Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/338

322 from the northeast and southwest, we found a small French administrative village with a civil official and a guard of Arab horsemen. After being served coffee by the young and very chic Parisian wife of the official, we continued on through another plain of alfa-grass, but this time streaked with ever-increasing bands of naked clay and sand set with small stones. Not a living being, not a bird nor even a lizard was to be seen, with the exception of a small flock of bustards which we sighted near the bed of a dried stream. Monsieur de Vitasse and I assembled our guns and tried to stalk them but were unsuccessful in getting within range. Disgusted with our failure, we put our guns back in their cases, only to see a magnificent specimen rise within fifty yards of the car out of some thick grass that grew in a ditch. A real misfortune! But I knew it would be so, as I met an old Arab woman just as I was leaving the house in Berguent to enter the car. Hunting tradition the world round has well established the fact that to meet an old woman on the way to the field tolls the knell of all chance. One can then miss an elephant at five paces, to say nothing of a flying bustard or a speeding gazelle.

As we journeyed, we did not see a single trace of man. Farther on a string of camels appeared from behind a low hill and soon lost itself around another. But when we entered the region of Oglat ben Abd el-Jebbar with its good wells, we came upon many herds and their attending nomads. Then soon the prairie was pressed into a narrow valley between flanking mountains, high up on one of which we sighted some European buildings and telegraph poles.