They talked a little while longer and finally stole away to their tents to sleep. Outside, the camel drivers talked still, chattering away, walking now and then around Hassan’s body in solemn procession. Finally, one of them who seemed to have taken the lead, broke into an impassioned stream of words. The others listened. When he had finished, there was a low murmur of fierce approval. Silent-footed, as though shod in velvet, they ran to the tethered camels, stacked the provisions once more upon their backs, lashed the guns across their own shoulders. Soon they stole away—a long, ghostly procession—into the night.
“Those fellows seem to have left off their infernal chattering all of a sudden,” Quest remarked lazily from inside the tent.
The Professor made no answer. He was asleep.
CHAPTER XII
A DESERT VENGEANCE
1.
Quest was the first the next morning to open his eyes, to grope his way through the tent opening and stand for a moment alone, watching the alabaster skies. Away eastwards, the faint curve of the blood-red sun seemed to be rising out of the limitless sea of sand. The light around him was pearly, almost opalescent, fading eastwards into pink. The shadows had passed away. Though the sands were still hot beneath his feet, the silent air was deliciously cool. He turned lazily around, meaning to summon the Arab who had volunteered to take Hassan’s place. His arms—he had been in the act of stretching—fell to his sides. He stared incredulously at the spot where the camels had been tethered. There were no camels, no drivers, no Arabs. There was not a soul nor an object in sight except the stark body of Hassan, which they had dragged half out of sight behind a slight knoll. High up in the sky above were two little black specks, wheeling lower and lower. Quest shivered as he suddenly realised that for the first time in his life he was looking upon the winged ghouls of the desert. Lower and lower they came. He turned away with a shiver.
The Professor was still sleeping when Quest re-entered the tent. He woke him up and beckoned him to come outside.
“Dear me!” the former exclaimed genially, as he adjusted his glasses, “I am not sure that my toilet—however, the young ladies, I imagine, are not yet astir. You did well to call me, Quest. This is the rose dawn of Egypt. I have watched it from solitudes such as you have never dreamed of. After all, we are here scarcely past the outskirts of civilisation.”
“You’ll find we are far enough!” Quest remarked grimly. “What do you make of this, Professor?”
He pointed to the little sandy knoll with its sparse covering of grass, deserted—with scarcely a sign, even, that it had been the resting place of the caravan. The Professor gave vent to a little exclamation.
“Our guides!” he demanded. “And the camels! What has become of them?”
“I woke you up to ask you that question?” Quest replied, “but I guess it’s pretty obvious. We might have saved the money we gave for those rifles in Port Said.”
The Professor hurried off towards the spot where the encampment had been made. Suddenly he stood still and pointed with his finger. In the clearer, almost crystalline light of the coming day, they saw the track of the camels in one long, unbroken line stretching away northwards.
“No river near, where they could have gone to water the camels, or anything of that sort, I suppose?” Quest asked.
The Professor smiled.
“Nothing nearer than a little stream you may have heard of in the days when you studied geography,” he observed derisively,—“the Nile. I never liked the look of those fellows, Quest. They sat and talked and crooned together after Hassan’s death. I felt that they were up to some mischief.”
He glanced around a little helplessly. Quest took a cigar from his case, and lit it.
“To think that an old campaigner like I am,” the Professor continued, in a tone of abasement, “should be placed in a position like this! There have been times when for weeks together I have slept literally with my finger upon the trigger of my rifle, when I have laid warning traps in case the natives tried to desert in the night. I have even had our pack ponies hobbled. I have learnt the secret of no end of devices. And here, with a shifty lot of Arabs picked up in the slums of Port Said, and Hassan, the dragoman, dying in that mysterious fashion, I permit myself to lie down and go to sleep! I do not even secure my rifle! Quest, I shall never forgive myself.”
“No good worrying,” Quest sighed. “The question is how best to get out of the mess. What’s the next move, anyway?”
The Professor glanced towards the sun and took a small compass from his pocket. He pointed across the desert.
“That’s exactly our route,” he said, “but I reckon we still must be two days from the Mongars, and how we are going to get there ourselves, much more get the women there, without camels, I don’t know. There are no wells, and I don’t believe those fellows have left us a single tin of water.”
“Any chance of falling in with a caravan?” Quest enquired.
“Not one in a hundred,” the Professor replied gloomily. “If we were only this short distance out of Port Said, and on one of the recognised trade routes, we should probably meet half-a-dozen before mid-day. Here we are simply in the wilds. The way we are going leads to nowhere and finishes in an utterly uninhabitable jungle.”
“Think we’d better turn round and try and bisect one of the trade routes?” Quest suggested.
The Professor shook his head.
“We should never know when we’d struck it. There are no milestones or telegraph wires. We shall have to put as brave a face on it as possible, and push on.”
Laura put her head out of the tent in which the two women had slept.
“Say, where’s breakfast?” she exclaimed. “I can’t smell the coffee.”
They turned and approached her silently. The two girls, fully dressed, came out of the tent as they approached.
“Young ladies,” the Professor announced, “I regret to say that a misfortune has befallen us, a misfortune which we shall be able, without a doubt, to surmount, but which will mean a day of hardship and much inconvenience.”
“Where are the camels?” Lenora asked breathlessly.
“Gone!” Quest replied.
“And the Arabs?”
“Gone with them—we are left high and dry,” Quest explained. “Those fellows are as superstitious as they can be, and Hassan’s death has given them the scares. They have gone back to Port Said.”
“And what is worse,” the Professor added, with a groan, “they have taken with them all our stores, our rifles and our water.”
“How far are we from the Mongar Camp?” Lenora asked.
“About a day’s tramp,” Quest replied quickly. “We may reach there by nightfall.”
“Then let’s start walking at once, before it gets any hotter,” Lenora suggested.
Quest patted her on the back. They made a close search of the tents but found that the Arabs had taken everything in the way of food and drink, except a single half-filled tin of drinking water. They moistened their lips with this carefully, Quest with the camphor in his hand. They found it good, however, though lukewarm. Laura produced