Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

THE DESERT JOURNEY 161
that the uglier the desert the more seductive the mirage ?
(Granted, the said bewitching mirage is as much in you
as it is in the treacherous desert, yet is it not equally
certain that, given no desert, there can be no mirage ?)
Be that as it may, here is the true tale of a mirage. Back
came our faggot-searchers one by one, solemnly reporting
a lake to be seen away on the Southern skyline. The
oldest Biheans with us stoutly refused to believe the thing,
until finally the wrangle came to an issue in my oflfering
to accompany four of our faithfuls to see for ourselves ;
the^ro lake and ^ro mirage factions being both repre-
sented. (Rather reminiscent, this, of the pro water, pro
fire sections we left behind. ) So off we start, heading due
South and tramping for two solid hours ; the pro lake
prophets developing a somewhat chastened optimism the
farther we penetrated into the void. On and on we go,
hope finally sinking so low that it seems to ooze out of
our boots—no lake visible, or likely to be. Only the same
old outlook on a limitless ocean of sand. Yet here is a
blatant "_pro-laker" at your elbow indoctrinating you
with his eloquent fiction of a man-in-the-moon oasis, the
earnest entreaty of the man almost winning you over to
his dream. Certain it is, I have the black and white of
my note-book for it, that I too caught the same momen-
tary mirage, and declared my own private and unalterable
conviction that the men were right, for—for there was a
lake ! But the Bihean who was our guide enjoyed my
greenness, and for many a day afterwards when we met,
his face wore a suspicious smile suggestive of the fact that