CHAPTER V
PHARAOH MAKES TROUBLE
Another six weeks or so had gone by, and at length the character ofthe country began to change. At last we were passing out of the endlessdesert over which we had travelled for so many hundreds of miles; atleast a thousand, according to our observations and reckonings, which Ichecked by those that I had taken upon my eastward journey. Our march,after the great adventure at the oasis, was singularly devoid ofstartling events. Indeed, it had been awful in its monotony, and yet,oddly enough, not without a certain charm--at any rate for Higgs andOrme, to whom the experience was new.
Day by day to travel on across an endless sea of sand so remote, sounvisited that for whole weeks no man, not even a wandering Bedouin ofthe desert, crossed our path. Day by day to see the great red sun riseout of the eastern sands, and, its journey finished, sink into thewestern sands. Night by night to watch the moon, the same moon on whichwere fixed the million eyes of cities, turning those sands to a silversea, or, in that pure air, to observe the constellations by which westeered our path making their majestic march through space. And yet toknow that this vast region, now so utterly lonesome and desolate, hadonce been familiar to the feet of long-forgotten men who had trod thesands we walked, and dug the wells at which we drank.
Armies had marched across these deserts, also, and perished there. Foronce we came to a place where a recent fearful gale had almost denudedthe underlying rock, and there found the skeletons of thousands uponthousands of soldiers, with those of their beasts of burden, and amongthem heads of arrows, sword-blades, fragments of armour and of paintedwooden shields.
Here a whole host had died; perhaps Alexander sent it forth, or perhapssome far earlier monarch whose name has ceased to echo on the earth.At least they had died, for there we saw the memorial of that buriedenterprise. There lay the kings, the captains, the soldiers, and theconcubines, for I found the female bones heaped apart, some with thelong hair still upon the skulls, showing where the poor, affrightedwomen had hived together in the last catastrophe of slaughter or offamine, thirst, and driven sand. Oh, if only those bones could speak,what a tale was theirs to tell!
There had been cities in this desert, too, where once were oases, nowoverwhelmed, except perhaps for a sand-choked spring. Twice we cameupon the foundations of such places, old walls of clay or stone, starkskeletons of ancient homes that the shifting sands had disinterred,which once had been the theatre of human hopes and fears, where once menhad been born, loved, and died, where once maidens had been fair, andgood and evil wrestled, and little children played. Some Job may havedwelt here and written his immortal plaint, or some king of Sodom, andsuffered the uttermost calamity. The world is very old; all we Westernslearned from the contemplation of these wrecks of men and of their workswas just that the world is very old.