Part 57

“My caravan was accompanied by four Arabs. They owned the burden camels, which they urged along with the cry of ‘Yoho! Shekh Abd-el Kader!’ and a shrill barbaric song, the refrain of which was, ‘O prophet of God, help the camels, and bring us safely to our journey’s end!’ They were very susceptible to cold, and a temperature of fifty degrees, which we frequently had in the morning, made them tremble like aspen leaves, and they were sometimes so benumbed that they could scarcely lead the camels. They wore long swords, carried in a leathern scabbard over the left shoulder, and sometimes favored us with a war-dance, which consisted merely in springing into the air with a brandished sword, and turning round once before coming down. They were all very devout, retiring a short distance from the road to say their prayers, at the usual hours, and performing the prescribed ablutions with sand instead of water. On the second morning, we passed through a gorge in the black hills, and entered a region called _El Biban_, or ‘The Gates.’ Here the mountains, though still grouped in the same disorder, were more open, and gave room to plains of sand several miles in length. The narrow openings, through which the road passes from one plain to another, gave rise to the name. The mountains are higher than on the Nile, and present the most wonderful configurations: towers, fortresses, walls, pyramids, temples in ruin, of an inky blackness near at hand, but tinged of a deep, glowing violet hue in the distance. Toward noon I saw a _mirage_, a lake in which the broken peaks were reflected with great distinctness. One of the Nubians who was with us, pointed out a spot where he was obliged to climb the rocks, the previous summer, to avoid being drowned. During the heavy tropical rains which sometimes fall here, the hundreds of pyramidal hills pour down such floods that the sand can not immediately drink them up, and the valleys are turned into lakes. The man described the roaring of the waters, down the clefts of the rocks, as something terrible. In summer the passage of the desert is much more arduous than in winter, and many men and camels perish. The road was strewn with bones and carcasses, and I frequently counted twenty dead camels within a stone’s throw. The stone-heaps which are seen on all the spurs of the hills, as landmarks for caravans, have become useless, since one could find his way by the bones in the sand. My guide, who was a great believer in afrites and devils, said that formerly many persons lost the way and perished from thirst, all of which was the work of evil spirits. Toward noon, on the third day, we passed the last of the ‘gates,’ and entered the _Bahr bela Ma_, (river without water,) a broad plain of burning yellow sand. The gateway is very imposing, especially on the eastern side, where it is broken by a valley or gorge of Tartarean blackness. As we passed the last peak, my guide, who had ridden in advance, dismounted beside what seemed to be a collection of graves—little ridges of sand, with rough head and foot stones. He sat by one which he had just made. As I came up he informed me that all travelers who crossed the Nubian desert, for the first time, are here expected to pay a toll, or fee to the guide and camel-men. ‘But what if I do not choose to pay?’ I asked. ‘Then you will immediately perish, and be buried here. The graves are those of persons who refused to pay.’ As I had no wish to occupy the beautiful mound he had heaped for me, with the thigh-bones of a camel at the head and foot, I gave the men a few piasters, and passed the place. He then plucked up the bones and threw them away, and restored the sand to its original level.[8]

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Footnote 8:

“Burckhardt gives the following account of the same custom, in his travels in Nubia. ‘In two hours and a half we came to a plain on the top of the mountain called _Akabet el Benat_, the Rocks of the Girls. Here the Arabs who serve as guides through these mountains, have devised a singular mode of extorting presents from the traveler: they alight at certain spots in the Akabet El Benat, and beg a present; if it is refused, they collect a heap of sand, and mold it into the form of a diminutive tomb, and then placing a stone at each of the extremities, they apprise the traveler that his tomb is made; meaning, that henceforward, there will be no security for him, in this rocky wilderness. Most persons pay a trifling contribution, rather than have their graves made before their eyes; there were, however, several tombs of this description dispersed over the plain.’”

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“The _Bahr bela Ma_ spread out before us, glittering in the hot sun. About a mile to the eastward lay (apparently) a lake of blue water. Reeds and water-plants grew on its margin, and its smooth surface reflected the rugged outline of the hill beyond. The waterless river is about two miles in breadth, and appears to have been at one time the bed of a large stream. It crosses all the caravan routes in the desert, and is supposed to extend from the Nile to the Red sea. It may have been the outlet for the river, before its waters forced a passage through the primitive chains which cross its bed at Assouan and Kalabshee. A geological exploration of this part of Africa could not fail to produce very interesting results. Beyond the _Bahr bela Ma_ extends the broad central plateau of the desert, fifteen hundred feet above the sea. It is a vast reach of yellow sand, dotted with low, isolated hills, which in some places are based on large beds of light-gray sandstone of an unusually fine and even grain. Small towers of stone have been erected on the hills nearest the road, in order to guide the couriers who travel by night. Near one of them the guide pointed out the grave of a merchant, who had been murdered there two years previous, by his three slaves. The latter escaped into the desert, but probably perished, as they were never heard of afterward. In the smooth, loose sand, I had an opportunity of reviving my forgotten knowledge of trackography, and soon learned to distinguish the feet of hyenas, foxes, ostriches, lame camels and other animals. The guide assured me that there were devils in the desert; but one only sees them when he travels alone.

“On this plain the mirage, which first appeared in the _Biban_, presented itself under a variety of wonderful aspects. Thenceforth, I saw it every day, for hours together, and tried to deduce some rules from the character of its phenomena. It appears on all sides, except that directly opposite to the sun, but rarely before nine in the morning, or after three of the afternoon. The color of the apparent water is always precisely that of the sky, and this is a good test to distinguish it from real water, which is invariably of a deeper hue. It is seen on a gravelly as well as a sandy surface, and often fills with shining pools the slight depressions in the soil at the bases of the hills. Where it extends to the horizon there is no apparent line, and it then becomes an inlet of the sky, as if the walls of heaven were melting down and flowing in upon the earth. Sometimes a whole mountain chain is lifted from the horizon and hung in the air, with its reflected image joined to it, base to base. I frequently saw, during the forenoon, lakes of sparkling blue water, apparently not a quarter of a mile distant.[9] The waves ripple in the wind; tall reeds and water-plants grow on the margin, and the desert rocks behind cast their shadows on the surface. It is impossible to believe it a delusion. You advance nearer, and suddenly, you know not how, the lake vanishes. There is a grayish film over the spot, but before you have decided whether the film is in the air or in your eyes, that too disappears, and you see only the naked sand. What you took to be reeds and water-plants probably shows itself as a streak of dark gravel. The most probable explanation of the mirage which I could think of, was, that it was actually a reflection of the sky upon a stratum of heated air, next the sand.

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Footnote 9:

In a previous chapter, Taylor says: “Before returning on board, we saw a wonderful _mirage_. Two lakes of blue water, glittering in the sun, lay spread in the yellow sands, apparently not more than a mile distant. There was not the least sign of vapor in the air; and as we were quite unacquainted with the appearance of the mirage, we decided that the lakes were Nile water, left from the inundation. I pointed to them, and asked the Arabs, ‘Is that water?’ ‘No, no!’ they all exclaimed; ‘that is no water; that is _Bar Shaytan_,’ a river of the devil!”

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“I found the desert life not only endurable but very agreeable. No matter how warm it might be at midday, the nights were always fresh and cool, and the wind blew strong from the north-west, during the greater part of the time. The temperature varied from fifty or fifty-five degrees at six in the morning, to eighty or eighty-five degrees at two in the afternoon. The extremes were forty-seven and a hundred degrees. So great a change of temperature every day was not so unpleasant as might be supposed. In my case, Nature seemed to make a special provision in order to keep the balance right. During the hot hours of the day I never suffered inconvenience from the heat, but up to eighty-five degrees felt sufficiently cool. I seemed to absorb the rays of the sun, and as night came on and the temperature of the air fell, that of my skin rose, till at last I glowed through and through, like a live coal. It was a peculiar sensation, which I never experienced before, but was rather pleasant than otherwise. My face, however, which was alternately exposed to the heat radiated from the sand, and the keen morning wind, could not accommodate itself to so much contraction and expansion. The skin cracked and peeled off more than once, and I was obliged to rub it daily with butter. I mounted my dromedary with a ‘shining morning face,’ until, from alternate buttering and burning, it attained the hue and crispness of a well-basted partridge.

“I soon fell into a regular daily routine of travel, which, during all my later experiences of the desert, never became monotonous. I rose at dawn every morning, bathed my eyes with a handful of the precious water, and drank a cup of coffee. After the tent had been struck and the camels laden, I walked ahead for two hours, often so far in advance that I lost sight and hearing of the caravan. I found an unspeakable fascination in the sublime solitude of the desert. I often beheld the sun rise, when, within the wide ring of the horizon, there was no other living creature to be seen. He came up in awful glory, and it would have been a natural act, had I cast myself upon the sand and worshiped him. The sudden change in the coloring of the landscape, on his appearance, the lighting up of the dull sand into a warm golden hue, and the tintings of purple and violet on the distant porphyry hills, was a morning miracle, which I never beheld without awe. The richness of this coloring made the desert beautiful; it was too brilliant for desolation. The scenery, so far from depressing, inspired and exhilarated me. I never felt the sensation of physical health and strength in such perfection, and was ready to shout from morning till night, from the overflow of happy spirits. The air is an elixir of life, as sweet and pure and refreshing as that which the first man breathed, on the morning of creation. You inhale the unadulterated elements of the atmosphere, for there are no exhalations from moist earth, vegetable matter, or the smokes and steams which arise from the abodes of men, to stain its purity. This air, even more than its silence and solitude, is the secret of one’s attachment to the desert. It is a beautiful illustration of the compensating care of that providence which leaves none of the waste places of the earth without some atoning glory. Where all the pleasant aspects of nature are wanting; where there is no green thing, no fount for the thirsty lip, scarcely the shadow of a rock to shield the wanderer in the blazing noon; God has breathed upon the wilderness his sweetest and tenderest breath, giving clearness to the eye, strength to the frame, and the most joyous exhilaration to the spirits.

“Achmet always insisted on my taking a saber as a protection against the hyenas, but I was never so fortunate as to see more than their tracks, which crossed the path at every step. I saw occasionally the footprints of ostriches, but they, as well as the giraffe, are scarce in this desert. Toward noon, we made a halt in the shadow of a rock, or if no rock was at hand, on the bare sand, and took our breakfast. One’s daily bread is never sweeter than in the desert. The rest of the day I jogged along patiently beside the baggage camels, and at sunset halted for the night. A divan on the sand, and a well-filled pipe, gave me patience while dinner was preparing, and afterward I made the necessary entries in my journal. I had no need to court sleep, after being rocked all day on the dromedary. Until noon of the fourth day we journeyed over a vast plain of sand, interrupted by low reefs of black rock. Soon after midday the plain was broken by low ranges of hills, and we saw in front and to the east of us many blue mountain-chains. Our road approached one of them, a range, several miles in length, the highest peak of which reached an altitude of a thousand feet. The sides were precipitous and formed of vertical strata, but the crests were agglomerations of loose stones, as if shaken out of some enormous coal-scuttle. The glens and gorges were black as ink; no speck of any other color relieved the terrible gloom of this singular group of hills. Their aspect was much more than sterile: it was infernal. The name given to them by the guide was _Djilet e’ Djindee_, the meaning of which I could not learn. At their foot I found a few thorny shrubs, the first sign of vegetation since leaving Korosko. We encamped half an hour before sunset on a gravelly plain, between two spurs of the savage hills, in order that our camels might browse on the shrubs, and they were only too ready to take advantage of the permission. They snapped off the hard, dry twigs, studded with cruel thorns, and devoured them as if their tongues were made of cast-iron. We were now in the haunts of the gazelle and the ostrich, but saw nothing of them.

“On the fifth day we left the plain, and entered a country of broken mountain-ranges. In one place the road passed through a long, low hill of slate rock, by a gap which had been purposely broken. The strata were vertical, the laminæ varying from one to four inches in thickness, and of as fine a quality and smooth a surface as I ever saw. A long wady, or valley, which appeared to be the outlet of some mountain-basin, was crossed by a double row of stunted doum-palms, marking a water-course made by the summer rains. Eyoub pointed it out to me, as the half-way station between Korosko and Abou-Hammed. For two hours longer we threaded the dry wadys, shut in by black, chaotic hills. It was now noonday, I was very hungry, and the time allotted by Eyoub for reaching _Bir Mûrr-hàt_ had passed. He saw my impatience and urged his dromedary into a trot, calling out to me to follow him. We bent to the west, turned the flank of a high range, and after half an hour’s steady trotting, reached a side-valley or _cul-de-sac_, branching off from the main wady. A herd of loose camels, a few goats, two black camel’s-hair tents, and half a dozen half-naked Ababdehs, showed that we had reached the wells. A few shallow pits, dug in the center of the valley, furnished an abundance of bitter, greenish water, which the camels drank, but which I could not drink. The wells are called by the Arabs _el morra_, ‘the bitter.’ Fortunately, I had two skins of Nile-water left, which, with care, would last to Abou-Hammed. The water was always cool and fresh, though in color and taste it resembled a decoction of old shoes. We left Mûrr-hàt at sunrise, on the morning of the sixth day. I walked ahead, through the foldings of the black mountains, singing as I went, from the inspiration of the brilliant sky and the pure air. In an hour and a half, the pass opened on a broad plain of sand, and I waited for my caravan, as the day was growing hot. On either side, as we continued our journey, the blue lakes of the mirage glittered in the sun. Several isolated pyramids rose above the horizon, far to the east, and a purple mountain-range in front, apparently two or three hours distant, stretched from east to west. ‘We will breakfast in the shade of those mountains,’ I said to Achmet, but breakfast-time came and they seemed no nearer, so I sat down in the sand and made my meal. Toward noon we met large caravans of camels, coming from Berber. Some were laden with gum, but the greater part were without burdens, as they were to be sold in Egypt. In the course of the day upward of a thousand passed us. The afternoon was intensely hot, the thermometer standing at one hundred degrees, but I felt little annoyance from the heat, and used no protection against it. The sand was deep and the road a weary one for the camels, but the mountains which seemed so near at hand in the morning were not yet reached. We pushed forward; the sun went down, and the twilight was over before we encamped at their base. The tent was pitched by the light of the crescent moon, which hung over a pitchy-black peak. I had dinner at the fashionable hour of seven. Achmet was obliged to make soup of the water of Mûrr-hàt, which had an abominable taste. I was so drowsy that before my pipe was finished, I tumbled upon my mattress, and was unconscious until midnight, when I awoke with the sensation of swimming in a river of lava.

“The tent was struck in the morning starlight, at which time the thermometer stood at fifty-five degrees. I walked alone through the mountains, which rose in conical peaks to the hight of near a thousand feet. The path was rough and stony until I reached the outlet of the pass. On leaving the mountain, we entered a plain of coarse gravel, abounding with pebbles of agate and jasper. Another range, which Eyoub called Djebel Dighlee, appeared in front, and we reached it about noon. The day was again hot, the mercury rising to ninety-five degrees. It took us nearly an hour to pass Djebel Dighlee, beyond which the plain stretched away to the Nile, interrupted here and there by a distant peak. Far in advance of us lay Djebel Mokràt, the limit of the next day’s journey. From its top, said Eyoub, one may see the palm-groves along the Nile. We encamped on the open plain, not far from two black pyramidal hills, in the flush of a superb sunset. The ground was traversed by broad strata of gray granite, which lay on the surface in huge bowlders. Our camels here found a few bunches of dry, yellow grass, which had pierced the gravelly soil. To the south-east was a mountain called by the Arabs _Djebel Nogàra_, (the mountain of the Drum,) because, as Eyoub declared, a devil who had his residence among its rocks, frequently beat a drum at night, to scare the passing caravans.

“The stars were sparkling freshly and clearly when I rose, on the morning of the eighth day, and Djebel Mokràt lay like a faint shadow on the southern horizon. The sun revealed a few isolated peaks to the right and left, but merely distant isles on the vast, smooth ocean of the desert. It was a rapture to breathe air of such transcendent purity and sweetness. I breakfasted on the immense floor, sitting in the sun, and then jogged on all day, in a heat of ninety degrees, toward Djebel Mokràt, which seemed as far off as ever. The sun went down, and it was still ahead of us. ‘That is a _Djebel Shaytan_,’ I said to Eyoub; ‘or rather, it is no mountain; it is an afrite.’ ‘O effendi!’ said the old man, ‘don’t speak of afrites here. There are many in this part of the desert, and if a man travels alone here at night, one of them walks behind him and forces him to go forward and forward, until he has lost his path.’ We rode on by the light of the moon and stars; and two hours after sunset, we _killed_ Djebel Mokràt, as the Arabs say: that is, turned its corner. The weary camels were let loose among some clumps of dry, rustling reeds, and I stretched myself out on the sand, after twelve hours in the saddle. Our water was nearly exhausted by this time, and the provisions were reduced to hermits’ fare, bread, rice and dates. I had, however, the spice of a savage appetite, which was no sooner appeased, than I fell into a profound sleep. I could not but admire the indomitable pluck of the little donkeys owned by the Kenoos. These animals not only carried provisions and water for themselves and their masters, the whole distance, but the latter rode them the greater part of the way; yet they kept up with the camels, plying their little legs as ambitiously the last day as the first. I doubt whether a horse would have accomplished as much under similar circumstances.