26 THE SECRET OF SAHARA: KUFARA 



glimpse of us any other way, had brought us as a gift 

 an absurd black bird with a bald head, a brother of Ali, 

 the cook, arrived from his camel' s-hair tent. He greeted 

 us kindly and told us that the Beduins were in sympathy 

 with us, that they knew we were Moslems and of their 

 own blood. 



Thus we felt we had done something to dispose of 

 the probability of sudden death before we were a hundred 

 kilometres on our way, but all other arrangements lagged 

 intolerably. The most venerable and respected of all 

 the ekhwan, Haji Fetater, who had done the great jour- 

 ney right through Kufara to Wadai, was the one man who 

 could probably help us on our way. He was of the 

 Mojabra tribe and he so loathed the "Nasrani" that 

 he would not be in the same room as a Christian. I do 

 not know whether it was Hassanein Bey's eloquence, 

 or his sudden discovery that Sidi es Senussi himself 

 had prophesied that the English would eventually be con- 

 verted to Islam that finally induced him to promise to 

 accompany us. "We are all servants of the Sayed. 

 Only if he tells me to go, must I go," he said, but when 

 the prophecy had aroused his enthusiasm, he flung back 

 his splendid grey head. "I will protect her," he ex- 

 claimed; "I will take her to Kufara, and she shall kiss 

 the holy qubba and be a Moslem!" 



He was eighty years old, but he determined instantly 

 that he would run the whole caravan and generally 

 instruct us in the art of desert travelling. He had caught 

 but a glimpse of me as I was hurried from the house in 

 case my presence therein should pollute him. He can 

 only have seen an exceedingly shy j^oung person, with 

 respectfully downcast eyes, in a pale blue tweed suit 

 huddled on a ridiculously small pony, dangling a swollen 

 foot in a native slipper, but he luckily took it into 

 his head that he liked me. Hassanein Bey rapidly 



