308 THE SECRET OF SAHARA: KUFARA 



"Hot tea," said the same voice. "With milk." 

 And I noticed an enormous kettle on the fire. Mugs 

 came from a magic picnic basket filled with all sorts of 

 good things. Rugs and sheepskins appeared from the 

 spare camels brought for our riding. Was there anything 

 the Frontier Districts Administration could not produce 

 at a second's notice? Then someone said "Sausages" 

 and even Hassanein was enthusiastic. We cooked them 

 with tomato sauce on the scented brushwood fire and ate 

 them steaming hot, with white new bread from the hos- 

 pitable basket and then — ^how we talked! Beneficent 

 Khaki smoked a pipe and we, blissfully indifferent to 

 the stern Senussi laws which had forbidden us tobacco 

 for so many weeks, saw visions and dreamed dreams in 

 the blue haze of our first cigarettes. 



It must have been nearly 2 a.m. when we finally 

 buried ourselves in our flea-bags, but no one slept — 

 Hassanein because of his broken bone. Beneficent Khaki 

 because he had been too recklessly generous in the dis- 

 posal of his own blankets and I because the Great 

 Adventure was ended! 



I lay on my back and looked at the stars, weighing 

 the balance of success and failure and, suddenly, I felt 

 that this was not really the end. Some time, somehow, 

 I knew not where or when, but most assuredly when 

 Allah willed, I should come back to the deserts and the 

 strange, uncharted tracks would bear my camels south 

 again. 



For those who like to know the end of every story be 

 it said that the efficiency which had taken possession of 

 us did not rehnquish its grasp until it had deposited us, 

 bewildered and hopelessly out of place, in the hotel at 

 Alexandria, after a 430-mile motor drive from Siwa. It 

 was complete to the last detail. 



Hot tea steamed beside our flea-bags before the dawn 



