced by a recollection of the changes of direction in a day’s march which has, through long practice, become so habitual as to be almost subconscious.
A good guide can not only steer by the stars and sun, but is able to get on almost equally well without them. On the darkest and most overcast night, Qway never had the slightest doubt as to the direction in which our road lay—and this too in a part of the desert which he had previously never visited.
I often tested the sense of direction possessed by my men when we got into camp, by resting a rifle on the top of a sack of grain and telling them to aim it towards the north, afterwards testing their sighting by means of my compass.
Qway and Abd er Rahman were surprisingly consistent in their accuracy, and there was very little indeed to choose between them. There was considerable rivalry between them on this point in consequence. They were very seldom more than two degrees wrong on one side or the other of the true north.
Qway was an unusually intelligent specimen of the bedawin Arabs—a race who are by no means so stupid as they are sometimes represented. There was little that he did not know about the desert and its ways, and he was extraordinarily quick to pick up any little European dodges, such as map-making to scale, that I showed him; but on questions connected with irrigation, cultivation, building, or anything that had a bearing on the life of the fellahin, he was—or professed to be—entirely ignorant. He regarded them as an inferior race, and evidently considered it beneath his dignity to take any interest at all in them or their ways. He seldom alluded to them to me without adding some contemptuous remark. He never felt at home in the crowded life of the Nile Valley, declared that he got lost whenever he went into a town—this I believe to be the case with most bedawin—that the towns were filthy, the inhabitants all thieves, liars, “women” and worse, and that the drinking water was foul, and even the air was damp, impure, and not to be compared with that of his beloved desert.
The opinion of the Egyptians of the Nile Valley is equally unfavourable to the Arabs. They regard them as an overbearing, lawless, ignorant set of ruffians whom they pretend to despise—but they stand all the same very much in awe of them. After all, their views of each other are only natural; their characters have practically nothing in common, and criticism usually takes the form of “this man is different from me, so he must be wrong.”
Qway, in the caravan, was invariably treated with great respect. He was usually addressed to as “khal (uncle) Qway,” and he was not the man to allow any lapses from this attitude, which he considered his due as an Arab and as the head-man of the caravan. Any falling off in this respect was immediately followed by some caustic reference on his part to the inferiority of slaves, “black men,” or fellahin, as the case required.
Abd er Rahman and the camel men all did their work well, and the difficulties due to the sand and the attitude of the natives that I had been warned that I should have to face, all appeared to be greatly exaggerated. With Qway as my guide, I hoped with the experience I had already gained, to make an attempt the next year, with a reasonable prospect of success, to cross the desert, or at any rate to penetrate much farther into it than I had already done, and reach some portion that was inhabited.
But just when I was preparing to return to Egypt, an event happened that put an entirely new complexion upon things, and upset the whole of my plans.