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Updated: July 25, 2025
It was now the twelfth day's journey, but its closing did not bring Abdel-Hassan and his servants to the long-expected spring. From the ancient line of travel they had wandered far away, And at evening, faint and weary, on a waste of Desert lay. Fainting men and famished camels stretched them round the master's tent; For the water-skins were empty, and the dates were nearly spent.
In winter the cold is intense. Pottinger, the traveller, relates that on the 7th of February, 1810, when at Baghivana, five marches from Kelát, his water-skins were frozen into masses of ice, and seven days afterwards, at Kelát, he found the frost so intense that water froze instantly when thrown upon the ground.
They traversed the square, passed the mosque, turned down a narrow street, and in five minutes crossed the line that bounded the oasis, and entered upon the desert. Immediately the dun leader took his place at the left and slightly in advance. The fourth on the right of the dun was the black racer. He carried two water-skins and Abdullah's saddle.
The water is excellent, much better than that of any other town of the Hedjaz, where the inhabitants are not industrious enough to form similar cisterns. When the winter-rains fail, the inhabitants of Yembo suffer severely, and are obliged to fill their water-skins at the distant wells of Aseylya.
Here for a quarter of an hour they halted, refilled their water-skins, gave the horses a drink and a handful of dried dates, eat a few themselves, and then started on their long ride.
On the morning following we mounted our horses at sunrise, and by mid-day arrived at a fine pond of water at the foot of a high rock, at no great distance from the river, where we refreshed ourselves and filled the water-skins, as at this place the roads turns into the Desert. We marched from the middle of the afternoon till an hour after midnight, when we halted to sleep.
In the rear with the king, but always on the road in front of him, some ten or twelve thousand men with water-skins who go seeking water, and place themselves along the road to give water to those who have no one to bring it to them; this is done so that none of the people should die of thirst.
As they rode past we opened a smart fire and dropped four of them; the others rode up the valley, so as to cut us off from going farther. We filled our water-skins and got the horses half-way up as you saw, and then lighted a fire and cooked. We kept watch all night, two down below and one at the top; but everything was quiet, and we guessed they were waiting for others to come up.
At the stores were bought two sacks of flour and two sides of bacon, a frying pan, saucepan, baking pot, and a good supply of tea and sugar; four large water-skins, five small ones, completed their purchases, with the exception of shovels, picks, and pails for washing the gravel. "Going up among the hills again, Dave?" remarked the store-keeper, with whom the miners had often dealt before.
I am quite sure that when I want it I have it'? Nothing! There may be wells to which a man has to go, as the Bedouin in the desert has to go, with empty water-skins, many a day's journey, and it comes to be a fight between the physical endurance of the man and the weary distance between him and the spring.
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