218 THE EMPTY QUARTER

for coffee and a genuine desire to accompany me, he exerted
himself to the utmost to deflect me in the direction of the
others but, failing in that object, sped away to share the
stimulating liquor.

I continued walking and, as a matter of fact, walking was
definitely pleasanter in that lovely, soft, sandy country
with its steep ridges than the devious, lurching progress of
the labouring camels. However, after three hours of it
when Sa'dan came up with my steed, I mounted without
protest and so we continued over the frequent ridges until the
latter part of the afternoon, when we halted for prayers at
a small patch of dazzling white gypsum exposed amid the
sands, in which just before we had passed over the wide-
spread and still unobliterated tracks, about a month old,
of camels at pasture—presumably, they thought, those of
Jabir ibn Fasl and others who had been with him before he
went north.

An hour later we entered the district of Bard Jafnan with
its prominent eponymous cone (Huqna Jafhan) a little way
off to the south-west. In this tract the characteristic paral-
lelism of the Sawahib formation is resumed, but its out-
standing feature is the marked frequency of horseshoe hol-
lows enclosed within sharply inclined, wedge-shaped shutes.
In one such pit at the very beginning of the tract we found
a small exposure of the rock-floor underlying the sands,
where the discovery of a fox earth and other indications con-
vinced us all of the concealed presence of a buried well. We
labelled it Bir Jaihan and passed on to camp amid excellent
and varied1 vegetation on a wide gently rolling plain between
low, bare dune ranges.

We had only marched about 25 miles during the day but,
even so, the latter part of the journey had been accompanied
by the music of loud protests from the trailing rear. Farraj,
who was with 'Ali and me in the van, acted as amplifier to
the unwelcome strains and lectured me on the proper care
of camels. I pointed out that we had taken a fortnight over
a march of about 100 miles and suggested that the camels
could graze by moonlight. He declared that that was un-

1 Zahr, Abal, Andab, Alqa and Birkan.