PURSE OF THE DESERT.

WHY THE BEDOUIN TRAVELS

LIGHT.

BOLL OP THE DREAD DRUMS.

WHERE SEX MAKES NO APPEAL.

Much has been written about the glamour of the desert, its peace, its suneete and its stillness, but this is the crust, measured by contact with civilieation. The sunset, satisfying as a theatrical performance when seen from the roof of a Tugurt hotel, may be a Iharbinger of torture when it reddens the sandstorms of Libia. The sunshine we crave in the North and whose acquisition is worth fabulous sums spent on trains de luxe and six-wheeled touring cars, may be worse than the seven plagues of Egypt. I have prayed for a cloud in the Sahara as I've never prayed at all in Europe! writes Rositer Forbes in the "New York Herald Tribune." The terror of the desert lies in its inevitability. There is no redress and 310 appeal. JThe Bedouin knows this, and 3ie doesn't waste time over complicated [preparations for the journey that may 'be cut short by any one of the hundred weapons the wilderness holds in store. "If Allah wills, I shall arrive." he pays and, as likely as not, he will start off on a thousand-inile march with, no otJior luggage than a bag of dates and a goatskin full of water. Hi 3 compass is tiie Pols Star, which he "sticks in the middle of his forehead" or "on the nape of his neck" —according to whether he is walking north or south. Ho watcl.es the European calculating the cubic allowance of water for each member of the caravan or the exact loading capacity of the camels with ticorn, for he knows that if it be the •will of Allah, the water skins may burst or leak or dry up; a playful camel may ujvet them and stampede the life of the caravan into the sand. The guide may lose his head and, with it, his tsciiAe direction. In the great deserts this is a recognised disease far more dangerous than fever or a broken limb.

It happens suddenly and without the slightest warning. At one moment the •white figure, trailing its stick behind it in a line which has noo wavered a coin<p&sa point during 500 miles, appears as immutable as fate. The next moment the line, which the caravan has followed day after day, begins to waver. Tho figure, muffled to the eyes in a coarse woollen jerd, hesitates. Its eyes, •which were keen and detached as those of a desert'hawk, grow uncertain and the fear in them spreads through the 'caravan. Mohamed or ■Abdullah, or whoever it is, has lost his head and the nearest well is distant several days' niariihJ i The Storm's Death Mounds.

There are sandstorms which, in a few lioure, can change the shape of a dune belt and destroy every known aspect of the wilderness. The flying sand, is like a flail. It tears the skin and iille every pore with a grain of sand, so that, tieirritation is like the cauterisation of a raw wound. The camels swing round in circles, bellowing in their pain, and finally sink to their knees and lie huddled together in a heap while- their'drivers, iburvino-' themselves under every avails able garment, try to rind shelter under the beasts' flanks. If the storm goes on long enough, they never'get up again. I once saw a -whole caravan dead within half a day's march of safety. The camels still carried their packs and the •bodies of the men were still wound in their stained white jerds. One was a Nubian, and his withered black fingers clutched the string amulet round his neck. There was the skeleton of a small bird beside him. In the Libian desert a range of curiously shaped hills is called after a merchant who had lost his way and perished amon"- them with a caravan of seventy beasts. On the edge of the southern belt of oases there is a well which is supposed to bring bad luck to any who drink Hβ peculiarly bitter water, because a Dervish who had tramped across the great ■ desert for twelve days with iiothing but a water bottle and a little rice, cursed it with parched lips as he died within a hundred yards of toe spring he just failed to reach Last of -all, there \ ere the desert drums, played by no human hands. Tins ■phenomenon of the wilderness is supposed to be a harbinger of evil and the Bedouin believes that the sound winch echoes acroso the empty spaces is produced 'by dead victims of the desert, drumming to welcome the latest addition to their-ranks. As far as I know there is no explanation within our own dimensions for this phenomenon except the somewhat vague one which attributes the queer rattling of wood on leather to the echo of a distant fete! - , Biding one night in brilliant moonlight along the edge° of the nbrthern # dune belt I heard a sudden throbbing in the eand. It was as if a tuyriad of monstrous bees were humming in a hive or as if one could 'hear the pulses of the earth beating under ones feet, But toein* of a practical temperament,! ■looked up, expecting to see an airPl 'st ! is the desert drums!" muttered Jusuf, "Allah, save us, there will be disaster." And disaster there was, almost before the words were out of his mouth. A man, standing up on his camel to fearnmU ids belongings, fell heavily on to ketone, and though the drummers were cheated of their recruit fcjW« seriously injured and has never, I believe, qi S? Sartre wa,- 'ntae-U were a thousand miles froro. the. nearest Some and more than-. from'a human habitation - jet .the Cms rolled and rattled while Ikndt beside the casualty amVtried.to tear my untarily! could imagine the tramp of tortghostly legion on parade! The Only Goal. In m& a setting, Bex is as to».»terW SS bLttlas Se »ew P moon or ge,er4«wSsb the end of the day's march.

In euch circumstances of heat* sweat and exhaustion, of walking with swollen, blistered feet for. a minimum of nine and a maximum of thirteen hours a day— I once did seventeen! —of inadequate and very unappetising food, of pores clogged with dust, of thirst, smell and the habitual irritation of sun and sand, what can it matter whether the haggard, dirty and odoriferous bundle which shares your plate of ill-cooked rice and crawls wearily into the neighbouring flea-bag, fully dressed because of impending frost, is a man or a woman. There fe no temptation whatsoever on the average desert journey so far as sex is concerned, but there are other and far greater sins, according to the Arab code. No Bedouin would look at a woman travelling under his protection. Veils — or rather, the coarse cotton barracans, which are like sheets, girdled with four yards of clumsy scarlet about the waist, one end Avound over the head and face above a bright-coloured handkerchief — are flung back in the desert, but the Bedouin lowers his eyes in respect when he passes any woman but his own. When I tried to help in putting up the tents—there were only two of them

for a caravan of seventeen—a camel driver would take the pegs from me. "This is not a woman's work," he would say, and sometimes, if his beast was in foal, he would bring me a- bo\yl of warm milk in the evening. But there his interest ended. I was the only woman with a merchant caravan consisting of desert Arabs, but that didn't bother them, because obviously I could walk or ride as far as the rest! The same criterion applied to a blind man who, in some mysterious fashion, never lost Ilia way as lie plodded behind the last'camel. Neither Sex Nor Hours. Sex becomes unimportant when it is stripped of its mystery, and there is no mystery at all on a desert march! There is'comradeship between every member of the caravan, which is so desperately isolated in its fight against unrelenting nature that there is no room for, divergent personalities. A woman is accepted as part of the unit so long as she does her share o'i the work, which is strictly apportioned. She cooks and mends and looks after any foals born on the journey, while the men feed and doctor the camels, strike the- camp and load violently protesting beasts with the precision of long practice in the daily drudgery of caravan life. The crimes of the desert are greed and laziness. The shirker gets short shrift and the man who drinks another's ration of water is likely to be treated as a murderer. It is murder, for, in the desert, human life is measured by the water supply. When a Bedouin is asked the distance from one place to another, Ihe is likely to reply, "As far as a man may walk on one waterskin," which means five days in winter and three days in summer.

An Arab proverb asserts: "There are no hours in the desert." For watches stop in the first sandstorm and the onlyclock is Suhail (Venus), which, rising with the sunset, is a spur to every labouring caravan. "We must walk till we've put out Suhail," insists the cautious guide every evening. The star sets quickly, three or four hours after the sun, but to the exhausted Bedouin those last hours seem interminable. The same proverb might well apply to sex, for on the long desert marches there are neither men nor women—only units of a caravan whose strength is that of its weakest member.