Towards morning Khalil staggered into the camp amid the jeers and curses of the men, croaked a request for water and, having drunk, flung himself down to sleep, too dead beat even to eat.
That little episode cured Khalil of malingering, and he gave no further trouble on our journey to Mut. It just shows what a little tact will do in dealing with a native. Many brutal fellows would have beaten the poor man!
The next day luckily proved fairly cool, and we made better progress than we expected. We consequently struck the dune belt just after noon and, as we seemed to have found a low part of it, by Qway’s advice I decided to tackle it at that point.
But in coming to this decision I had overlooked a most important factor in the situation—the light. Curious as it may seem, dunes are sometimes almost as difficult to cross in the blazing sunshine at noon as they are in the dark. The intense glare at this time of day makes the almost white sand of which they are composed most painful to look at, and the total absence of any shade prevents their shape being seen and makes even the ripples practically invisible.
In consequence of this state of affairs, Qway, while riding ahead of the caravan to show the way, blundered without seeing where he was going, off the flat top of a dune on to the steep face below, was thrown, and he and his hagin only just escaped rolling down to the bottom, a fall of some thirty feet. After that, until we reached the farther side of the belt, he remained on foot, dragging his hagin behind him. Once across the dunes the rest of the journey was easy enough.
The news of affairs in Europe that we heard in Dakhla on our return was simply heartbreaking. The revolution in Turkey that had promised to be rather a big thing, had fizzled out entirely. The Sultan Abdul Hamid—“Abdul the Damned”—it is true had been deposed; but his brother, Mohammed V, had been made ruler in his stead, and was firmly seated on the rickety Turkish throne. The disturbance had quieted down in Turkey; there was no chance of there being a republic, and so the threatened invasion of Egypt by the Senussi, was not in the least likely to come off.
All the same, we felt fairly pleased with ourselves, for we had been for eighteen days in the desert away from water, with only seven camels, in the most trying time of the year, and had got back again without losing a single beast. But anyone who feels inclined to repeat this picnic is advised to take enough water and suitable food.
The Gubary road by which we travelled to Kharga followed the foot of the cliff that forms the southern boundary of the plateau upon which ’Ain Amur lies. It was very featureless and uninteresting. But though it contained no natural features of any importance, the bedawin have a number of landmarks along it to which they have given names and by which they divide the road up into various stages. It is curious to see how the necessity for naming places arises as soon as a district becomes frequented.
These little landmarks are often shown in maps in a very misleading way. One of those on the Gubary road is known as Bu el Agul. There is another Bu el Agul, or Abu el Agul, as it is sometimes called, on the Derb et Tawil, or “long road,” that runs from the Nile Valley, near Assiut, across the desert to Dakhla Oasis. I have often seen this place marked on maps in an atlas, the name being printed in the same type as that used for big mountains, or villages in the Nile Valley, and there was nothing whatever in the way in which it was shown on these maps to indicate its unimportance.
Now Bu el Agul is only a grave—what is more, it is not even a real grave, it is a bogus one. The commonest form of a native nickname is to christen a man the father of the thing for which he is best known among them. I was myself at one time known as “Abu Zerzura,” the “Father of Zerzura,” because I was supposed to be looking for that oasis, and later on as “Abu Ramal,” “the father of sand,” because I spent so much time among the dunes.