“Having left them,” Owen repeated.  “Good God!  I was told he was here.”

“He left here three days ago.”

Owen cursed his friend in Laghouat.  If he had only told him in the beginning of the week!  The dragoman answered: 

“Sidna, vous vous en souvenez”

“Speak to me in Arabic, damn you!  There is nothing to do here but to learn Arabic.”

“Quite true, Sidna, we shall not be able to start to-morrow; the rains are beginning again.”

“Was there ever such luck as mine, to come to the desert, where it never rains, and to find nothing but rain?”—­rain which Owen had never seen equalled except once in Connemara, where he had gone to fish, and it annoyed him to hear that these torrential rains only happened once every three or four years in the Sahara.  He was too annoyed to answer his dragoman.... Enfin, Tahar had left his eagles at Ain Mahdy, and Owen fed them morning and evening, gorging them with food, not knowing that one of the great difficulties is to procure in the trained eagle sufficient hunger to induce him to pursue the quarry.  It was an accident that some friend of Tahar’s surprised Owen feeding the eagles and warned him.

“These eagles will not be able to hunt for weeks now.”

Owen cursed himself and the universe, Allah and the God of Israel, Christ and the prophets.

“But, Sidna, their hunger can be excited by a drug, and this drug is Tahar’s secret.”

“Then to-morrow we start, though there be sand storms or rain storms, whatever the weather may be.”

The dragoman condoned Owen’s mistake in feeding the eagles.

“The gazelles come down from the mountains after the rains; we shall catch sight of some on our way.”

A few hours after he rode up to Owen and said, “Gazelles!”

When he looked to the right of the sunset Owen could see yellow, spotted with black; something was moving over yonder among the patches of rosemary and lavender.

The gazelles were far away when the caravan reached the rosemary, but their smell remained, overpowering that of the rosemary and lavender; it seemed as if the earth itself breathed nothing but musk, and Owen’s surprise increased when he saw the Arabs collecting the droppings, and on asking what use could be made of these he was told that when they were dried they were burnt as pastilles; when the animal had been feeding upon rosemary and lavender they gave out a delicious odour.

Then the dragoman told Owen to prepare for sand grouse; and a short while afterwards one of the Arabs cried, “Grouse!  Grouse!” and a pack of thirty or forty flew away, two falling into the sand.