TREACHERY AT HAWARI 175 



the ridges of stones and red sand rise sufficiently to 

 allow one to look, as it were, over their edge on to 

 a country of paler sand beyond. Here reigned our 

 old enemy, the mirage, so it was difficult at first to 

 distinguish the false from the true. On the far horizon 

 loomed the purple hills of the Kufara Gara. Some- 

 where beyond those peaks and cliffs lay the mysterious, 

 elusive oasis that was no near and yet always just 

 beyond our reach. Up till that moment we had con- 

 sidered Hawari as a part of Kufara, but Yusuf, point- 

 ing joyfully to a pale sand wave just before the distant 

 hills, said, "Do you see the white sand? Before we 

 come to that, below it, are the palms of Hawari, but 

 Kufara is 'bayid,' beyond the Gebel." 



For a couple of hours we straggled across uneven 

 country, dotted with rare patches of stones and mounds, 

 with ever more and more tantalising points appearing to 

 the south till we wondered if the mountains ever ended. 

 Nobody waits for anyone else in the desert. Everyone 

 walks at his own favourite pace. If you cannot keep up, 

 you drop behind and your companion does not stop to 

 ask the reason. If you pause to shake the sand from a 

 shoe, he does not halt with you. It is against the custom, 

 unless you are ill. The Beduins often speak of the long, 

 waterless routes as "The roads where we do not wait for 

 a dying man. An hour for a camel, two for an Arab, 

 then we leave them!" 



At last a stronger sand wave than most gave us a 

 sudden perfect view of Hawari, a long, very narrow strip 

 of palms running for about 12 kilometres very nearly 

 north and south, with two little isolated groups of palms 

 at the southern end. All round it lay a band of very 

 red sand, broken into thousands of small mounds of 

 "hattab," the httle dry sticks we had seen before. A 

 ■:hird naga started to foal, but we ruthlessly left her to 



