“Malaysh” (“it’s of no consequence”), replied Qway calmly. “Let him stay behind and die if he wants to. Whack the camels, Abd er Rahman, and let’s go. We can’t wait. We are in the desert, and short of water.”
“I shall die,” sobbed Khalil.
“Malaysh,” repeated Qway, without even troubling to look back at him.
I felt much inclined to tickle the aggravating brute up with my kurbaj, but it was against my principles to beat a native, so we went on and left him sitting alone in the desert.
“My wife will be a widow,” screamed Khalil after us—though how he expected that contingency to appeal to our sympathies was not quite clear. Musa shouted back some ribald remarks about the lady in question, and the caravan proceeded cheerfully—not to say uproariously—upon its way.
After we had gone some distance our road dipped down to a lower level, and we lost sight of Khalil for a while. I looked back just before we got out of sight, and saw him sitting exactly where we had left him. We travelled a considerable distance before a rise in the ground over which our road ran enabled us to see him again. On looking back through my glasses, I could just distinguish him sitting still where we had left him. I quite expected that by the time we had gone a few hundred yards—or at any rate as soon as we were out of sight—that Khalil would have got up and followed us. But the fellahin of Egypt are a queer-tempered race, who when they cannot get exactly what they want, will sometimes fall into a fit of suicidal sulks that is rather difficult to deal with. As Khalil appeared to have got into this sulky frame of mind I began to fear that he really intended to carry out his threat and to stay where he was until he either died of thirst, or had been so far left behind by the caravan that he would be unable to rejoin us, which would have led to the same result.
Qway, when I asked him how long it would take for us to reach the oasis, was most positive in saying that it would be all that we could do to get across the dunes before sunset the next day. The sand belt, though easy enough to cross in daylight, when we could see where we were going, would have presented a very serious obstacle in the dark. With the possibility of another day of scorching simum or, worse still, a violent sandstorm in our teeth, before we reached Dakhla, a delay that would cause us to camp the next night on the wrong side of the dunes, and so entail another twelve hours in the desert before reaching water, might have had very serious consequences.
“If we don’t cross the sand to-morrow,” said Qway impressively, “we may not reach Mut at all. Look at the camels. Look at our tanks. They are nearly empty. We must go on. We can’t wait.”
I couldn’t risk sacrificing the whole caravan for the sake of one malingerer; so I told Abd er Rahman to whack up the camels, and we left the “delicutly nurchered” Khalil to die in the desert.
Soon afterwards we lost sight of him altogether. We had started early in the morning and we went on throughout the day, with hardly a halt, till eight o’clock at night, when we were compelled to stop in order to rest the camels. We saw nothing more of Khalil and gave him up for lost. To give him a last chance we lighted a big fire and then composed ourselves to sleep as well as we could, on a wholly insufficient allowance of water.