CHAPTER XXXV.
LOST IN THE DESERT.
Natheless his somewhat gloomy letter to Hester Maule, Malcolm Skene, though feeling to the fullest extent the influence of the presentiment of evil therein referred to, was too young, and of too elastic a nature, not to feel also a sense of ardour, enterprise, and enthusiasm at the confidence reposed in him by his superiors. With an inherent love of adventure and a certain recklessness of spirit, he armed himself, mounted, and quitted his quarters at Cairo just when the first red rays of the morning sun were tipping with light the summit of the citadel or the apex of each distant pyramid, and rode on his solitary way—solitary all save Hassan, the swarthy Egyptian guide provided for him by the Quartermaster-General's Department.
He had been chiefly selected for the duty in question—to bear despatches to the Amir-Ali, or Colonel, commanding the Egyptian force at Dayr-el-Syrian, in consequence of his proficiency in Arabic—the most prevailing language of the country.
He and his guide were mounted on camels. Skene's was one of great beauty, if an animal so ungainly can be said to possess it, with a small head, short ears, and bending neck. Its tail was long, its hoofs small, and it was swift of action. The rider was without baggage; he wore his fighting kit of Khakee cloth and tropical helmet with a pugaree. He had his sword and revolver, with goggles, and a pocket compass for use if his guide in any way proved at fault.
Unnoticed he traversed the picturesque streets that lay between the citadel and the gate that led by a straight road towards the castle and gardens of Ghizeh, passing the groups and features incident to Cairo: a lumbering train of British baggage waggons, escorted by our soldiers in clay-coloured khakee with bayonets fixed; an Egyptian officer in sky-blue uniform and red tarboosh 'tooling' along on a circus-like Arab; a whole regiment of darkies, perhaps with rattling drums and French bugles; strings of maimed, deformed, and blind beggars; private carriages with outriders in Turkish costumes of white muslin with gold embroideries, and bare-legged grooms; 'the gallant, gray donkeys of which Cairo is so proud, and which the Cairenes delight in naming after European celebrities, from Mrs. Langtry to Lord Wolseley;' singers of Nubian and Arabian songs and dealers in Syrian magic, all were left behind, and in the cool air of the morning Malcolm Skene found himself ambling on his camel under the shadows of the lebbek trees, with wading buffaloes and flocks of herons on either side of the road as he skirted the plain where the Pyramids stand—the Pyramids that mock Time, which mocks all things.
He was too familiar with them then to bestow on them more than a passing glance, and rode forward on his somewhat lonely way. Hassan, his guide, like a true Arab, uttered a mocking yell on seeing the vast stony face of the Sphinx—an efrit—fired a pistol, and threw stones at it, as at a devil, and then civilization was left behind.
Trusting to his guide Hassan, Skene was taken a few miles off his direct route southward down the left bank of the Nile, and while riding on, turning from time to time to converse with that personage, who was a typical Fellah—very dark-skinned, with good teeth, black and sparkling eyes, muscular of form, yet spare of habit, and clad simply in loose blue cotton drawers with a blue tunic and red tarboosh—it seemed that his face and voice were somehow not unfamiliar to him.
But where, amid the thousands of low-class Fellaheen in Cairo, could Malcolm Skene have seen the former or heard the latter? Never before had he heard of Hassan Abdullah even by name. But 'strange it is, for how many days and weeks we may be haunted by a likeness before we know what it is that is gladdening us with sweet recollections, or vexing us with some association we hoped to have left behind.'
Memphis, with its ruins and mounds, in the midst of which stand the Arab hamlets of Sokkara and Mitraheny, was traversed with some difficulty, though the site is now chiefly occupied by waste and marshes that reach to the sand-hills on the edge of the desert; but from Abusir all round to the west and south, for miles, Skene and his guide found themselves stepping from grave to grave amid bones and fragments of mummy cloth—the remains of that wondrous necropolis which, according to Strabo, extended half a day's journey each way from the great city of Central Egypt.
'Ugh!' muttered Malcolm Skene, as he guided the steps of his camel and lighted more than one long havannah, 'this is anything but lively! What a dismal scene!'
'The work of the Pharaohs,' said Hassan, for to them everything is attributed by the Fellaheen, who suppose they lived about three hundred years ago.
But Memphis was ere long left in his rear, and night was at hand, when—according to Hassan Abdullah's statement, on computation of distance—they should reach and halt at certain wells, about ten shoni distant therefrom, in the direct line to the Wady Faregh.
Memphis was, we say, left behind, and the two rode swiftly on. His former thoughts recurring to him, Malcolm Skene, checking his camel to let that of his guide come abreast of him, said to the latter:
'Your face is singularly familiar to me. Did we ever meet in Cairo?'
Hassan grinned and showed all his white teeth, but made no reply.
'Your face has some strange mystery for me,' resumed Skene, with growing wonder, yet fearing he might make the man think he possessed the evil eye; 'it seems a face known to me—the face of the dead in the garb of the living.'
'And it is so, Yusbashi (captain), so far as you are concerned,' was the strange reply of the Fellah as his black eyes flashed.
'What do you mean?'
'We met in the roulette saloon of Pietro Girolamo.'
'Right! I remember now; you are one of the fellows I fought with. I thought you were killed in that row!'
'Nearly so I was, and by you.'
This was an awkward discovery.
'But you escaped?'
'Yes; thanks to an amulet I wear—a verse of the Koran bound round my left arm.'
To trust such a rascal as Skene now supposed this fellow must be was full of peril. To return and seek another guide, when he had proceeded so far upon his way, would argue timidity, and tempt the 'chaff' of the more heedless spirits of the mess; thus it was not to be thought of.
He could but continue his journey with his despatches, and watch well every movement of his guide; but to have as such one of the ruffians and bullies of Pietro Girolamo was certainly an unpleasant discovery—one with whom he had already that which in these parts of the world is termed a blood feud, seemed to be the first instalment of his gloomy presentiment.
Hassan Abdullah had been—he could not conceive how or why—chosen or recommended as a guide by those in authority; and if false, or disposed to be so, he veiled it under an elaborate bearing of servility and attention to every wish and hint of Skene. Thinking that he could not make any better of the situation now, Malcolm was fain to accept that bearing for what it might be worth, and, to veil his mistrust, adopted a new tone with Hassan, and instead of listening to directions from him, began to give orders instead. But, ignorant as he was of the route, this system could not long be pursued.
As he rode on he thought of Hester Maule, and how she would view or consider his letter. Would she answer it? He scarcely thought she would do so—nay, became certain she would not. Under the circumstances in which they had parted after that interview in the conservatory at Earlshaugh, and with the grim presentiment then haunting him, it was beseeming enough in him perhaps to have written as he did to her; but not for her to write him in reply unless she meant to hold out hopes that might never be realized.
What amount of ground they had traversed when the sun verged westward Malcolm scarcely knew, as the way had been most devious, rough, and apparently, to judge of the guide's indecision more than once, very uncertain; but the former judged that it could not have been more than thirty miles from Memphis as the crow flies.
Dhurra reeds, date, and cotton-trees had long since been left behind, and before the camel-riders stretched a pale yellow waste of sand, strewed in places by glistening pebbles. Malcolm Skene thought they were now entering the lower end of the Wady Faregh, between El Benat and the Wady Rosseh, and on consulting his pocket-compass supposed the Dayr Macarius Convent must be right in his front, but distant many miles, and the post of Dayr-el-Syrian, for which he was bound, must be about ten miles further on; but Hassan Abdullah knew better; and when near sunset that individual dismounted and spread his dirty little square carpet whereon to say his orisons, with his face towards Mecca, his head bowed, his beads in his dingy hands, and his cunning eyes half closed. None would have thought that a Mussulman apparently so pious had only hate and perfidy in his heart for the trusting but accursed infidel, or Frenchi, as he called Skene—the general name in Egypt for all Europeans—as the latter seated himself by the side of a low wall half buried in the drifted sand—the fragment of some B.C. edifice—and partook of his frugal meat, supper and dinner combined.
Far, far away in the distance Memphis and the Valley of the Nile were lost in haze and obscurity; westward the sun, like a ball of fire—a blood-red disc of enormous proportions—shorn of every ray, was setting amid a sky of gold, crimson, and soft apple-green, all blending through each other, yet with light strong enough to send far along the waste they had traversed the shadows of the two camels of Skene and of Hassan.
The former recalled with a grim smile Moore's ballad:
'Fly to the desert, fly with me!'
and thought the desert looked far from inviting.
His only table appurtenance was the jack-knife hung from his neck by a lanyard, and as issued to all ranks of our troops in Egypt, and with that he cut his sandwiches, now dry indeed by this time, and opened a tiny tin of preserved meat, which he washed down by a mouthful from the hunting-flask, carried in his haversack.
As he sat alone eating his frugal meal, which from religious scruples Hassan declined to share with him—or indeed anything save a cigar—Skene, though neither a sybarite nor a gourmand, could not help thinking regretfully of the regimental mess-table in the citadel of Cairo, possessing, like other such tables, all the ease of a kindly family circle, without its probable dulness; of the dressing bugle, and the merry drums and fifes playing the 'Roast Beef of Old England;' the quiet weed after dinner, a stroke at billiards, a rubber of short whist while holding good cards; and just then civilization and all the good things of this earth seemed very far off indeed!
When he and Hassan started again to reach the wells—where they were to procure water for themselves and their camels, and were to bivouac for the night, no trace of these could be found, though the travellers wandered several miles in different directions; and, as the sun set with tropical rapidity, Skene—his water-bottle completely empty—with his field-glass swept the horizon in vain for a sight of those gum-trees which were said to indicate the locality of the springs in question; and then he began more than ever to mistrust the good faith, if not the knowledge, of Hassan Abdullah.
So far as their camels were concerned, Skene had no cause as yet for any anxiety, as these animals, besides the four stomachs which all ruminating quadrupeds possess, have a fifth, which serves as a reservoir for carrying a supply of water in the parched and sandy deserts they are so often obliged to traverse.
A well—one unknown to Hassan, apparently—they certainly did come upon unexpectedly, but, alas! it was dry. Malcolm Skene looked thirstily at the white stones that lined or formed it, glistening in the light of the uprisen moon, and with his tongue parched and lips hard and baked he thought tantalizingly of brooks of cool and limpid water, of iced champagne and bitter beer!
He haltered his camel, looked to his arms and laid them half under him, and resting his head against the saddle of his animal, strove to court sleep, against the labours of the morrow, thinking the while that the labours of Sisyphus were almost a joke to the toil of the duty he had undertaken.
At a little distance on the other side of the dried-up fountain, Hassan, whom he watched closely for a time, took his repose in a similar fashion.
The night in the desert was not altogether unpleasant, for that rarefied clearness of sky which renders the heat of the sun so intolerable by day, makes the sky of night surpassingly beautiful, and that is the time when, if he can, the traveller should really make his way over the sandy waste.
With early morning, and while the red sun was yet below the hazy horizon, came full awakening after a somewhat restless night, broken by periods of watchfulness and anxiety, and tantalized by dreams of flowing and sparkling water, which left the pangs of growing thirst keener than ever.
Hassan, however, seemed 'fresh as a daisy,' having, as Malcolm strongly suspected, some secret store of his own selfishly concealed about him.
They gave their camels a feed of their favourite food, the twigs of some thorny mimosa that grew near the dried-up well—scanty herbage of the desert—and then Malcolm, who distrusted the skill or fealty, or both, of Hassan Abdullah, while the latter was kneeling on his prayer carpet, turned to consult his pocket compass with reference to the direction in which to steer through the waste of sand which now spread in every direction around them.
It was gone!
Nervously, with fingers that trembled in their haste, he searched his haversack, turning out its few contents again and again, and cast keen glances all around where he had been overnight, but no sign or trace of that invaluable instrument, on which too probably his life depended, was there!
Fiercely he turned to Hassan, then just ending his morning prayer and folding up his carpet, suspecting that the soft and swift-handed Egyptian must have filched it from him during sleep—yet he had felt so wakeful that such could scarcely be the case.
'My compass!' he exclaimed.
'What of it, Yusbashi?'
'Have you seen it?'
'I—not I; and if I did, do you think I would touch it?'
'It is ifrit—the work of the devil—an affair of which I, as a true Mussulman, can know nothing.'
'But how about the way to go now?' said Malcolm Skene in genuine perplexity and alarm, looking all around the vicinity of the stony hole, called a well, for the twentieth time.
'The Frenchi will be told all of the way that his servant knows,' replied Hassan with a profound salaam, while bending his head to hide the leer of his stealthy and glittering eyes.
Skene thought for a moment. Should he take this fellow at his word; threaten him with death if he did not produce the pocket compass, or knock him down with the butt-end of his pistol and then search his pockets?
An open quarrel was to be avoided. Skene felt himself to be a good deal, if not wholly, at the fellow's mercy. The latter could only delude him so far, at the risk of perilling himself; but he might, on the other hand, lure and betray him into the hands of the enemy, several of whom, under a leader named Sheikh Moussa Abu Hagil, were hovering on the skirts of the desert in various directions—a man known to have been a faithful adherent and kinsmen of the captive Zebehr Pasha.
Nothing seemed to remain for Skene but to accept as before the guidance of Hassan Abdullah, so, after the latter had breakfasted on a few dates and the former on a simple ration from his haversack, once more they headed their course into what seemed to be an endless and markless waste of sand.
Apart from the bodily pangs of thirst, anger, doubt, and anxiety were gathering in the mind of Malcolm; but he sternly resolved that the moment he became assured of Hassan Abdullah deluding or betraying him he would shoot that copper-coloured individual dead, as if he were a reptile or a wild beast. And Hassan no doubt knew quite enough of life in his own country to be aware that he rode on with his life in his hands.
So another night and day passed away.
And now, as we have referred to the desert here and elsewhere in the Soudan, it may seem the time to give a description of what such a waste is, and the scene that now spread before the anxious and bloodshot eyes of Malcolm Skene; for it has been justly said that he who has never travelled through such a place can form no idea of a locality so wondrous—one in which all the ordinary conditions of human life undergo a complete change.
Once away from the valley of the Nile, all between the fourteenth degree and the shore of the Mediterranean, a tract of more than eight hundred thousand square miles is desert, treeless, waterless, without streams or rivulets, and almost without wells, which, when they exist, are scanty, few, and far apart. 'The first thing after reaching a well,' says a recent writer, 'is to ascertain the quantity and quality of its water. As to the former, it may have been exhausted by a preceding caravan, and hours may be required for a new supply to ooze in again. The quality of the desert water is generally bad, the exception being when it becomes worse, though long custom enables the Bedouins to drink water so brackish as to be intolerable to all except themselves and their flocks. Well do I remember how at each well the first skinful was tasted all round as epicures sip rare wines. Great was the joy if it was pronounced moya helwa, "sweet water;" but if the Bedouins said moosh tayib, "not good," we might be sure it was a solution of Epsom salts.'
The desert now traversed by Skene was composed of coarse sand, abounding in some places with shells, pebbles, and a species of salt. In some parts the soil was shifting, and so soft that the feet—even of his camel—sank into it at every step; at others it was hard as beaten ground. Here and there grew a few patches of prickly plants, such as he remembered to have seen in botanic gardens at home, with small hillocks of drifted sand gathered round them; and as he rode on he felt as if he had about him the awful sensations of vastness, silence, and the sublimity of a calm and waveless ocean—but an ocean of sand, arid, and gloomy, dispiriting and suggestive of death—but to the European only; as the Bedouins, whose native soil it is, are, beyond all other nations and races, gay and cheerful.
During August and September the winds in Egypt retain a northerly direction, and the weather is generally moderate; but Malcolm Skene was in the desert now, and under the peculiar influences of that peculiar region.
Then at times is to be encountered the mirage, or Spirit of the Desert, as the Arabs call it, when the eyes of the wanderer there are deluded by the seeming motion of distant waves; of tall and graceful palms tossing feathery leaves in the distance, when only the sun-scorched sand is lying, mocking him with the false show of what his soul longs for, and his overheated brain depicts in glowing colours.
Riding mechanically on—uncomfortably, too, all unused as he was to the strange ambling action of a camel—oppressed by thirst which he could see no means of quenching, and knowing not when he might be able to do so—oppressed, too, by the glare of a cloudless sun growing hotter and hotter—more mighty than ever it seemed to be before—Malcolm Skene was soon to become conscious that the sense of vision was not the only one by which the mysterious desert mocks its sojourner with fantastic tricks; and once he became sensible of that strange and bewildering phenomena referred to by the author of 'Eothen' in his experiences of Eastern travel.
He seemed, overpowered by the heat, to fall slowly asleep—was it for moments or minutes?—he knew not; but he seemed also to be suddenly awakened by the familiar but far-off sounds of drums beating, to the wailing of a bagpipe playing 'The March of Lochiel,' as he had often heard it played by the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, in the citadel of Cairo.
He started and listened, his first idea being naturally that he was partly under the power of a dream; but it seemed as if minutes passed ere these sounds, in steady marching cadence, became fainter and then died away.
Utterly bewildered, he was quite awake now. Under the same influence, and in the same place, it was the bells of his native village that were heard by the writer referred to, and who says: 'I attribute the effect to the great heat of the sun, the perfect dryness of the clear air through which I moved, and the deep stillness of all around me. It seemed to me that these causes, by occasioning a great tension and susceptibility of the hearing organs, rendered them liable to tingle under the passing touch of some new memory that must have swept across my brain in a moment of sleep.'
And so doubtless it was with Malcolm Skene, who, sunk in thought and lassitude, was pondering deeply over the strange dream—if dream it was—when he was roused by the voice of Hassan Abdullah, as it amounted to something like a shriek.
'The Zobisha—the Zobisha!' he exclaimed, with a terror that was too genuine to be affected in any way.