Chapter XVIII

“The blue impillared vault of naked heaven

Had been his temple; God had taught him prayer.”

“This note was written upon gilt-edged paper

With a neat little crow-quill slight and new.”

BYRON.

* * * * *

A RIDE TO KOBBE.

A conclave. — Hyenas. — Mohommed’s love. — Mohommed’s prayer. — Its effect. — A runaway camel. — A search for a lion. — The wake of the “ship of the desert.” — A welcome supper. — Two scientific men. — Kobbe. — A scrap of paper.

AS our work in El Fasher drew towards its close, a very serious discussion arose among the members of the staff, involving a question of no less importance than the very essence of the Fourth Commandment. The Mohommedan Sabbath is Friday, and all our officers and men were naturally very anxious that this day should, during our work in the field, be kept as a day of rest to enable them to say the orthodox number of prayers, and to take the requisite number of hours’ sleep in order that they might be fit, both spiritually and temporally, for the resumption of work on the following day. Our own Sabbath was of course Sunday, and our anxiety that the day should be becomingly honoured by grateful repose was not less heartfelt than that of the Mohommedans. For ourselves to abstain from work on Sunday and let the men work would be simply preposterous, as they could do nothing without our guidance; for us to work on the Friday while the men were resting and praying, would be, perhaps, more preposterous still, as we could do nothing without their assistance. The question, therefore, arose—on which day should we rest from our labour. Some were in favour of Sunday, others in favour of Friday. To recapitulate the arguments adduced by the learned theologians composing this conclave would be foreign to the nature of this work, which is not theological. Happily an agreement was at length come to. Mutual concessions, creditable to both sides, were made, and it was resolved _nem. con._ that we should rest from our labours both on the Friday and on the Sunday.

This arrangement was satisfactory to all parties concerned.

Availing myself of the opportunity thus presented, I determined late on Thursday evening to set out that night on a journey to Kobbe, to consider the intervening Saturday a _dies non_, and to return by the following Sunday night or early on Monday morning. I had no map of the country, but from inquiries judged the town, which was in the Wady el Kho, to be distant between thirty and forty miles in a north-westerly direction.

I made up my mind to go without a guide, as at that late hour, when everyone in El Fasher was fast asleep, it would be impossible to find one.

Mohommed Gadderâb was to accompany me; he had never been to Kobbe before, but neither of us anticipated any difficulty in finding the way. Our arrangements, two skins of water and one of cabin biscuits, were soon completed, and we left the palace at about midnight. Passing through the silent town we disturbed several hyenas, hard at work in the market-place, making disgusting noises in their efforts to masticate and gorge some delicate morsels too tough for their teeth and too large for their throats. We soon left the last houses behind us, and, after crossing the Wady el Kho, started across the trackless wilderness.

The night, like all the nights, was indescribably beautiful but more than usually cold, and Mohommed pulled the date-basket more closely over his ears, and rolled the ropes three or four times round his neck to protect it from the air. We trotted gently side by side, and my faithful friend and guide, generally, like all Arabs, so reticent, chatted gaily as we went, and opened his heart, and, though I was younger than he, called me his father. He told me of his mother and children, and how he loved them, and of his wife whom he venerated and loved more than all the others put together, and how there was only one thing more in the whole world he wished for, and that was, when he grew rich, to marry again—a beautiful daughter of a wealthy shiekh. When our expedition was over and he obtained his money, an event he by no means considered a certainty, he intended to do this, to give up guiding, and to settle down in peace and contentment for the rest of his days—if the two wives did not quarrel _much_. I liked the man, and he, I believe, was sincerely devoted to me. I promised him, on our safe return to Old Dongola, a substantial “backsheesh,” with the hope that it might help him in carrying out his matrimonial projects. They were, however, never realised, but abandoned before he reached his home, when his thoughts had reference less to a second wife in this world than to the diviner houris he anticipated meeting in the next.

The deep indigo of the night changed to the pale grey of the dawn, the stars faded one by one in the sky,

“Till in the east a solitary orb

Was left the herald of approaching day.”

Venus’s light was soon put out, and in five more minutes the sun rose and changed the whole of the heavens to blue and gold. Mohommed Gadderâb unrolled the rope from his neck, loosened the date-basket on his head, made his camel kneel down, and then, turning towards the rising sun, knelt down too, and said from his simple heart his simple prayer.

The genuflexions, the sudden rises and falls, the many bowings down of the head and date-basket and ropes into the sand in adoration of Allah and of the Great Prophet Mohommed, produced in my camel, who was not in the habit of witnessing so extraordinary a performance, a sudden and great fear, and, with me on his back, he bolted, mad with terror, across the desert.

This conduct on the part of my camel astonished me very considerably; with the exception of one occasion, when he turned with me into the thorny bush, his behaviour had always been irreproachable. He had travelled for six hundred miles, and had met with many sudden surprises. Thorns had entered his feet and had torn his sides; storm sand-spouts had risen under his very nose; foxes and hares had started from between his feet, and once a hyena, a horrid vision, rose only a yard before his eyes; still he never flinched, but brought me safely to the end of my journey. Mohommed’s prayer and the bobbing basket were, however, too much for him; he became unsettled, his mind lost its balance,

“And Reason reeled down drunken from its throne.”

My position on the back of the terror-stricken and wildly-galloping camel was one of pain and much anxiety. Properly to convey an idea of the motion would be impossible, but a tolerably good imitation might, I think, be obtained by mounting astride of two large rocking-horses, each made to rapidly rock in such a manner that when the head of one was in its zenith, the head of the other should be in its nadir.

First away went my hat, my Thresher and Glenny helmet, price thirty shillings, on which I prided myself much, next the folded rug and the jaguar-skin I had brought from South America, and placed on the saddle to soften the seat and make it comfortable. My red morocco slippers followed my jaguar-skin’s example, and at length, worst of all, the little case-bottle, which I had always carried to meet any emergency that might arise, jumped like a living thing from my breast pocket, and fell shattered into the stones. The water in the skin hanging to one side of the camel, and the cabin biscuits in the skin on the other side, made much rattling noise in their respective receptacles, and, for aught I know to the contrary, tended materially to increase the terror of the already maddened beast. As luck would have it, my camel was running square on to the dense mass of thorn-trees and scrubs that fringed the banks of the Wady el Kho. They would not have stopped him, and had he gone in amongst them, the very flesh would to a certainty have been torn from my bones. With my left hand I clutched the upright wooden pommel of the saddle, and with my right pulled with the strength of fear the rope that served as bridle, in order to turn him towards a low sand-hill half a mile off on the right. In this I was fortunately successful; he came to a stop a little way up the slope of the hill, turned suddenly round, and started off in another direction as madly, or more madly, than before. The second bolt was a long one. He must have galloped over the flat, sandy, and stony desert for at least two miles. Finally, when he was exhausted, he came to a walk, snorting. I watched my opportunity, lifted my right leg over the high pommel, and jumped, truly thankful, on to the ground.

The whole of the skin from the palm of my left hand had gone, owing to the friction of the rough wooden top of the pommel which I had clutched. Other than this I had sustained no bodily injury, but the implicit confidence which I had placed in my camel was irretrievably lost.

This fact of the loss of part of my palm leads me to tell how easy it is in the dry air of the desert for the skin to be torn off, and how quickly it again comes. The hands coming in contact with anything in the least rough will at once cause an abrasure, and, happily, but very little pain. My dear friend and colleague, with whom I had travelled to El Fasher, had always kindly volunteered to look after the stores, and every evening on our arrival in camp his good-nature necessitated his using a hammer and chisel to open the cases, and nails to shut them up again. His hands from the use of these tools became in many places destitute of their usual covering, which, however, as quickly appeared again. The Arabs do not suffer in the same way, for the two reasons that they never do any manual labour, and that their skin, although they drink but little water, is always moist; but throughout the European members of our staff the circumstance was universally noticed.

Mohommed rode up in a few minutes with my personal furniture, my thirty- shilling Thresher and Glenny helmet, my two slippers, my rug and jaguar- skin, the stopper of my case-bottle, and the elegant little tin drinking cup which had so conveniently fitted on to its end, and from which, on many happy occasions, I had taken a grateful draught of Martell’s three- star brandy, properly diluted, to the health of my friends at home in England.

“O Mohommed, why did you pray? You see the effect of your prayer. You have for ever spoiled the temper of my camel,—and look at the palm of my hand!”

“O Effendim! why did you not pray? Had you got down from the camel and prayed to your God as I did to mine, it would not have happened; the camel would have rested, and your hand would still have been as God has made it.”

Mohommed had very much the best of the argument. I was soon ready to go on, but took the wise precaution to change camels with Mohommed, in the natural fear lest my animal should take it into his head to stampede again.

The ground through which we now travelled was in many parts susceptible of being cultivated, but no signs of any past or present cultivation existed.

There were numerous porcupine-burrows, with many quills scattered about their entrances. Now and then we came upon a large tortoise, about a foot high and the same breadth and length, pursuing its slow and melancholy way with, perhaps, a destination in the wady below which, at its present pace, it might reach in the course of about six months. Gazelles, ariels (Oryx), and antelopes, resembling the koodoo of Natal, sometimes trotted playfully out of the trees in the valley, saw us, and trotted hastily back. We saw the marks of giraffes and of ostriches, and of many beetles, and occasionally the smooth track of a snake in the sand, but none of the animals, insects, or reptiles themselves.

When at twelve o’clock our shadows had hidden themselves under the camels, we turned into the valley, and sat down in desirable shade to lunch on cabin biscuits and lukewarm water. After lunch we wandered about on foot, and struck into one of the many tributary “khors.” Here I found the footmarks of some wild animal, which Mohommed told me were those of a lion. My curiosity was aroused. I had never seen a lion in a wild state, and with Mohommed’s help I tracked them up the “khor” for about an hour.

Mohommed suddenly came to a stop in our search and said: “Suppose we find the lion?”

This was a contingency which had not yet occurred to my mind. I was anxiously looking for something which I had no desire whatever to find. We were neither of us armed, and to have suddenly come upon an angry, hungry lion guarding his cubs in his lair, might have had results the reverse of conducive to the success of our expedition to Darfoor.

I said: “It is time to proceed on our journey. We will go back to the camels.”

On our further journey we crossed the valley and rode on the north- eastern side. When the night came the bushes were pretty thick all over the land, and we completely lost sight of the dark-green line by which we had hitherto been guided.

I judged, from the time we had travelled, that we were not far from Kobbe, and turned due west. After an hour the country became again quite open and free from trees. A long distance ahead stretched a bright white line, to the right and to the left, as far as we could see. It seemed on the dark expanse of the desert as seems the Milky Way on the dark expanse of the sky. To me it was a mystery, but to Mohommed it imparted certain and welcome information.

We reached it soon; it was the camel-track from Kobbe northward to Sioot, on the Nile, two hundred and fifty miles above Cairo. We had passed Kobbe by a long distance, and we retraced our steps southwards. The remote reaching track to the north was like the white wake of a ship speeding in the night and moon over the face of the ocean: it was the wake of the “ship of the desert.” The powdered and bleached bones of myriads of camels, that for the last many thousand years had dropped under their weights to slowly die, had been trodden into the earth and mixed with the sand: it was Death itself acting as our guide, and charitably showing us the road to our destination. We followed gratefully the spectre on his pale gray horse, and at length reached Kobbe at about midnight. The town was fast asleep. I got off my camel, hobbled one of his legs, and sent him to graze on the scanty tufts of yellow grass in the land of Death, and lay down on my rug and went fast asleep in the bone-dust. Mohommed went into the town to try and find us a more lively lodging.

He was not long absent, but returned in about an hour accompanied by two Greeks, merchants, whom he had found awake in their store, at supper. In ten more minutes I was a welcome guest, eating hot mutton, black olives, Dutch cheese, truffles, and duchn cake, and drinking pale ale and red wine, strongly imbued with the flavour of the leather skin in which it had been brought down from the mountains in the “Isles of Greece.”

Supper ended, a back-gammon board, about the size of a whist-table was introduced, and the two Greeks sat down to play, with men as large as Bath buns, and dice as big as the grains of the cubic powder used in charging the eighty-ton gun at Shoeburyness. I retired to rest in an adjoining apartment, but the rattle of the huge dice and the banging about of the Bath buns, rendered sleep impossible. I rose and took a seat by the side of one of the players. The men were playing high—five pounds a game and twenty pounds for the gammon.

Backgammon is an ingenious game, much played by the clergy in England, but I doubt whether the most experienced English parson would stand any chance with a really skilled Greek. The players throw the dice with the hand, and not from a cup as we do. To play properly is quite a science. Should the thrower want an ace, or any other number, he drops one of the dice on to the board; if it turns up an ace, or the other required number, the second die immediately follows, and the throw remains; if, on the other hand, the wished-for number should not come up, the die is picked up as though accidentally dropped, and the player throws again. A very skilful player will, in the critical parts of the game, perhaps repeat this once or twice, generally with ultimate success. The two players in question were both scientific in the highest degree, but it was Greek meeting Greek, and in every case their efforts were at once detected, and no harm was done. To their request that I should play I gave a polite negative.

To tell about Kobbe, in which town I spent some hours next day, would be only again to tell what I have told about El Fasher. There was the same dust and age, and the same tumble-down grimy tuckles and sheds. The people, however, are perhaps a shade less sleepy and slothful. The town stands on the high camel-track from Sioot southwards, through the oasis of Khargeh, the alum mines of Sheb, the salt district of Selimah, and the natron lakes at Zeghawa, whence on through Kobbe to lake Tchad, in the very heart of Africa. It is, however, only a resting-place; itself has little or no trade. When a caravan goes through the town the inhabitants wake up, and when it has passed they go to sleep again. Beyond this they have no life. In the town there was but the one merchant firm, the two Greeks I have mentioned, and their business was the collection of feathers and tusks.

On Saturday afternoon, at about three o’clock, when the sun’s heat began to grow less, Mohommed and myself started back on an estimated bee-line. The two kind Greeks pressed upon us a bottle of black Spanish olives and a tin of French truffles, to eat on the way. In about fourteen hours we struck El Fasher exactly, arriving just in time for breakfast.

On the afternoon of this day, the 2nd of April, the messenger whom we had despatched with letters from Om Badr to the Khartoom party, rode gaily into the enclosure of the palace, returned from his long ride of more than one thousand one hundred miles. When he had delivered his letters, happily reporting all well, he looked carefully at each of us, as though in search of some one whom he could only find from a description he had received. His eyes at length rested on me, and after gazing for some seconds, he beckoned me to follow him outside.

In a secluded corner,

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,”

he unrolled from his loins the old Dongola cloth, his entire wardrobe, and, after untying a knot in one of its remote corners, handed to me a piece of coarse paper, in shape and size resembling a walnut; opened out as large as the palm of my hand. Signature, or seal, the usual method of signing in Egypt, there was none, and the bad and blotted writing was quite illegible to me. Whence did it come? An old woman at Sotaire had given it to him. What was it about? He did not know. On what subject could an old woman at Sotaire or anywhere else write to me? old women are not my usual correspondents. I had paid all my debts for sheep and oxen and milk. There was a mystery in this little note. A surmise came from my heart into my mind. Might it be from the good and beautiful Rebecca who had drawn the water from the well for me to drink, and who, in the solitude of the starlit night, had told me all about the strife and sorrow of her people. She could not write, that was impossible, but she might have employed the old woman to do so for her; old women will do these things. In my vanity I thought so, and, let me be forgiven, I think so now, and have ever since treasured the torn and crumpled piece of paper with its illegible writing. On our return to Sotaire the tribe was no longer there. The secret remains divided between the paper in my desk and the hearts of the writer and of the sender, wandering over the desert thousands of miles away. I have looked at the paper many times since, I am looking at it now; some of the letters seem clearer, and one word, one word only, has grown from month to month into life—“Fantasia.”

[Decoration]