THE HEART OF THE desert now. As the sun rose higher the heat became intense. My fur coat lay on the floor under my feet; the water in the canteens was tepid and horrible; mirages of cool lakes and tiny islands formed in front of us only to dissolve into the dry and empty earth; and we sank into a lethargy from which we roused only at the sound of shooting ahead.
It turned out, however, that the Captain was firing at a wolf, and our hearts went back to normal again.
Seated on the running board of the car for shade, at noon we ate what remained of our dried sandwiches from Beirut and drank our hot tea. My interest in Bagdad had died of a sunstroke, and even a polite battle between Madame, who was a feminist, and the Englishman, who was not, could not cheer me. The Arabs could have Arabia, for all of me, and the English could have Bagdad. So far as I was concerned, the whole darned East could get along without me from then on. The country was empty. Not even camels now relieved the monotony. Here and there a skeleton lay, for unlike the Sahara this desert does not bury its dead beneath kindly drifting sands. But of life there was little or none. Three hundred miles we must have gone that day, the track now twisting among bare low hills, again speeding straight across some great flat plain.
Sometime after lunch, however, we did see life. Four Bedouins, without the excuse of herds to guard, were standing to our left a quarter of a mile away, quietly watching us. And as four Bedouins had constituted the party which had attacked the car the week before, the fact was suspicious.
They made no hostile move, however. They merely stood and watched us with a sort of concentrated intensity, and once again monotony seized us, and fatigue, and almost despair.
The track varied. Sometimes there was no track, indeed, and the car flew over the smooth hard ground to some distant landmark we did not know. Again it wound up low dune-like hills, up which we bumped and down which we slid, while the book on India descended on us and the brakes smoked. Always we were riding against time; pushing on the good stretches, watching the hours. For this remarkable service not only performs a miracle; it does so twice a week, on scheduled time.
At three in the afternoon we were brought to a sudden halt. Half asleep, we roused to see the track barred by Arabs on camels, and heavily armed.
“Whash the matter?” said the Head drowsily.
“We’re held up,” I said in a dreadful tone.
Now I have always maintained that in a crisis I can keep my head. Therefore I at once proceeded carefully to tuck our last remaining bottle of mineral water under the seat cushion behind me, and the Head, I believe, grabbed the camera. After the excitement was over I found my purse on the car floor, but we did not find the mineral water until we no longer needed it.
After all this, it turned out to be the Arab desert patrol, out on their camels after the murderers. The line on the company’s circulars, to the effect that each ticket carried a thousand pounds, or five thousand dollars, of insurance could be again forgotten.
These were friends.
They made a dramatic picture. Perhaps forty camels and their riders, in the picturesque dress of the Arab police, fully armed and grimly intent on their errand, they stopped only long enough to gather our information, and then to push on again. They had come a long distance already, and they were to be a week or so longer in the desert before they found their men. After that there was to be the long journey back on their slow-moving animals. But their officers were alert and jaunty. Without loss of time they re-mounted their camels and moved on in the direction from which we had come.
The sun had set when we reached the first running water since leaving Damascus. During the spring rains the Wadi Harun is a considerable stream, but it had dwindled to a small creek in the center of a wide river-bed. However, the Panhard was a heavy car, making its first trip.
Would it get through? Or would it not?
It would not. Dashingly it flew at the stream, only to come to an ignominious stop in the center and there to proceed to sink. We crawled out. One other car had got through and had blithely gone on, and we were bogged down in the heart of the desert! Arab police or no Arab police, I didn’t like it. There were too many hills around that wadi, for one thing, and it was only ten miles or so from the scene of the outrage for another.
The second car came up. It carried spades for such emergencies, and the digging began. One hour, two hours, they dug. Twilight fell; the cold evening wind began to blow; we had breakfasted at dawn and lunched lightly at eleven; and the khan at Quebeissa and dinner were still a hundred miles away.
Disconsolately Madame and I hunted a high dry place, and there sat on a rock in gloomy silence.
Late that night we drove into a great khan, and the high solid gates were closed and barred behind us. Luxury now; the company rest house, with hot and cold water, good beds and good food. Even a phonograph!
Over all was the heavy scent of the bitumen wells at Hitt, near by, those very well from which Noah secured the pitch for the Ark and which once paved the great Main Street of Babylon, a hundred feet wide and miles in length; which still covers the reed foundations of those strange Tigris and Euphrates river boats, the circular, tublike goofas.
During the night I wakened to an unearthly shrieking outside our walls, a hyena, perhaps. But all the animals of the aforementioned Ark might have howled that night outside the walls of the khan, without seriously disturbing me.
I turned over and went to sleep again,