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Updated: April 30, 2025
Long before daylight on the following morning, old Jimmy and I were tracking the camels by torchlight, the horse-bells indicating that those animals were not far off; the camel-bells had gone out of hearing early in the night.
There was a dead silence in the direction of the enemy's encampment, and no sounds but those of our camel-bells disturbed the stillness of the luminous and lunar night. On the following morning, at earliest dawn, the screams and howls of a number of the aborigines grated harshly upon our ears, and we expected and prepared for a fresh attack.
But we were off the road, and a search was begun with lights to find the beaten path. Footsore and hungry, with an almost intolerable thirst, we trudged along till morning, to the ding-dong, ding-dong of the deep-toned camel-bells.
The blue sky flushes to deep purple before him; night falls; all colour is swallowed up in darkness, until the jingling camel-bells receding up the pass cross the dividing ridge, and for him the last silence is begun.
The Master's weariness and pain were forgotten as he crawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady. The sound of distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reached his ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman's. Over the edge of the wady he peered, across a wa'ar, or stony ground covered with mummified scrub.
The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other raised for silence. "Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!" "What now?" demanded the Master. "Bells! Camel-bells!" "Nom d'un, nom!" And the lieutenant drew his gun. The five fugitives stiffened for another battle. They looked well to their weapons.
The tinkle of camel-bells as a caravan of laden beasts swung by, the quick pad-pad of donkeys' hoofs, the howl of a Turkish dog, the cry of a child these and other sounds of the city came through the open window of the ward. His brown face and grizzled beard were oddly framed in the white of the spotless pillow and sheets. His face turned to the door as it opened and the matron entered.
Two o'clock came much sooner than I wished. An Arab came and shook me, and, half asleep, I mounted my mule. To the shouts of the drivers, the tinkle of the small bells, and the ding-dong of the large camel-bells the long caravan passed out into the darkness. Soon we had the outermost courts and palm groves of Baghdad behind us, and before us the silent, sleeping desert.
But I soon discovered that the musical sounds I had heard were the tintinabulations of my camel-bells, tinkling in the evening air, as they came closer and closer over the sandhills to the place where I lay dreaming, and my senses returned at length to their ordinary groove.
There were rich odors abroad, floating subtly from groves and gardens; from the remote distance camel-bells were sounding and exotic cries, "Ayah!" and "oosh! oosh!" as though a drove of strange animals were being rounded up and driven through the crowded streets. "You're welcome to him," replied Jennie pleasantly. "He ought to dance. I sometimes wish I did."
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