As a result of my enquiries I was able to draw up a sort of programme for my work in the desert, the main objects in which were as follows:—
(1) To cross that field of impassable dunes.
(2) If I succeeded in doing so, to cross the desert from north-east to south-west.
(3) Failing the latter scheme, to survey as much as possible of other unknown parts of the desert.
(4) To collect as much information as possible from the natives about the unknown portions of the desert that I was unable to visit myself.
Before leaving Cairo, I engaged two servants. My knowledge of Arabic at that time was scanty, and what there was of it was of the Algerian variety—a vile patois that is almost a different language to that spoken in the desert—an interpreter was consequently almost a necessity. I took one—Khalil Salah Gaber by name—from a man who was just leaving the country. He was loud in his praises of Khalil, stating that he was an extremely good interpreter and “very tactful.”
Since then I have always been distinctly suspicious of people who are noted for their tact—there are so many degrees of it. Tactful, diplomatic, tricky, dishonest, criminal, all express different shades of the same quality, and Khalil’s tact turned out to be of the most superlative character!
I also engaged a man called Dahab Suleyman Gindi as cook. Dahab—unlike Khalil, who was a fellah or one of the Egyptian peasants—was a Berberine, the race from which the best native servants are drawn. He was a small, elderly, rather feeble-looking man with an honest straightforward appearance, who not only turned out to be a very fair cook, but who also made himself useful at times as an interpreter, as he knew a certain amount of English.
After my preparations were completed, I stayed on for a while to see something of the sights of Cairo. Its cosmopolitan all-nation crowd made it an interesting enough place for a short stay. But after one had spent a little time there, and done all the usual sights, dirty, noisy Cairo and the other tourist resorts began to pall upon one. After all, they are only a sort of popular edition of the country, published by Thomas Cook and Son. Beyond lay the real Egypt and desert, a land where afrits, ghuls, genii and all the other creatures of the native superstitions are matters of everyday occurrence; where lost oases and enchanted cities lie in the desert sands, where the natives are still unspoiled by contact with Europeans, and where most of the men are pleasing, and, though the prospect is vile, that could not destroy the attraction that lay in the fact that about a million square miles of it were quite unknown, and waiting to be explored.
Before I had been very long in Cairo, I had had enough of it—it was so much like an Earl’s Court exhibition—and at the end of my stay, I cleared out for the desert with a feeling of relief.