Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 73: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ba ee ~S _. = oe hb tea I 3° 8 Pla Ti Pee ie te a x ae : Ca ee ay iv ri sg, Set ae dee ek ; ee eae: % . FORTY DAY ROAD 73 harmed. Soon we reach Kharga—and the end of the Road. The Egyptians—” he spat on the ground—“‘ at the customs there will tax everything. So we put the children in the empty water-skins, and sometimes they are not noticed.” We moved off, and soon were winding down a rocky gorge. I began to feel very tired. And then everything became fainter and fainter. % I woke, alone and shivering, to see vast, thousand-foot cliffs : ringed round me, with the flat basin of the oasis laid out below - At once, I knew that it was Kharga. I stumbled down to the nearest patch of millet, and there was x a fellah watering it from an irrigation ditch. As he swung up } the long counterbalanced pole, I saw that the water receptacle at the other end was something that I knew and could understand a —a four-gailon petrol-tin. The fellah took me to the police-post. They kept me in hospital for a long time, and I played dumb © and didn’t know a thing. I expect you'll agree I was right. In | the end they decided that it was just possible for someone with | loss of memory to walk a hundred and ten miles in four days } and nights without water, and survive. That was the distance from where I vanished on my midnight walk to the point where I surfaced at Kharga. They couldn’t explain why, when Hank had called for search by radio, the planes found no trace of me. I kept my mouth shut, and did a little reading and a few sums. I couldn’t find out much about the Forty Day Road—except that it was still in use in 1795, and was supposed to have been over a thousand miles long; perhaps forty stages of about twenty-seven miles each. You see, four times twenty-seven is nearly a hundred and ten. So I kept my mouth shut—tight. Tighter still when they tried to ask me about those raw, chafed rings that were seared into each wrist. * * * H, EAU Water, plain drinking-water, is practically unknown in Paris. . .. An English friend of mine once ordered plain water in a restaurant and the waiter did not seem to understand. ‘““ Mineral water? . . . Soda water?’ he suggested hopefully. “No,” my friend insisted. “‘ Ordinary, plain drinking-water. You know perfectly well what I mean.” The gargon thought the proposition over for another moment and then a glimmer of under- standing appeared in his eyes: ‘‘ Oh—you mean umbrella juice?” GeorGE Mikes, Little Cabbages comiclooks.comnn