The sores on Abdulla’s hagin having sufficiently healed, I packed the whole caravan off again into the desert. Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim as before were to carry stores out to the depot at Jebel el Bayed. Abdulla’s work was to go on ahead of the caravan, following directions to be given him by Abd er Rahman, as I was afraid Qway might mislead him, till he reached Jebel el Bayed. There he was to climb to the top of the hill, whence he could see the one I had sighted in the distance the season before. This lay in practically the same line from Mut as Jebel el Bayed itself. Having in this way got its bearing, he was to go on to the farther hill, which he was also to climb and make a note of anything that was to be seen from the summit. He was then—provided the country ahead of him was not inhabited—to go on again as far as he could along the same bearing before returning to Dakhla.
I asked Abdulla how far out he thought he would be able to get. In a matter-of-fact tone he said he thought he could go four, or perhaps four and a half, days’ journey beyond Jebel el Bayed before he turned back. As he would be alone in a strange desert, I doubted somewhat if he would even reach Jebel el Bayed. But I did not know Abdulla then.
There really was nothing much for Qway to do, but, as I thought it better to send him off into the desert to keep him out of mischief, I told him to ride west again along the plateau.
Qway was rather subdued. Abdulla’s arrival had considerably upset him, in spite of his efforts to disguise the fact. He objected strongly to his going on ahead of the caravan to scout, but I declined to alter the arrangement. So to keep Abdulla in his place, Qway, with the usual high-handed manner of the Arabs, when dealing with Sudanese, collared a water tin of his for his own use. On hearing of this I went round to the camel-yard and gave Abdulla back his tin, and pitched into Qway before all the men. Having thus sown a little discord in the caravan, I told them they had to start in the morning.
I went round again later in the day and found all the Sudanese having their heads shaved by the village barber and being cupped on the back of their necks, preparatory for their journey. The cupping they declared kept the blood from their heads and made them strong!
This operation was performed by the barber, who made three or four cuts at the base of the skull on either side of the spine, to which he applied the wide end of a hollow cow’s horn, pressed this into the flesh and then sucked hard at a small hole in the point of the horn, afterwards spitting out the blood he had thus extracted. It seemed an insanitary method.
The Sudanese were all extremely dark. Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim even having black, or rather dark brown, patches on their gums. Their tongues and the palms of their hands, however, showed pink. Abdulla was even darker. He came up to my room the evening after his cupping and declared that he was ill. There was nothing whatever the matter with him, except that he wanted pills and eye-drops because they were to be had for nothing. But I made a pretence of examining him, took his temperature, felt his pulse, and then told him to show me his tongue.
The result of my modest request was rather staggering. He shot out about six inches of black leather, and I saw that not only his tongue was almost black, but also his gums and the palms of his hands as well. He was the most pronounced case of human melanism I ever saw.
Sofut.