CHAPTER XLIX
FIRST GLIMPSE OF AN ANCIENT FRONTIER
THE interest of the ground we had now reached was so great that for the sake of closer exploration I would gladly have left our camp where it had been pitched at nightfall, though dismal were its surroundings. But the total want of water and grazing obliged us to push on next morning. For two miles or so we continued to thread a maze of steep clay terraces and then emerged on the north edge of a lagoon-like dry bed which stretched away to the south-west. Though bare of all vegetation, it showed shallow but unmistakable shore lines as if it had held water quite recently. Our guide held on to a south-east course, and after another mile or so we found ourselves at the mouth of a broad and deeply cut flood-bed, recalling an Arabian or Egyptian Wadi. As we moved up its bottom, here close on a mile wide, the sandy soil changed rapidly to a coarse gravel. In the haze raised by the windy night the scenery looked doubly sombre and desolate.
As the Wadi could be seen steadily ascending eastward, I soon realized that we had reached a terminal bed of the Su-lo Ho. But we were not to follow it long ; for when the guide espied a narrow gorge opening into the Wadi from the south he struck for it as if at last quite assured of his bearings, and with relief pointed to the well-marked track we found leading up it. After a sharp pull up between steep cliffs of consolidated gravel, we found ourselves on a flat pebble-covered plateau fully one hundred feet above the bottom of the Wadi. The latter was cut in so abruptly that, continuing our course to the south-east, we soon completely lost sight of it. This old
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