338 THE EMPTY QUARTER

some of the camels were ' snuffed ' to cool their heads before
the day's heat had reached its worst. Suwid took the water
into his mouth and blew it into the nostrils of his steed,
while the only kettle was being used elsewhere for the same
purpose. It was indeed a strange scene—that bevy of camels
and men at rest in the midst of the featureless wilderness
with never a dry blade of grass or stick of fuel to vary its
barren gravel, stretching out to the horizon on every side.
I collected an assortment of its pebbles before we remounted
and cast about in vain for desert Mantids or other creeping
things. The world around us was dead.

An hour later we saw the distant shimmer of sands and
thought we might be approaching Rumaila, but were dis-
appointed. It was but an isolated dune-group piled up on
the gravel. Afar off a dust-devil rose some 20 feet into
the air and, curling its tail upward, disappeared as suddenly
as it had formed. The sun blazed down on us and my com-
panions drowsily dozed as they wqnt—a relief denied to me
by lack of experience. Salim dozed with the rest, waking up
every now and then with a grunt indicating the desired
direction. I wondered how in such circumstances, half
asleep and with nothing to guide him, he could keep any-
direction at all, but I checked his course frequently with the
compass only to be amazed at his accurate piloting. I asked
him how he managed it and he simply did not know. There
is perhaps an instinctive sense of direction in the men and
animals of the desert controlled by a sub-conscious percep-
tion of the motion of the sun and stars. Salim never had any
but the vaguest idea of the time as such—an hour simply
meant nothing to him—but he never seemed to be at a loss
for direction, at any rate if the sky was clear.

We had reached the worst patch of the afternoon, the
dismal hours between 1 and 3 p.m. Having had no sip of
liquid since 5 a.m. I was beginning to feel thirsty. The pro-
spect of tea seemed very remote as we marched into the
mirage now gradually shifting to our front, and I began to
wonder how much longer I could hold out against the inward
craving for water. Tor a while I kept it at bay by eating thed
few onions I had reserved for such a crisis, and when they