Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
73
there I had made fantastic journey to speak to my
princess, and left with my speech unspoken; there,
for the first time in my life, I had truly envisaged the
reality of the romantic middle-aged tourist-tout, had
known myself cursed with such clarity of intro¬
spection as no romantic dreamings might ever serve
to veil. ... So Pelagueya had vanished from Abu
Zabal and my life and wandered brilliant and
unresting—where ? Italy, perhaps, or the gay French
coasts. And how much or ever did she remember
of me or that Gault whom a raiding band of Tuareg
had killed and mutilated in the mountain-passes of
Mesheen ?
Oh, these old, unhappy, far off things !
Now, some quarter of a mile distant from the
house, Kalaun’s lorry halted again, as he had been
bidden to halt it, and then, brown and golden, like
an ancient dragon in the evening light, swung right
again, into the waste, moist fields of Selim Hanna.
Moist we in the Darracq knew them to be even
before we came on them; the Leyland wallowed
like a dinosaur distressed. But in the distance of some
ten yards or so it attained to a track of fair firmness
that ran by the brink of the neglected canal and in
this track we followed, the while the darkness, coming
over the shoulder of the village of Abu Zabal, waited
for us impatiently. And at length Huebsch, elevating
himself from beside me with startling creakings,
sent his immense shout down the still air.
“That’ll do, Kalaun ! Camp her there for the
night.”