The Worst Of It Was That I
Had No Provision Of Food Or Water With Me, And Already I Was
Beginning To Feel Thirst.
I deliberated for a minute, and then
determined that I would abandon all hope of seeing my party again,
in the Desert, and would push forward as rapidly as possible
towards Suez.
It was not, I confess, without a sensation of awe that I swept with
my sight the vacant round of the horizon, and remembered that I was
all alone, and unprovisioned in the midst of the arid waste; but
this very awe gave tone and zest to the exultation with which I
felt myself launched. Hitherto, in all my wandering, I had been
under the care of other people - sailors, Tatars, guides, and
dragomen had watched over my welfare, but now at last I was here in
this African desert, and I MYSELF, AND NO OTHER, HAD CHARGE OF MY
LIFE. I liked the office well. I had the greasiest part of the
day before me, a very fair dromedary, a fur pelisse, and a brace of
pistols, but no bread and no water; for that I must ride - and ride
I did.
For several hours I urged forward my beast at a rapid though steady
pace, but now the pangs of thirst began to torment me. I did not
relax my pace, however, and I had not suffered long when a moving
object appeared in the distance before me. The intervening space
was soon traversed, and I found myself approaching a Bedouin Arab
mounted on a camel, attended by another Bedouin on foot. They
stopped. I saw that, as usual, there hung from the pack-saddle of
the camel a large skin water-flask, which seemed to be well filled.
I steered my dromedary close up alongside of the mounted Bedouin,
caused my beast to kneel down, then alighted, and keeping the end
of the halter in my hand, went up to the mounted Bedouin without
speaking, took hold of his water-flask, opened it, and drank long
and deep from its leathern lips. Both of the Bedouins stood fast
in amazement and mute horror; and really, if they had never
happened to see an European before, the apparition was enough to
startle them. To see for the first time a coat and a waistcoat,
with the semblance of a white human head at the top, and for this
ghastly figure to come swiftly out of the horizon upon a fleet
dromedary, approach them silently and with a demoniacal smile, and
drink a deep draught from their water-flask - this was enough to
make the Bedouins stare a little; they, in fact, stared a great
deal - not as Europeans stare, with a restless and puzzled
expression of countenance, but with features all fixed and rigid,
and with still, glassy eyes. Before they had time to get
decomposed from their state of petrifaction I had remounted my
dromedary, and was darting away towards the east.
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