VIII

"When a woman has seen the guest she no longer cares for the master." An old hunter had told him this proverb, a lame, one-eyed man, an outcast from his tribe, or very nearly, whose wife was so old that Owen's presence afforded him no cause for jealousy, a friend of the hunter who owned the eagles, so Owen discovered, but not until the end of a week's acquaintance, which was strange, for he had seen a great deal of this man in the last few days. The explanation he gave one night in the café where Owen went to talk and drink with the Spahis; coming in suddenly, and taking Owen away into a corner, he explained that he had not told him before that his friend Tahar, he who owned the eagles, had gone away to live in another oasis, because it had not occurred to him that Owen was seeking Tahar, fancying somehow that it was another—as if there were hundreds of people in the Sahara who hunted gazelles with eagles!

"Grand Dieu!" and Owen turned to his own dragoman, who happened to be present. "A-t-on jamais!… Ici depuis trois semaines!"

The dragoman, who expected an outburst, reminded Owen of the progress he had made in Arabic, and of the storms of the last three weeks, the rain and wind which had made travelling in the desert impossible, and when Owen spoke of starting on the morrow the dragoman shook his head, and the wind in the street convinced Owen that he must remain where he was.

"Mais si j'avais su—"

The dragoman pointed out to him the terrible weather they had experienced, and how glad he had been to find shelter in Laghouat.

"Oui, Sidna, vous êtes maintenant au comble de regrets, mats pour rien au monde vous n'auriez fait ces étapes vers le sud."

Owen felt that the man was right, though he would not admit it; the camels themselves could hardly have been persuaded to undertake another day's march; his horse—well, the vultures might have been tearing him if he had persevered, so instead of going off in one of his squibby little rages, which would have made him ridiculous, Owen suddenly grew sad and invited the hunter to drink with him, and it was arranged that as soon as the wind dropped the quest for Tahar should be pursued.

He would be found in an oasis not more than two days' journey from Laghouat, so the hunter said, but the dragoman's opinion was that the old hunter was not very sure; Tahar would be found there, and if he were not there he was for certain in another oasis three or four days still farther south.

"But I cannot travel all over the Sahara in search of eagles."

"If Sidna would like to return to Tunis?"

But to return to Tunis would mean returning to England, and Owen felt that his business in the desert was not yet completed; as well travel from one oasis to another in quest of eagles as anything else, and three days afterwards he rode at the head of his caravan, anxious to reach Ain Mahdy, trying to believe he had grown interested in the Arab, and would like to see him living under the rule of his own chief, even though the chief was, to a certain extent, responsible to the French Government; still, to all intents and purposes he would be a free Arab. Yes, and Owen thought he would like to see a Kaid; and wondering what his reception would be like, he rode through the desert thinking of the Kaid, his eyes fixed on the great horizons which had re-appeared, having been lost for many days in mist and rain.

An exquisite silence vibrated through the great spaces, music for harps rather than for violins, and Owen rode on, reaching the oasis, as he had been told he would, at the end of the second day's journey. When he arrived the Kaid was engaged in administering justice, and Owen was forced de faire un peu l'anti-chambre; but this was not disagreeable to him. The Arab court-house seemed to him an excellent place for a lesson in the language; and the case the Kaid was deciding was to his taste. A man was suing for divorce, and for reasons which would have astonished Englishmen, and cause the plaintiff to be hurled out of civilised society; but in the Sahara the case did not strike anybody as unnatural; and Owen listened to the woman telling her misfortunes under a veil. But though deeply interested he was forced to leave the building; the flies plagued him unendurably, and presently he found the flies had odious auxiliaries in the carpet, and after explaining his torture to the dragoman, who was not suffering at all, he left the building and walked in the street.

Half an hour after the Kaid came forward to meet him with a little black sheep in his arms, struggling, frightened at finding itself captured, bleating painfully. The wool was separated, and Owen was invited to feel this living flesh, which in a few hours he would be eating; it would have been impolite to the Kaid to refuse to feel the sheep's ribs, so Owen complied, though he knew that doing so would prevent him from enjoying his dinner, and he was very hungry at the time. The sheep's eyes haunted him all through the meal, and his pleasure was still further discounted by the news that though the eagles were at Ain Mahdy, the owner having left them—

"Having left them," Owen repeated. "Good God! I was told he was here."

"He left here three days ago."

Owen cursed his friend in Laghouat. If he had only told him in the beginning of the week! The dragoman answered:

"Sidna, vous vous en souvenez"

"Speak to me in Arabic, damn you! There is nothing to do here but to learn Arabic."

"Quite true, Sidna, we shall not be able to start to-morrow; the rains are beginning again."

"Was there ever such luck as mine, to come to the desert, where it never rains, and to find nothing but rain?"—rain which Owen had never seen equalled except once in Connemara, where he had gone to fish, and it annoyed him to hear that these torrential rains only happened once every three or four years in the Sahara. He was too annoyed to answer his dragoman…. Enfin, Tahar had left his eagles at Ain Mahdy, and Owen fed them morning and evening, gorging them with food, not knowing that one of the great difficulties is to procure in the trained eagle sufficient hunger to induce him to pursue the quarry. It was an accident that some friend of Tahar's surprised Owen feeding the eagles and warned him.

"These eagles will not be able to hunt for weeks now."

Owen cursed himself and the universe, Allah and the God of Israel,
Christ and the prophets.

"But, Sidna, their hunger can be excited by a drug, and this drug is Tahar's secret."

"Then to-morrow we start, though there be sand storms or rain storms, whatever the weather may be."

The dragoman condoned Owen's mistake in feeding the eagles.

"The gazelles come down from the mountains after the rains; we shall catch sight of some on our way."

A few hours after he rode up to Owen and said, "Gazelles!"

When he looked to the right of the sunset Owen could see yellow, spotted with black; something was moving over yonder among the patches of rosemary and lavender.

The gazelles were far away when the caravan reached the rosemary, but their smell remained, overpowering that of the rosemary and lavender; it seemed as if the earth itself breathed nothing but musk, and Owen's surprise increased when he saw the Arabs collecting the droppings, and on asking what use could be made of these he was told that when they were dried they were burnt as pastilles; when the animal had been feeding upon rosemary and lavender they gave out a delicious odour.

Then the dragoman told Owen to prepare for sand grouse; and a short while afterwards one of the Arabs cried, "Grouse! Grouse!" and a pack of thirty or forty flew away, two falling into the sand.

They came upon a river in flood, and while the Arabs sought a ford Owen went in search of blue pigeons, and succeeded in shooting several; and these were plucked and eaten by the camp fire that night, the coldest he had known in the Sahara. When the fire burnt down a little he awoke shivering. And he awoke shivering again at daybreak; and the cavalcade continued its march across a plain, flat and empty, through which the river's banks wound like a green ribbon…. Some stunted vegetation rose in sight about midday, and Owen thought that they were near the oasis towards which they were journeying; but on approaching he saw that what he had mistaken for an oasis was but the ruins of one that had perished last year owing to a great drought, only a few dying palms remaining. Oases die, but do new ones rise from the desert? he wondered. A ragged chain of mountains, delightfully blue in the new spring weather, entertained him all the way across an immense tract of barren country; and at the end of it his searching eyes were rewarded by a sight of his destination—some palms showing above the horizon on the evening sky.