William Joseph Harding King

“ A journey on a fine night in the desert is always an experience to remember, and the almost perfect silence in which we marched made it more impressive than usual. Hardly a sound was to be heard beyond the gentle shuffling of the camels’ feet on the smooth sand, the soft clinking of their chain bridles, the occasional creak of a rope against the baggage, and the hollow splashing of the water to and fro in the half empty tanks. ”

“ A long night march seems interminable. The slow, monotonous stride of the camels, regular as the beat of a pendulum, produces an almost mesmeric effect as one plods along, mile after mile, hour after hour, beside them over the dreary waste of starlit desert.
The most trying part of a night march is the period just before dawn. Then one’s vitality is at its lowest, and one feels most the fatigue of the long night’s journey. A great silence falls over the caravan at these times. The whole desert seems dead and unutterably dull and dreary, and nothing at all seems in the least worth while. ”

“ The moon was too faint and low at the time for any tracks to be visible. The whole desert was bathed in a faint and ghostly light that made it impossible to see any distance; so after watching for some time, and hearing no further sounds, I returned and lay down for the night about a hundred yards from Abd er Rahman and his camels.
It is curious how easily, in the absolute calm of a desert night, the slightest sound is audible, and how quickly one wakes at the faintest unusual noise. ”

“ As wheeled conveyances are entirely unknown in the oasis the presence of the tracks was a perfect mystery. It was not till my return to the oasis that I learnt their history. At least forty years before, the father of the ’omda of Rashida had imported a cart into the oasis from the Nile Valley, in order to fetch from the gritstone hill two millstones we had seen in a mill in his village.
The permanence of tracks in certain kinds of desert is well known to anyone with any experience of desert life. ”

“ In making my plans to set out into the unknown part of the Libyan Desert beyond Dakhla, I found myself at once confronted by a serious difficulty of a distinctly unusual nature. Generally, when a traveller starts on a journey, he has some definite object in view—he is going to climb a particular mountain, to follow a certain river to its source, to complete the survey of some lake that has been found, or to look for some place that has been reported to exist on native information—but in this part there was no such object available. ”

“ The swirling clouds of sand, driven by the furious desert gales, have in many places not only shaped the hard limestone into long ridges running up and down wind, but have even cut grooves in the ridges themselves, as though with a gigantic gouge, forming a type of desert known to the natives as kharashef. ”

“ Instead of the sand-covered desert to the south-west of Dakhla shown on the maps, the whole surface consisted of bare Nubian sandstone—there was no sign of the limestone that caps the plateau near the Nile Valley. The hill on which we stood was considerably higher than Dakhla, and from our elevated position we could see a great distance; but not a trace was there to be seen of the “great sea of impassable sand” that was shown on the maps of the south-west of the oasis. Never had an unsuspecting traveller been so hopelessly misled by an imaginative geographer. ”

“ It is extraordinary how many of my informants regarded the desert as “a land of romance.” No doubt in many cases distance lends enchantment to the view, and covers it with a certain amount of glamour; but a very slight experience of these arid wastes is calculated completely to shatter the spell. Romance is merely the degenerate offspring of imagination and ignorance. There can be few parts of the world where one is so much up against hard cold facts as one is in the desert. ”

“ Their resentment at his conduct in the desert had had time to cool down. He had been bullied by a fellah mamur, been forced to confess in public that he had disgraced himself by getting lost in the desert, had been arrested by a Sudani and publicly paraded through the oasis dressed as a fellah. His humiliation was complete and could scarcely have been more thorough. The bedawin instinct for revenge had been amply satisfied. Hatred is generally largely composed of fear, or jealousy, and there was certainly no room for either where Qway was concerned. ”

“ Curious as it may seem, dunes are sometimes almost as difficult to cross in the blazing sunshine at noon as they are in the dark. The intense glare at this time of day makes the almost white sand of which they are composed most painful to look at, and the total absence of any shade prevents their shape being seen and makes even the ripples practically invisible. ”

“ I will stay behind and die. I cannot walk any more. I am tired. You go on, sir, and save yourselves. I will stay here and die in the desert.”
We had had many scenes of this kind with Khalil, and the bedawin never failed to enjoy them thoroughly.
“What is he saying?” asked Qway.
I translated as well as I could.
“Malaysh” (“it’s of no consequence”) , replied Qway calmly. “Let him stay behind and die if he wants to. Whack the camels, Abd er Rahman, and let’s go. We can’t wait. We are in the desert, and short of water.”
“I shall die,” sobbed Khalil. ”

“ Old Sheykh Mawhub’s religion was obviously a very real and genuine thing, but that of his sons was, from all I heard and saw, largely a matter of conforming to the outward formalities of their order. But the prestige of the sect they belonged to was so great that, with the simple inhabitants of the oasis, their backslidings were overlooked, and almost regarded as one of the privileges of their holy character. In North Africa it is only necessary to label yourself as a holy man, to say enough prayers and fast occasionally, and you can do pretty much what you like in the meantime. ”

“ Beyond lay the real Egypt and desert, a land where afrits, ghuls, genii and all the other creatures of the native superstitions are matters of everyday occurrence; where lost oases and enchanted cities lie in the desert sands, where the natives are still unspoiled by contact with Europeans, and where most of the men are pleasing, and, though the prospect is vile, that could not destroy the attraction that lay in the fact that about a million square miles of it were quite unknown, and waiting to be explored. ”

“ The former seems to be resident in Dakhla all the year round; but the latter are migrants, coming into the oasis in March and returning in the autumn after the date harvest. They take somewhat the place in Dakhla that the cuckoo does in England, their advent being regarded as a sign that the winter is past and the summer close at hand. The palm groves of the oasis, [285] when the hot weather comes on, swarm with these pretty little birds, whose soft cooing as they sit swaying in the palm tops is a most melodious sound—extremely pleasant and soothing after a long hot desert journey. ”

“ Qway was an unusually intelligent specimen of the bedawin Arabs—a race who are by no means so stupid as they are sometimes represented. There was little that he did not know about the desert and its ways, and he was extraordinarily quick to pick up any little European dodges, such as map-making to scale, that I showed him; but on questions connected with irrigation, cultivation, building, or anything that had a bearing on the life of the fellahin, he was—or professed to be—entirely ignorant. ”

“ There are hundreds of the same class of men still to be found practising their arts on the credulous natives of Egypt, and one of the principal subjects upon which they are even now consulted is the recovery of buried treasure. There is a sheykh el afrit (ruler of spirits) in almost every village, to whom the inhabitants resort to induce him by means of the pool of ink, or some similar method, to foretell the future or to guide them to where treasure has been buried. Some of them perhaps believe in their own powers, but the majority are probably little more than impostors. ”

“ Half an hour’s journey through this scrub-covered area brought us to the palm groves and village of Bulaq, on the south side of which I pitched my camp. Bulaq, though one of the largest villages of the oasis, with a population of about one thousand, is quite uninteresting. Its palm groves and cultivated land lie on its eastern side; on the north, south and west it is bounded by open sandy desert. It is chiefly noted as being the main centre in the oasis for the manufacture of mats and baskets, made chiefly from the leaves of the numerous Dom palms growing in the neighbourhood. ”

“ The night’s rest that I got in Kharga was most welcome; there had not been a night since leaving Qasr Farafra, a fortnight before, when I had been able to get more than a very limited amount of sleep.
A sleeping man is so utterly defenceless that I had been put to great shifts to get any rest at all on the five days’ journey from Bu Mungar to Dakhla. It was not till we got to Mut that I felt I could trust my men enough to risk being caught by them asleep. Even while inhabiting the old store, Dahab and I took it in turns to keep watch during the night. ”

“ In many cases one’s host is a private individual, or, if he be an ’omda, entertains one in his private capacity. But usually when invited to partake of a meal or to stay with an ’omda, one is in reality the guest of the entire village, though the fact may not be apparent. The ’omdas of Dakhla Oasis have the right to take a small proportion of the flow of any new well sunk in their district, to pay for the hospitality they show to the strangers that come to their village. ”

“ They claim to be descended from an afrit, whom, for some crime, either David or Solomon shut up in a box, till he grew to such an enormous size that he burst it open. There still exists apparently a mongrel Bedayat—Tibbu tribe, known as the M’Khiat er Rih, that possess the miraculous power of being able to walk over sand without leaving any tracks behind them—a most useful accomplishment in the desert for a race of born freebooters. This peculiarity they owe to the fact that wherever they go they are followed by a wind that immediately obliterates their footprints! ”

“ Not only were insects, reptiles and birds fairly well represented in the desert, but even mammals were not unknown. In addition to the desert rats, about eighty miles to the south of Dakhla I came across the remains of a gazelle, but possibly the poor little beast had only wandered out into the desert to die. Small foxes, though they existed in the oasis, I never saw in the desert—the rats would not have been so numerous if I had. The tracks of a larger fox were seen several times, often several days’ journey away from an oasis. ”

“ Dahab, he added, was of no use in the desert, as he was only a cook, and I could do without him, and, as we were short of water, we had better get rid of him. At the end he was fairly shouting at me with rage, and, as he was not in a state to listen to arguments, I walked away from the camp into the desert to give him time to cool down.
A Sudani at heart is a savage, and if a savage thinks he is deprived of the necessaries of life he is very apt to fall back upon primitive methods, and is quite capable of “getting rid” of anyone who stands between him and his water supply. ”

“ It is very difficult to see where to draw the line. The system adopted in Algeria of describing places like Kharga and Wad Ghirh as groups of oases—or oasis-archipelagos, as they are sometimes called—seems preferable to the Egyptian plan of alluding to them as a single oasis. It would seem advisable to confine the term oasis to a place which is actually cultivated, whether continuously inhabited or not, and to use the word hattia for “fertile spots” in the desert where no cultivation exists. The dividing-line, however, between a hattia and a deserted oasis would not be very sharply drawn. ”

“ I was myself at one time known as “Abu Zerzura,” the “Father of Zerzura,” because I was supposed to be looking for that oasis, and later on as “Abu Ramal,” “the father of sand,” because I spent so much time among the dunes.
Bu el Agul means the “father of hobbles.” One of the greatest risks that an inexperienced Arab runs, when travelling alone in the desert, is that of allowing his camel to break loose and escape during the night. Then, unless he be near a well, having no beast to carry his water-skin, his fate is probably sealed. Many lives have been lost in this way. ”

“ A good guide can not only steer by the stars and sun, but is able to get on almost equally well without them. On the darkest and most overcast night, Qway never had the slightest doubt as to the direction in which our road lay—and this too in a part of the desert which he had previously never visited. ”

“ I never saw a specimen of the waran, or large lizard, in the desert, but on one occasion saw what looked like its track. It resembled the trail of a large-bodied lizard crawling slowly over the sand. My men, however, declared it to be the track of an issulla, which they described as a creature between a snake and a lizard in shape, which, when approached, will fly at an intruder, rising into the air after a rapid run on membraneous wings stretched between its legs—acting apparently somewhat like an aeroplane. ”

“ I told him there were two unusually fine camels in the yard next to my caravan, and suggested that as a Government official going back to the Nile on duty, he had the power to commandeer them and their drivers, and suggested that he should do so. No petty native official can resist the temptation to commandeer anything he has a right to in his district—it is a relic of the old corrupt Turkish rule. The mamur jumped at the idea and departed shortly after with a very sulky camel driver and two of the finest camels owned by the Senussi. ”

“ The majority of the natives of these oases are miserably poor, and it goes much against the grain for a European to have to live upon them in this way. But to refuse their hospitality would be considered as a slight, if not as an actual insult, and so would any attempt to offer them any payment in return.
The meals, as a rule, were quite well cooked, and usually better than I got in camp. It was the tea and cigarettes that were such a trial. The one luxury the inhabitants of the oasis allow themselves is tea; even the poorest of them consume enormous quantities. ”

“ It is the impossibility of inducing rival dervishes to combine, more perhaps than anything else, that makes that wild dream of Pan-islam, by which all Mohammedans are to unite to get rid of their European rulers, such a hopelessly impossible scheme.
A very large proportion of the Moslem natives of North Africa belong to one, or more, of these orders. But it is seldom that a native can be found to discuss at all freely [21] the particular one to which he belongs. A knowledge, however, of them and of the peculiarities by which the followers of each sect can be identified, is most useful. ”

“ The Libyan Desert, that in the past has to a great extent defied the efforts of all its explorers, is bound before long to give up its secrets. Suitably designed cars, accompanied perhaps by a scouting plane, our enemies against which even the most avid desert is almost defenceless, though one cannot but regret the necessity for such prosaic mechanical aids, they unquestionably afford an ideal method of conducting long pioneer explorations in a waterless desert. ”

“ One of the problems of the Libyan Desert, beyond the western frontier of Egypt, is that of the oasis known as Zerzura, or “The oasis of the Blacks.” It was, I believe, first heard of by Rohlfs, who, in his attempt to go westward from Dakhla Oasis to Kufara, found the sand dunes [53] impassable for his big caravan, and so had to turn up to the north and make for the oasis of Siwa instead. During this journey he encountered three blacks, who said that they were escaped slaves from the oasis of Zerzura, a place that they described as being some distance to the west of his route. ”