258 THE EMPTY QUARTER

which differentiates it from what had gone before. After
good rains, said Ibn Humaiyid, this is good grazing country
and the Arabs come hither with their milch-camels to seek
the Oryx. And they remain out until the camels need water,
themselves living only on milk and the meat of the chase.
But it is the great ones only who do that—people like Ibn
Nifl and Ibn Jahman and Ibn Suwailim. It is a hard life.
But there has been no rain in these parts for seven or eight
years now, and none come hither these days. Gradually the
country had become more undulating with rounded dunes
and low ridges. But it was amazingly bare.

The light, cool breeze of the early morning dropped, but
for an hour or two the conditions remained pleasant enough
though the air was deathly still. The silence—once broken
by the sweet piping of an invisible lark—was astonishing.
And the dunes and ridges merged into a sea of billows with-
out order, tossed and tumbled by the conflict of desert winds.
A little way off to the southward a group of lofty pink dunes
towered above it all, and we went by the tracks and dung
of a solitary Oryx, which had passed across this ^derness
two days earlier questing for pastures further north.

Suddenly there appeared before us the trough of a great
valley-bottom cleaving the rolling downs from south-west to
north-east. In its bed we saw a long series of exposed
patches of the underlying rock, which we turned out of our
way to visit in search of shells. We found none and climbed
up the long and weary slope beyond to enter, on its crest,
the district of Hadhat al Hawaya, a tract of deeper valleys
and higher ridges which extend in uniformly parallel lines
for some 40 or 50 miles westward to the Shuwaikila country.
Here the Hadh bush reappeared after a long absence, dead
like everything else though occasional tufts of green raised
hopes that were doomed to disappointment. As the day
drew on to noontide and the sun blazed down on us without
mercy it was easy to believe that never in 20 years or
more had rain fallen in this district. The dry Hadh shrubs
had gathered mounds of sand about their half-buried heads
and even the hardy Abal, the longest-lived of all the desert
plants, had not survived the strain.