Page:Monthly scrap book, for October.pdf/4

The fourth, fifth, and sixth days' marches ⟨on⟩ the Cairo Hadj, through the deserts of Tyh, are exceedingly exhausting and dangerous. The weary pilgrims halt for a day and a night at the castle of Nakhel, in the middle of the desert where they replenish their water-skins; but ⟨they⟩ march again in the evening of the seventh day and, finding no water in their route, halt not ⟨till⟩ the morning of the tenth, when they have reached the plain and castle of Akaba. This district presents fearful monuments of the sufferings of the caravan. "Past the Akaba," says Burckhard "near the head of the Red Sea, the bones of dead camels are the only guides of the pilgrim through the wastes of sand." It is, perhaps, rarely that the pilgrims perish with thirst on the road, unless some of them wander from the main body; or the caravan, losing its way, overshoots the day's station. Where there are no landmarks but those which are formed by the traces of former devastation—by "the bones of dead camels"—such ⟨a⟩ circumstance is not difficult to happen even to the most experienced guides. The water-skins are in such cases, emptied, and horses and men perish in a state of miserable despair, while the wearied camels drop with exhaustation. Probably these afflictions happen more frequently to private caravans than to those of the pilgrimage. Burckhard relates an interestiug story of such an event in the Nubian desert, which beautifully illustrates the surprising instinct of the camel. It was told to him by a man who had himself suffered all the pangs of death: