THERE CAME A DAY when heat, sparrows, flies, mosquitoes and scents from the river bank were too much for us; when the servants, eating broken food in the court-yard, revolted us; and when my high clean bed at Beirut, into which I climbed from a chair, and the modest bathroom with no leaking pipes and Englishmen in puris naturalibus, began to call us with a loud clear voice.
So once more we set out, in a Dodge car this time, driven by a temperamental Syrian. More people apparently wished to leave Bagdad than to get there, and so there were two cars of passengers, and a Russian gentleman and an Armenian lady in the truck.
The Russian gentleman had preempted the seat beside the driver, so the Armenian lady sat in the back, on a trunk.
The silent Swiss was returning also; he and the Head had the rear seat of the car, along with the camera, dressing cases, extra wraps, bottles of mineral water, bags of fruit and boxes of crackers. I was beside the driver.
At the last moment, however, came Brown, the man at whom the shots had been fired the night of the hold-up and now to be our escort and guard. He too went into the rear seat, and in this fashion did we start back on our three days’ journey across the desert again.
It was a gray and windy day. The Tigris, on which we had so gayly floated in our goofa, was drab and swollen under the bridge as we crossed it. No drafts of inflated sheep-skins, later to be deflated and packed up-stream again on horse or donkey back, floated on its angry surface; no fishermen flung their nets from their round tublike boats.
The palms bent to the gale, and the dust of a thousand years stung our faces and filled our eyes. Even the golden domes of the Mosque at Kadhimain were tarnished; Kadhimain the fanatic city, where we had gone under guard the day before Ramadan, and where I had held my skirt back from the vegetable stalls, for fear of a riot should the touch of an infidel pollute the food.
And when we emerged into the desert it was worse. The dry soil rose in clouds, and the wind gave it a cutting quality I had not foreseen. That night, back in the khan at Quebeissa again, I found that a large portion of the hair below my hat had been neatly sheared off by the flying sand!
Of conversation there was none. All of us were watching the track, along which our Mahmoud Ali Hassan drove us at a blood-curdling rate. The speedometer went to ninety, a hundred kilometers, and stayed there. I clutched my hat, the Head held to the top brace with one hand and a side brace with the other. And for three days, more or less, I clutched and the Head held on, across the desert once more.
It was on the second day that we sighted the Camel Corps again. We had crossed the Wadi Harun without trouble, and were within a half mile of the scene of the murder when along the horizon to the right a camel came into sight. It was followed by another and another, until in a long row the entire corps was silhouetted against the sky.
We turned off the track, and across the hard desert drove toward it. Politely its officers halted the line, and, the camels having knelt, dismounted.
They had found the murderers, or at least three of them. What is more, they were there, on camels and securely handcuffed. And with us was Brown!
At our request they took the men from their animals and brought them forward. Like all Arabs they feared the evil eye, and one could hardly be persuaded to take his hand from his face. But he finally did so, and the Head secured his picture.
It was a dramatic meeting, there in the heart of the Syrian desert in northern Arabia, of the three wretches protesting their innocence, and the impassive Englishman they had tried to kill.
I do not even know if Brown was able to identify them. He was not talkative, perhaps by instruction from Headquarters. But they had been turned over by their tribe as the guilty ones, and the justice of the desert is quick and sure.
Strange times indeed have come to the Arabs. Their desert no longer hides them. From the air great machines carrying men can pry out their hidden refuges, and what are their camels against the unbelievers’ motor cars? And now come the British and the French, and for the mere matter of a killing take hostages so that their very tribesmen turn betrayers.
The Black Camel kneels before their tents indeed.
At a word from the officers the murderers were taken back to their camels. The soldiers swung into their saddles, the animals rose, and at a brisk trot the imposing procession moved on. Equally impassive, Brown got into the Dodge and we too started off. He never referred to the matter again.
It rained the next day. Not a real rain, but a small fine drizzle which was hardly a rain at all. It was enough, however! The morning of the third day saw us west of the ruins of Palmyra and wallowing in apparently bottomless mud. Some place, I have no idea just where, we found the Panhard of luxurious memory, abandoned and deserted, and digging it out we brought it along.
We took the Armenian lady from her trunk in the truck and placed her on its velvet cushions, and it is not my fault that the Russian gentleman got in too. But their comfort was only for a brief period. Two hours later we struck a deep-wash. The Dodge, by digging and pushing, got out in due time, but the Panhard stayed.
We sat on a bank and watched the Armenian lady, who for some reason wore black velvet slippers, get out into the deep muck and wade ashore. We mildly cheered when the Russian had to do the same thing. But mainly we just sat. Sat for hours, while time went by, and stray dogs from an Arab village near by begged for food, and two cut-throats with old muzzle-loading rifles and long braids of hair kept toying with their guns in a manner I considered highly suggestive.
A French army supply train came along, fourteen wagons covered like our old prairie schooners, and each drawn by three horses. It was bound for some distant desert post, but it did not attempt to pass. Nor to help!
Our water was gone, and of our food only two oranges remained. The sun came out, and while it was drying the mud it was boiling us. Only a hundred and fifty miles or so to the west of us lay Damascus, and food and civilization—strange to think of Damascus as civilization—but they seemed a million miles away.
And then the Panhard moved.
Late that night I crawled up the high steps of the Grand Hotel de Boisseul in Beirut. I had two brass trays under my arm, and the Head carried the rug.
I needed a bath. I needed everything. A tray of food was brought to the room, but I could not even eat.
Thankfully but stiffly I pushed a chair beside my high bed, mounted it and crawled in. During the night the wind blew the brass trays down and probably roused the entire hotel, but I never even heard them fall.