The Quest of Julian Day (49 page)

Directly we saw them we hurriedly made our preparations to meet the storm, closing up the cars and wrapping veils round our faces, but we were held up for over an hour during which we could not see any further than one can in a pea-soup London fog; and the storm was of such severity that the driven sand had the effect of emery-paper. When we were at last able to leave the cars again we saw that it had taken every scrap of paint off the windward side of them.

Appearances did not bother us but we were greatly perturbed about our engines as if these had become choked we should have had considerable difficulty in getting them going again; but we had taken the precaution of having the engines enclosed in special sand-protectors before leaving Luxor and, much to our relief, we found that these had functioned satisfactorily.

Experience soon taught us that Clarissa was not a very efficient quartermaster as far as keeping a check on our stores
was concerned, so we placed Amin in charge of that very important department. She was, however, an admirable caterer when it came to devising our menus and, owing to he ingenuity and the trouble she took in explaining dishes to Abdulla, we fed much better than might have been expected seeing that nearly all our food came out of tins.

It was just as well for us that Clarissa was such an enthusiast about food since Sylvia would have proved quite hopeless. Soon after we had entered the Sea of Sand she told me one day when we were walking on ahead of the convoy together, that she simply loathed anything to do with cooking and had never been able to raise the least enthusiasm for household management. On my remarking that her dislike of such things would prove a handicap if she ever thought of getting married, she replied:

‘That's just the trouble. I should never be any good as a poor man's wife and yet I do want tremendously to marry and settle down. I'm sick to death of the wretched existence I've been leading for the last few years—never enough money, always having to scrape and save; trying to keep up appearances because of Father's position by living in expensive hotels, yet having to beg managers for special terms and suffer the constant humiliation of under-tipping servants because one hasn't enough to do the job properly. We've never had a proper home since Mother died and I'd give my eyes to have one of my own instead of making a parade that I can't afford out here in the winter, and pigging it in some rotten little boarding-house at home each summer.'

I was a little surprised at this outburst as it showed me a completely different side of Sylvia and an aspect of her life that I had not suspected although I knew that her father had been far from rich.

I nodded sympathetically. ‘That sort of existence must be pretty wearing; but surely if you'd wanted to marry you must have had lots of chances? Even if you'd been hard up yourself, you've been moving in moneyed circles out here and I should have thought that in the last few winters you would have come across quite a lot of likely lads.'

‘I can understand your thinking so,' she agreed. ‘But somehow it doesn't pan out that way. You see, most of each season
I've been stuck away up country with Father in some dirty little “dig” and the only men one meets in such places are the young excavators, who're full of enthusiasm for their job but haven't got much money. Then, as far as Cairo or Luxor is concerned, only rich people can afford to come so far afield as Egypt for a holiday and the great majority of visitors are middle-aged or old.'

‘But hang it all,' I protested, ‘You're terribly good-looking Sylvia. You know that as well as I do; and you
must
have had some chaps fall for you.'

‘Oh yes; but the ones with money have been twice my age or married already and the only man I really cared about hadn't got a bob. He was an excavator and even his expenses out here were paid by one of the University Archæological societies, although he was one of the most brilliant young men Father ever had on his staff. I had a darned good mind to burn my boats and marry him; but Father said he'd sack him if I did, and I just couldn't face starting married life practically on the dole.'

‘I think you were right about that,' I told her. ‘Love in a cottage can't be much fun after the first few weeks, and there's always the possibility of children turning up to make things more difficult than ever.'

She turned a glowing face to me. ‘Oh, but I adore children. And that's one of the reasons I'm so terribly keen to marry. I'm determined to have at least four and I wouldn't mind working my fingers to the bone in the nursery. I'm sure I'd make a good wife, too, because I am the faithful kind and I've learnt to be economical. It's only this wretched business of thinking up meals and cooking which I hate so much; and if I couldn't afford to have servants to do it for me I should be driven stark, staring mad after the first few months.'

‘Couldn't you get some sort of job yourself which would help pay for a couple of servants?' I suggested.

‘I thought of that ages ago but there are so few jobs I'm fitted for which would bring in decent money. My only special subject is Egyptology and there are plenty of young men from the Universities or the wives and daughters of archæologists who're able and willing to do that sort of clerical work for nothing. I'm no good at modern languages and I've never learnt
shorthand so I couldn't get a post as secretary. I could serve in a shop or become a mannequin, I suppose, but the pay wouldn't amount to much and if I were out at work all day, who would look after the children? No, Julian; my one real hope is this expedition. If it's successful I'll have enough to live decently and marry anyone I choose. If it's not, this will be my last season in Egypt and I'll have to drop out of things to become a daily-breader at about two pounds a week living in some London suburb.'

‘What happened to your chap?' I asked.

‘I don't know,' she said bitterly. ‘He quarrelled with Father, mainly about me; and he went home to try out some scheme by which he hoped to raise the wind; but he's not very practical, poor darling, and from the last I heard of him I'm afraid he's made a mess of things. It's not easy to get rich quick on an academic education and I've pretty well given up hoping that he'll ever come back into my life at all.'

After this chat Sylvia and I seemed to slip quite easily into a much greater degree of intimacy and she told me a lot about the wretched shifts to which they had been put in order to maintain her father's position in the eyes of the outer world, while looking twice at every penny expended on food and clothes.

One is always inclined to regard a very pretty girl as an exceptionally fortunate person because one assumes automatically that her good looks more or less place the world at her feet, and that she can get anything in reason that she sets her heart upon; but I saw now that it didn't necessarily work out like that. In spite of her natural attractions Sylvia seemed to have had a rotten deal and my sympathy for her drew us together during the many hours we spent in each other's company.

In the minor crises, which are natural to such expeditions, she never lost her head; and I admired tremendously the calm way in which she brought order out of chaos among the jabbering, excited Arabs. I felt she was right, too, when she had said that she was the faithful kind and would make a good wife. I wondered what the chap was like whom she had fallen for and decided that, in any case, if she fell for someone else, he would be a darned lucky fellow; providing he had just sufficient
income to provide her with servants for her kitchen which, after all, wasn't a very unreasonable thing for a girl to ask when brought up as she had been.

She seemed impervious to sunstroke and while we sweated under our solar topees she went about bare-headed most of the time, her pale gold hair gradually bleaching to an even lighter
blonde cendrée
in the strong rays of the sun. I had thought her attractive from the beginning and the sight of her tall, slim figure clad in riding-breeches, top-boots and an open shirt, which was never long out of my range of vision, consoled me more and more as the days went on for the lack of variety in the landscape.

Day after day we trekked over the endless sand, mounting crest after crest to see wave after wave of others, undulating before us. Sometimes we managed only a little over twenty miles in a day and at others nearly forty, according to the amount of time we had to devote to getting the cars and lorries out of soft patches where they had stuck.

It was on our eleventh day out from Dakhla that we arrived at our destination. Somehow I had vaguely expected that there would be something to indicate it, just as a child thinks that the North Pole must really have an ice-coated flag-staff set up to show the Arctic explorer that he has really reached his goal. I don't know what I expected, a bit of ruin or a small oasis, perhaps: but I was quite disappointed when, an hour and a half after we had set out from our midday rest on the eleventh day. Sylvia called a halt and said: ‘Here we are!'

The column drew up on a ridge and in every direction as far as the eye could see, the landscape was the same incredibly monotonous waste that we now seemed to have been trekking through for half a life-time—just endless waves of hump backed, yellow dunes.

I moved the convoy down into the next valley in order that our camp should be sheltered from the wind as much as possible and, when I had started the porters setting up our tents, I trudged back up the hill. Sylvia had taken her usual observation of the sun at midday but she was now taking another as a final check on our position, which she worked out by the same process, having allowed for the difference of time registered on our chronometers.

‘We're not far out,' she said when she had done. ‘The actual point is about three-quarters of a mile further south along the ridge here, as near as I can make it.'

With Harry and Clarissa we walked along to the place she had pointed out and began to look about us; hoping that even a casual survey might enable us to find a solitary spearhead or some other indication of the thousands of men who had perished there. But the sands were as smooth and unbroken as those of the innumerable dunes we had traversed in the preceding days.

Although I had not said so, as I did not wish unduly to depress the others, I had never felt particularly optimistic about the success of the expedition after Sylvia had told me in Cairo something of the natural laws which govern the sands of the Libyan Desert. Apparently, although the countless waves of dunes appear quite stationary, they are actually in slow but constant movement. This is caused by the prevailing wind which gradually shifts the sand from the windward sides of the dunes, over their tops to their leeward sides, which has the effect that, in the course of time, the whole of each dune turns right over, gradually moving forward as it does so. As every ridge does the same the whole sandy ocean slowly advances in one direction. During a period of centuries the dune upon which we were standing might gradually have rolled to its present site from a spot many miles further northwest of us. In consequence, the bottoms of the valleys also change their position so that one section of low ground is uncovered at one time and another a few years later, which results in any particular point being alternately an exposed valley bottom or buried five hundred feet deep below the crest of a dune which consists of millions of tons of sand.

The last camps of the lost legions would obviously have been in the valley bottoms of their time so that the legionaries might get as much shelter from the bitter night winds as possible. Within a few months, or at least years, of their foundering, all traces of their camps would have been obliterated by the moving forward of the nearest dunes. Year after year the sand above their remains would have got deeper and deeper, until they lay buried hundreds of feet below its crest. Then, after a further period of years, the sand that buried them
would gradually have moved on until they were fully exposed in a new valley bottom once more.

How often they became exposed was difficult to calculate and perhaps if one had flown in an aeroplane over the spot upon which we were standing in the year of Queen Victoria's jubilee one might have seen mile upon mile of metal debris stretching along the valley bottoms for anyone to pick up who came along. On the other hand, in that particular year all traces of the lost legions' passing might have been at their maximum depth below the sand; or again only buried some ten feet deep, in which case they would be comparatively easy to get at.

I had no doubt whatever that the stuff was there but it seemed to me that the whole success or failure of our expedition hung upon the blind chance as to how deep it was buried during the particular year in which we had arrived on the scene. The only thing really in our favour was that an army of 50,000 men would have occupied a very considerable area, more particularly as they must have scattered at the last in their desperate endeavours to find a way back out of the trap into which they had fallen; so, although many of their remains might be buried beyond all hope of recovery others might possibly be found in these or neighbouring valleys.

We spent a couple of hours prospecting the valley in which we had set up our camp but none of us could find anything at all and, as Sylvia pointed out, even a small miscalculation on the part of the Egyptian astronomer on whose bearings we were relying to find the spot where the treasure had been abandoned might have thrown us out by several miles. Taking the site or our camp as the centre of operations, therefore, our next job was to go out in the cars during the succeeding days and survey the whole territory within as big a radius as we could section by section.

The following day we set about it, taking the south-eastern sector over which we had advanced as the most likely; for this would be the direction in which the army would have retreated Harry suggested halving our labours by letting the two cars take different directions but I would not agree to that as I thought it was much too dangerous. Even on picnic expeditions from the Nile Valley the Egyptian Government have
made it a law that not less than two cars may proceed into the desert, since if one breaks down its occupants may lose themselves in trying to get back, and formerly the government was put to much expense in having to send out aeroplanes to locate stranded parties. We had no aeroplane to search for one of the cars if anything went wrong with it or even if it got stuck in a bad patch of sand, and if the second car failed to find it that might cost the occupants of the stranded car their lives. In consequence, I had my way and it was agreed that both cars should set out together.