CHAPTER I

' THE VERITABLE DESERT !

Tis this — that which they named to you as the Empty Quarter !

DESPITE the long and strenuous journey before us we had
agreed to make the first day's march a short one to enable
me to visit and inspect all the wells to westward of Shanna.
The main body with the baggage was to march direct to an
agreed rendezvous under the guidance of Salirn, while my
smaller party, including Zayid and *Ali Jahman, was to make
the necessary detour by the wells and in due course rejoin
the rest during the afternoon. The baggage-train got away
some ten minutes ahead of us and passed out into the desert
over the left bank of the Shanna valley in a north-westerly
direction, while we marched up the valley itself south-
westward to the wells of Arfaja about a mile away and
situated in the deep hollow of a horseshoe sand-cliff. Part
of the hollow was occupied by a considerable hillock of ex-
posed gypseous rock with steep 40-feet cliffs, between which
and the sand-slopes round it lay two wells. One of them was
in fact no more than a trial shaft which had been abandoned
in despair by its excavators before any moisture had been
reached ; but the other had reached the water table at a
depth of seven fathoms though it had never yielded a satis-
factory supply and had soon been abandoned. Its shaft had
subsequently been filled in almost to the top by blown sand
from the desert, which will doubtless one day obliterate this
memorial of the human labour which led ultimately, and
during the same season, to the discovery and exploitation of
Shanna, In ten minutes from Arfaja we came upon a great
dyke of sand lyiag in the form of a double horseshoe, right
across the valley at a great southward bend of its course.

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