It was not, I confess, without a sensation of awe that I swept with my sight the vacant round of the horizon, and remembered that I was all alone, and unprovisioned in the midst of the arid waste; but this very awe gave tone and zest to the exultation with which I felt myself launched.  Hitherto, in all my wandering, I had been under the care of other people—­sailors, Tatars, guides, and dragomen had watched over my welfare, but now at last I was here in this African desert, and I myself, and no other, had charge of my life.  I liked the office well.  I had the greasiest part of the day before me, a very fair dromedary, a fur pelisse, and a brace of pistols, but no bread and no water; for that I must ride—­and ride I did.

For several hours I urged forward my beast at a rapid though steady pace, but now the pangs of thirst began to torment me.  I did not relax my pace, however, and I had not suffered long when a moving object appeared in the distance before me.  The intervening space was soon traversed, and I found myself approaching a Bedouin Arab mounted on a camel, attended by another Bedouin on foot.  They stopped.  I saw that, as usual, there hung from the pack-saddle of the camel a large skin water-flask, which seemed to be well filled.  I steered my dromedary close up alongside of the mounted Bedouin, caused my beast to kneel down, then alighted, and keeping the end of the halter in my hand, went up to the mounted Bedouin without speaking, took hold of his water-flask, opened it, and drank long and deep from its leathern lips.  Both of the Bedouins stood fast in amazement and mute horror; and really, if they had never happened to see an European before, the apparition was enough to startle them.  To see for the first time a coat and a waistcoat, with the semblance of a white human head at the top, and for this ghastly figure to come swiftly out of the horizon upon a fleet dromedary, approach them silently and with a demoniacal smile, and drink a deep draught from their water-flask—­this was enough to make the Bedouins stare a little; they, in fact, stared a great deal—­not as Europeans stare, with a restless and puzzled expression of countenance, but with features all fixed and rigid, and with still, glassy eyes.  Before they had time to get decomposed from their state of petrifaction I had remounted my dromedary, and was darting away towards the east.

Without pause or remission of pace I continued to press forward, but after a while I found to my confusion that the slight track which had hitherto guided me now failed altogether.  I began to fear that I must have been all along following the course of some wandering Bedouins, and I felt that if this were the case, my fate was a little uncertain.

I had no compass with me, but I determined upon the eastern point of the horizon as accurately as I could by reference to the sun, and so laid down for myself a way over the pathless sands.