had been riding ten hours, and must have come fifty miles; our monastery was only forty-five. We had missed it, and it was all but dark. Under a bluff of loose sand we halted the camels and dismounted.

A night in the cutting winter wind of the desert, a night without tent, water, fire, or fodder, was the very best we had to look forward to. The worst—but just as the mind strayed round to the remote possibilities up panted Said.

"Have you seen, Said?

"Effendim, I have seen; I saw from the hill back yonder; come and see for yourselves."

And he led us to the brow of the bluff, and there, surely-yes, there gleamed something white. The monastery; hurrah! It can't be four miles off; we will walk, and the camels can follow. So up got the patient camels, and off we strode, five miles an hour, over sand as hard and crisp as the early morning snow.

We walked. Now the sand grew softer,

AN UNPLEASANT SITUATION.

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now it hardened again, now it was shingle; but we walked fast, and we seemed to walk straight. The blazing crimson and orange of the sunset blinded our eyes to the white blob of the monastery, but by now we must be almost on top of it. Faster and faster we walked and walked. Now crimson and orange blazed no more; it was really dark now; we had come five miles; we had not arrived.

you sure you saw, Said - quite

"Are you

sure?"

66

Effendim," replied Said, "I thought I saw something white."

Nothing white in sight now.

The guide

was thrown out utterly in that tangle, where you could never really see two miles ahead, you might as well have groped for a button as for a building. And there we were, fifty-five miles from home, camels done up and foodless, camel-boys starving, thirsty, and waterless, selves with possible two days' food, and certain less than one day's water -lost-clean lost in the Libyan desert.

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XI.

A NIGHT IN THE DESERT.

THE CAMEL'S REAL CHARACTER THE DESERT WHITELEY-A CAMEL-TRACK-ILLUSIONS OF THE DESERT-THE MONASTERY

AT LAST.

January 5.-Often enough I had been lost before, only this was different. In the desert you can laugh at little privations as long as you know the way-but once miss it in that unanswerable enigma, that pitiless perplexity of sand, and you have this choice before you. You know that your Nile lies, perhaps, forty miles due east of you; only, will your camels -Pyramid picnic camels, untrained for the privations of long desert journeys-will they hold out, foodless and waterless, till you strike it? You know that your monastery is, perhaps, within a mile, almost certainly within

STRANGE SLEEPING-QUARTERS.

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a dozen miles of you-only dare you use up your beasts, and provisions, and strength hunting for it? That was the agreeable question we had to sleep over.

But the first thing to do was to sleepthough I, for one, felt a kind of prompting to walk about all night calling aloud for the monastery to come and pick us up. Yet that was soon forgotten in the new interest of the desert. During the day it was merely a thing to be crossed, a thing to be looked at -with interest, certainly, but with the sort of interest one gives a stranger. Now it was become more than a stranger — a friend or enemy, as the case might turn out, and all its moods and tenses were worth attentive scrutiny.

And, first, although the desert can be hot at midday, even in January, it can be bitter cold at night. I had never thought of the desert as a place in which to wrap up warm and get out of the wind. However, there was not very much wind, by good luck, and a sand slope under a semi

circle of small basalt boulders gave bed and shelter.

Said and the camel-boys disdained the slope and the boulders, which led up to the next point of enlightenment-the camels. Up to then I had not appreciated the camel. These were bad camels: one, as I should have told you, gave out after half a day, and another was threatening to kneel down every stride before dark but at its best a camel has none of the generosity of the horse. When he is called on to work he makes a noise something between a dog's snarl and a peacock's screech; while he is at it he wears an air of sulky superciliousness, as who should say, "I'm doing it, but not for any love of you." Also at this season of the year he has a disgusting habit of blowing parts of his inside out at his mouth-a great pink bladder, which he puffs out and sucks in again in the filthiest way. But now I noticed that when the camels lay down in the wind the Arabs carefully lay down on the lee side of them. There was no fodder, but they pulled up yesterday's