The Quest of Julian Day Read Online Free PDF

of crossing those three hundred miles of waterless desert.’
    Sir Walter paused and, immensely interested in what he had been telling me, I asked quickly, ‘Did he succeed in finding a way?’
    â€˜The victories of the Persians were largely due to the admirable staff-work they put in before initiating any fresh campaign, and campaigns were leisurely things in those days,’ he answered slowly. ‘Time was no object, and while he lorded it in Thebes, Cambyses prepared for his march by making good the lack of wells in a very ingenious manner.
    â€˜He collected thirty thousand wine-jars, filled them with water and despatched them with a huge caravan one day’s march into the desert. There they were buried in the sand so that the water should not evaporate. The caravan then returned and picked up another thirty thousand jars which they took two days’ march into the desert and buried. And so on and so on until, after many months’ labour, he had established a complete chain of halting-places for his army, at each of which they would have an ample supply of water, along a five hundred mile route direct to the Oasis of Jupiter-Ammon.
    â€˜When the time came for Cambyses to march he was a sick man. He retained sufficient men with him to keep Egypt in subjection but sent fifty thousand of his finest troops off into the desert, meaning to follow them afterwards. As he considered Thebes as no more than a temporary resting-place in his great march to conquer the known world, he naturally sent with the Army the bulk of the immense spoils which he had taken from the Egyptian temples. There can be no doubt about that; otherwise we should have found them by now either inEgypt itself or during our excavations in the Persian capital had he sent them back there.
    â€˜Cambyses’ legions set out on their march but when they were two-thirds of their way across the desert their Senussi guides deliberately misled them, preferring death for themselves to opening the way to the conquest of their people. The story of their marches and counter-marches lost in the burning sand; of their last, desperate endeavour to stagger back across the endless miles to the Nile and safety is one no man will ever know. All history tells us is that not a single Persian arrived at the Oasis of Jupiter-Ammon, and that no survivor ever returned to tell Cambyses the fate of his legions. That great army, carrying with it the accumulated treasures of five thousand years of civilisation, vanished utterly, the 50,000 men in it perishing of sunstroke and thirst, lying down to die where the last stages of exhaustion overcame them; and no trace of the place where they foundered, out there in the limitless desert, has ever yet been discovered.’
    â€˜What an amazing story!’ I exclaimed.
    Sir Walter smiled. ‘It
is
amazing, but none the less true. If you re-read your Herodotus, you’ll find that he gives quite a lengthy account of this appalling calamity. But the point is that I am in a position to confirm it owing to a discovery I made during my last season’s work in Egypt.’
    â€˜How in the world did you manage that?’
    â€˜I was excavating in the Oasis of Dakhla, some 250 miles west of Luxor, which was the jumping-off place used by Cambyses’ army. I dug up a small steel, or memorial tablet, there. It was broken into two pieces and I had no opportunity to translate it until late in the spring when our diggings had been closed down for the year.
    â€˜The tablet had been erected by one Heru-tem, Captain of a thousand, and he recorded on it that he was a survivor of Cambyses’ lost army. After many terrible days in the desert he had managed to get back to the Oasis, but he knew that the Great King would certainly kill him in his anger if he reported the appalling fate which had overtaken all his finest regiments. Very wisely, Heru-tem never returned to Thebes but settled under another name as a