NOW FOR A NUMBER OF years it has been our custom to spend a certain portion of the open season under canvas. A part of the upper floor of the garage at home has been taken up in the intervals by great bedding rolls, carefully strapped in their tarpaulin covers, and a certain cedar chest has contained such necessities as wading boots, rubber coats, folding lanterns in which to burn a candle, collapsible canvas basins and what not.
We had hitherto, one perceives, carried with us all the necessities, but none of the luxuries. Food and a camp stove, tin or granite-ware dishes, a minimum of necessary extra clothing packed in a canvas duffle bag, and sufficient tentage to shut out mountain winds and—less effectively—rain, has been the limit of our equipment. A bottle of aspirin, one of iodine, some bandages and adhesive tape have largely constituted our medicine chest, and I well remember the year we encountered an outfit in the mountains which carried with it a folding canvas chair, and the scorn with which we surveyed it.
“If one is going camping,” we said among ourselves, “one camps. If one is going to be as luxurious as that, why not stay at home?”
In view of all this, I rather hesitate to describe the way in which we camped in the Libyan desert. It may show a weakening of fiber, a slackening. When I say that instead of one chair we carried eight, and that four of them were steamer chairs——!
Let me, rather, describe a typical day in the desert with the camp at the end of it.
In the morning our breakfast tray has been brought to the sleeping tent, and the other tents have been taken down. The grumbling, snarling male camels which carry the enormous burden of our equipment are being packed, and our gentler and softer-gaited riding animals are kneeling ready for us.
We mount, and Assour on his little gray donkey leads off. Gazelle is this donkey’s name, and he has been neatly shorn to a dull white, save where on his legs are left various ornamentations. Thus one fore leg boasts the Pyramids, and one rear one a garter. His footprints in the sand are no larger than a dog’s, and from morning to night he carries Assour at a tireless little trot.
He leads the camels, Assour’s long legs almost touch the ground, but he manages to convey an air of dignity, even when the wind catches his cloak and the two together resemble a very small craft carrying an immense head of sail.
Behind him come the two riding camels. Dahabeah and Missouri, with their great soft saddles, and stirrups, and their swinging ornaments and harness. And falling in at the last the lumbering pack camels, drooling at the mouth, clumsy and complaining. Enormous beasts, these, and slow, so that before long we have left them behind and are swinging along side by side, our camel boys plodding at the rear.
By noon we are very weary. The camels begin to drag along at two and one half miles an hour; and now and then, by kicking them and hissing through our teeth, we rouse them to a bit of a trot, and Smedi and Abdul Baggi lope behind, their bare feet slipping and sliding in the sand. The motion has become fairly intolerable. Forward and back, side to side, up and down, there are six different and distinct jerks, twists and contortions for every four feet of advance we make.
The Head rouses from a sort of lethargy of discomfort.
“Now I know how they train the nautch girls,” he says. “They put ’em on camels.”
Were it not a matter of pride, I would trade with Assour, on Gazelle. The little white donkey trots along, its back as level as a floor. It is the test of a good donkey that one be able to drink a cup of Turkish coffee while he trots, without spilling it.
But I have set out to ride a camel and I will not weaken.
At noon we halt. Sometimes we have found a rock; again it is only a cup-shaped depression in the sand, and every small breeze sets up a tiny sand storm and fills our food with grit. The Bedouins eat, and then covering their heads from the wind, lie out in the sun and sleep. The Head dozes, and I sit and watch some desert beetle digging out a home.
He is working frantically with his forelegs, and as the sand moves back, his rear feet catch it and throw it further still. There is a colony of them, and all about appear these mysterious, geyser-like eruptions of sand.
The camels are squatted in the sand, a rope around their doubled knees. They cannot move, except now and then to lower their heads and scratch the under parts of their long sensitive necks on the ground. Their eyes half-closed, they too doze and rest.
Old training asserts itself and I want to clean up the camp before leaving. But Assour prevents it. He rolls up the bits of bread and meat and leaves them by the wayside.
“Somebody he come along,” he says. “Maybe hungry. We leave this, eh?”
And of course we leave it. The food for the hungry, in this empty desert land, and the tin cans to serve who knows what use, where in the remote places almost all the tin-ware is made of American tin cans, and where a Standard oil can is a priceless treasure.
Perhaps we are still close to the Nile, on this specimen day of ours. Then luncheon may be curtailed a trifle, and the siesta also, and Assour will come to us with the light of determination in his eyes.
“We go on now, please,” he will say. “We see very fine tomb today.”
“Not another tomb, Assour!” I plead.
“Very fine tomb,” he says firmly. “Easy. No walking. Just go in, see, come out again.”
And of course we see the tomb, or tombs. Assour has a mania for them; we stoop and slide and crawl down into strange and often beautiful depths, and gaze by the light of burning magnesium wire, which usually goes out just as our eyes grow accustomed to the glare; and then we climb and pant and struggle out again.
“Now, was it fine tomb, madams?” Assour demands, with the light of his mania in his eyes. “You like it?”
“It was a grand tomb, Assour,” I say feebly, and drop onto a rock for a rest.
But ah me, how easy it is now to understand the deep significance of a “rock in a weary land.” Blazing sun and bitter wind, and never a tree for shade. And then the rock, and rest; shadow and shelter. A rock in a weary land.
What are the Pyramids but that? The sublimation of the rock, of shadow and shelter. The very Sphinx is but a rock, carved into a god to face the rising sun…
The day wears on.
The camel saddle has a high horn, front and back, and the Head has been riding a bit too far to the rear. He asks me if I see any smoke arising from the point of contact there, and later on wedges a pillow against the rear horn. When I have kicked and hissed Dahabeah into a trot, Abdul Baggi, my camel boy, sometimes holds to her tail as she goes. She resents this by a dark muttering, but eventually submits.
I drive Dahabeah. She has a chain around her long and slightly aquiline nose, and from this depends a single rough hair rope. When I want her to go to the right I pull her head that way, upon which she goes where she wants to. The same is true of going to the left.
But when Abdul Baggi wants her to do anything he waves a stick and talks to her in low but violent tones, saying awful things which she quite understands. She talks back, often, and it becomes a dialogue. The fact is that I treat her like a lady; he treats her like a strumpet. But it is him she loves, not me.
We are not talkative, and Assour begins to fear for the success of the expedition. He makes a little conversation.
“You know what Missouri mean in English?” he inquires.
We wait for an explanation.
“It mean ‘show me.’ In English Missouri’s name it ‘show me.’”
We nod gravely, and I take my foot out of the left stirrup and try crossing both legs over the camel’s neck. Not an easy matter this, for I have by now abandoned breeches and boots, and am riding in a suit which was the pride of my New York tailor’s heart before I sailed.
“It is very good,” he had said, standing back and gazing at it. “The expression of the skirt, it is right, madame.”
But if I am any judge of the expression of a skirt, it is at this moment both shocked and pained.
Eddies of air catch the sand and produce tiny local sand storms, columns like water spouts that rise a hundred feet or so and then move majestically along. We meet a half dozen Bedouins, driving camels to sell at some village market on the Nile, and eye them with suspicion. But they are unarmed; they are not allowed weapons, and all they carry is their long wooden staves.
“Saïda,” we say, as we pass. And gravely and decorously they reply: “Saïda.”
Their camels swing slowly along, with a curious effect of slanting forward, for a camel makes up for the distance he projects to the front by the suddenness with which he drops off to the rear. He has no haunches; where the saddle ends so does he. It is a dizzy matter to look back and down while in the saddle, for there is nothing there.
But now Assour begins to promise us the camp. Over each rise we watch, into each valley we peer. And at last we see it. Three white tents, set with their backs to some ridge of sand, still perhaps a long way off, but offering tea and rest, and something to sit on which has not six motions all at one and the same time.
Camp.