Of The Two Dromedaries Which I Had Obtained For This Journey, I
Mounted One Myself, And Put Dthemetri On The Other.
My plan was to
ride on with Dthemetri to Suez as rapidly as the fleetness of the
beasts would allow, and to let Myserri (who was still weak from the
effects of his late illness) come quietly on with the camels and
baggage.
The trot of the dromedary is a pace terribly disagreeable to the
rider, until he becomes a little accustomed to it; but after the
first half-hour I so far schooled myself to this new exercise, that
I felt capable of keeping it up (though not without aching limbs)
for several hours together. Now, therefore, I was anxious to dart
forward, and annihilate at once the whole space that divided me
from the Red Sea. Dthemetri, however, could not get on at all.
Every attempt which he made to trot seemed to threaten the utter
dislocation of his whole frame, and indeed I doubt whether any one
of Dthemetri's age (nearly forty, I think), and unaccustomed to
such exercise, could have borne it at all easily; besides, the
dromedary which fell to his lot was evidently a very bad one; he
every now and then came to a dead stop, and coolly knelt down, as
though suggesting that the rider had better get off at once and
abandon the attempt as one that was utterly hopeless.
When for the third or fourth time I saw Dthemetri thus planted, I
lost my patience, and went on without him. For about two hours, I
think, I advanced without once looking behind me. I then paused,
and cast my eyes back to the western horizon. There was no sign of
Dthemetri, nor of any other living creature. This I expected, for
I knew that I must have far out-distanced all my followers. I had
ridden away from my party merely by way of gratifying my
impatience, and with the intention of stopping as soon as I felt
tired, until I was overtaken. I now observed, however (this I had
not been able to do whilst advancing so rapidly), that the track
which I had been following was seemingly the track of only one or
two camels. I did not fear that I had diverged very largely from
the true route, but still I could not feel any reasonable certainty
that my party would follow any line of march within sight of me.
I had to consider, therefore, whether I should remain where I was,
upon the chance of seeing my people come up, or whether I would
push on alone, and find my way to Suez. I had now learned that I
could not rely upon the continued guidance of any track, but I knew
that (if maps were right) the point for which I was bound bore just
due east of Cairo, and I thought that, although I might miss the
line leading most directly to Suez, I could not well fail to find
my way sooner or later to the Red Sea. 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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