Libyan Desert

“ Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite, evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of their Mystery ceremonials.
This "watching" aspect of the Libyan Desert is really natural enough; but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepest revelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. ”

“ When laboriously traversing the hot and arid plateaux of the Libyan Desert, our thoughts divided between the fertile plains of the Nile we have left behind and the still far distant oasis, it is difficult to realize the presence, within a distance of a few hundred yards, of an abundant supply of the purest water. Yet there is little doubt that the water-bearing beds underlie practically the whole of the Libyan Desert, though it is only on the floors of the depressions that they lie within accessible distance of the surface. ”

“ On the right, within a stone's-throw of where you stand, lie the boundless reaches of the Libyan Desert—a land inhospitable and accursed for unnumbered ages and unexplored by all-subduing man even to the present day. ”

“ Not a tree, not a hut, not a living form broke the green monotony of the plain. Behind the temple, but divided from it by a farther space of mounded ruins, rose the mountains—pinky, aerial, with sheeny sand-drifts heaped in the hollows of their bare buttresses and spaces of soft blue shadow in their misty chasms. Where the range receded, a long vista of glittering desert opened to the Libyan horizon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above the truncated walls, with their bright clear colours, the desert appears, and shows quite brown by contrast; one sees the great yellow swell of sand and stones above the pictures of these decapitated people. It rises like a colossal wave and stretches out to bathe the foot of the Libyan mountains beyond. Towards the north and west of the solitudes, shapeless ruins of tawny-coloured blocks follow one another in the sands until the dazzling distance ends in a clear-cut line against the sky. ”

“ I saw, as the dahabijeh glided noiselessly along, the great procession of the wandering hordes quitting their homes, polluted by the conquering stranger, and seeking a new and glorious resting-place in the west far away.
The great and mysterious immensities of the Libyan desert became peopled in my mind with high priests in flowing robes and leopards' skins, with priestesses in heavy plaited wigs, and priests with shaven crowns, with men and women, angular and gaunt, dark and high cheek-boned, flat-footed and large-eyed, such as we see depicted on ancient tombs and papyri. ”

“ Toward the west and south-west, the eye ranged over the great Libyan desert, extending to the utmost verge of the horizon, without a single object to interrupt the dreary horror of the landscape, except dark floating spots, caused by the shadows of passing clouds upon the sand.
“The stones of the platform upon the top, as well as most of the others used in constructing the decreasing ranges from the base upward, are of soft limestone. ”

“ On the other hand, the Libyan Desert, owing to its lying nearer the equator, is subjected to a much hotter sun. Its intensely arid character prevents it from being cooled in any way by evaporation, and it is entirely unshaded by any vegetation. Under the heat of the tropical sun, the stones and sand of which it is composed very rapidly heat in the sun’s rays. The air overhanging it consequently gets greatly heated in its turn, becomes lighter and so rises, and the colder, denser air from the Mediterranean has to rush in and take its place. ”

“ The following are the principal roads that traverse the Libyan Desert: One starting from Giza, near Cairo, runs in a westerly direction through the Wady Natrun and the Wady Moghara, follows the course of the reported Wady el Fardy to El Qara, and then proceeds via Siwa, Jaabub, Jalo and Aujila to the oasis of Abu Naim and on into Tripoli. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One village succeeds another, each alike smiling and sordid under its crown of foliage. The terraces of the Libyan hills, away beyond the Western Nile, scarcely rise above the horizon, and lie like a white edging between the green of the plain and the blue of the sky. The Arabian hills do not form one unbroken line, but a series of mountain masses with their spurs, now approaching the river, and now withdrawing to the desert at almost regular intervals. At the entrance to the valley, rise Gebel Mokattam and Gebel el-Ahmar. ”

“ Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea. Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green sandworm along the course of the river. Here and there it disappears altogether, and the Nile runs between black and sun-cracked hills, with the orange drift-sand lying like glaciers in their valleys. Everywhere one sees traces of vanished races and submerged civilisations. ”

“ But these things have only recently been invented, and there are still many problems that remain unsolved as to “what lies hid behind the ridges” in the vast area that we know as the Libyan Desert, and speculation is so full of fascination, that it seems almost a pity that those problems should ever be solved. ”

“ As I expected to come a good deal in contact with them in the Libyan Desert, after leaving the Algerian Sahara, I spent a considerable time in the public libraries of Algeria and Tunis, in collecting such information as was available on the Senussia and other dervishes of North Africa.
For the benefit of those unacquainted with the subject it may be as well to explain the nature of these dervish orders. They resemble in some ways the monastic communities of Christianity, and are usually organised on much [20] the same lines. ”

“ Climbing to the top of one of the highest of these hillocks, we began by surveying the ground. The desert here is firm to the tread, flat, compact, and thickly strewn with pebbles. Of the fine yellow sand which characterizes the Libyan bank, there is little to be seen, and that little lies like snow in drifts and clefts and hollows, as if carried thither by the wind. The tumuli, however, are mounded of pure alluvial mold, smooth, solid, and symmetrical. ”

“ Examples of closed basins separated from one another by steppe or desert are the oases of Kufra, the Jaghbub-Siwa, Jalo and Lake Chad depressions. In these areas cultivation is frequently intense; salt and fresh water are abundant; and the vegetation sometimes develops luxuriantly into veritable forests of date palms such as exist at Kufra. Between these hollows the intervening Libyan desert is probably the largest and most sterile area of its sort in the world. ”

“ Sportsmen who reckon the success and pleasures of a shooting expedition only by the contents of the resulting bag are advised to give a wide berth to the Libyan Desert, as in that arid region—with the exception of one restricted area far removed from the oasis under description—no game is to be found which cannot be obtained far more easily, and in much greater quantities, in the cultivated plains of the Nile Valley and on the adjoining desert margins. ”

“ In Tripoli my eyes were made sore by the glare of the Libyan wastes and their dust blew across the Nile valley during my stay in Egypt and the British Sudan. The Arabian desert was on both sides of us as we came down the Red Sea and its sands several times covered the ship. We had the rockiest of all deserts in southern Arabia while that of Italian Somaliland was not any better.
Here at Mombasa we are in the luxuriant tropics where the surroundings remind me of Solomon’s song. All nature seems joyful. ”

“ We have our own dromedaries and our own Arab guide on whom we can rely. We can therefore go where we like, and we steer our course from Lake Chad towards the eastern Sudan, where we have already been in the company of General Gordon. But before we come to the Nile we turn off northwards to cross the Libyan desert, the most inaccessible and desolate, and therefore the least known, part of the Sahara. ”

“ With the possibility of another day of scorching simum or, worse still, a violent sandstorm in our teeth, before we reached Dakhla, a delay that would cause us to camp the next night on the wrong side of the dunes, and so entail another twelve hours in the desert before reaching water, might have had very serious consequences.
“If we don’t cross the sand to-morrow,” said Qway impressively, “we may not reach Mut at all. Look at the camels. Look at our tanks. They are nearly empty. We must go on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be noticed that the Tibu domain, with the now absolutely impassable Libyan desert [1117] , almost completely separates the Mediterranean branch from the Hamites proper. Continuity, however, is accorded, both on the north along the shores of the Mediterranean to the Nile Delta (Lower Egypt) , and on the south through Darfur and Kordofan to the White Nile, and thence down the main stream to Upper Egypt, and through Abyssinia, Galla and Somali lands to the Indian Ocean. ”

“ The Libyan Desert has been explored and found to be the most sterile part of the Sahara, being a dried-up basin of a shallow sea below the level of the Mediterranean, the present surface of which was found to be a dry chalk plateau, like the Swabian Alps. ”

“ Although the sands of the Libyan deserts have in some places been drifted into the valley of the Nile, yet these aggressions, says Wilkinson, are far more than counterbalanced by the fertilizing effect of the water which now reaches farther inland towards the desert, so that the number of square miles of arable soil is greater at present than at any previous period. ”

“ It is quite conceivable that it may have required centuries or thousands of years to saturate the huge block of sandstone underlying the Libyan Desert, and even were the original sources of supply entirely cut off at any particular time, the effect on a few hundred bores, discharging only 50,000 cubic metres a day, would not necessarily be appreciable in one, or even five, centuries. ”