Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/224

210 time the temperature was almost freezing. The same limestone surface which reflects the sun by day, radiates the heat rapidly as soon as the sun goes down; so that while the days are very hot, the nights are very cold. We have to wrap ourselves up warmly, piling blankets and overcoats upon our camp-beds, and then are sometimes almost frozen. Yet while it required our utmost efforts, even under shelter, to keep our blood stirring, the Arabs slept in the open air, with only their thin covering, and such warmth as they might get from their camp-fires.

The next morning we had a new experience. After weeks of unclouded sky in Egypt and on the desert, it was a relief to see signs of rain. Dark clouds gathered in the west. This we took to indicate our approach to the sea. It was probable that there had been a great storm on the Mediterranean, the skirts of which reached us, although we were still at a distance of perhaps a hundred miles. We had several light showers, which threatened a bad day for marching; yet we were so anxious to press on that we struck our tents and started, keeping along the Wady el Arish, which we left only to enter on a broad plain covered with flint stones, which continued, with occasional intervals, perhaps twenty miles. This flinty desert is quite different from the sandy desert; its surface is as hard as a stone, and the tracks across it seem as if they had been worn by the footsteps of caravans that had passed along the same line for generations.

Notwithstanding the occasional showers, we escaped pretty well in the morning; but in the afternoon the clouds again appeared, yet held off for a time, clinging to a chain of mountains in the west, and we thought we should run the gauntlet in safety. But suddenly, as if they espied the fugitives on the plain, they advanced directly towards us. "Now we are in for it!" said the