Chapter I: The Libyan Desert and Its Oases

Contrast of Libyan Desert and Nile Valley — Area and Geographical Position — Barrenness — Dunes and Sand-submerged Areas — Underlying Water-charged Sandstones — Early History of Oases — Condition in Prehistoric Times — Cultivated Lands and Wells.

No more striking contrast can be imagined than that between the intensely cultivated Valley of the Nile and the barren deserts on either side. There are arid wastes in many parts of the world—in Australia, in the Western States of America, in Asia—but in point of desolateness, in the absence of animal and vegetable life, there is probably nothing to rival the greater portion of the Libyan Desert, on the west side of the Nile. Its barrenness is aggressive; it is not necessary to travel far to make its acquaintance; so sharp is the junction that, in a single step, one may pass from the richly cultivated alluvial soil of the Nile to the bare sandy plains which skirt the more rocky interior of the desert. Along the borders of the Egyptian wastes one generally looks in vain for the Persian poet’s

“Strip of herbage strown,
That just divides the desert from the sown.”

Geographically the Libyan Desert is the eastern and most inhospitable portion of the Sahara, or Great Desert of Africa. On the north and east its boundaries are clearly defined by the Mediterranean Sea and the Valley of the Nile; on the south it is bounded by the Darfur and Kordofan regions of the Egyptian Sudan; to the south-west its limits may be regarded as coterminous with the elevated districts of Tibesti; while on the west it stretches to the outlying oases of Fezzan and Tripoli. Its area is about 850,000 square miles, or approximately seven times that of the British Isles.

With the exception of a narrow belt fringing the Mediterranean, the region is, to all intents and purposes, rainless, the occasional thunderstorms being extremely local, and seldom breaking over the same district in two consecutive years. In the more elevated deserts on the eastern side of the Nile rains appear to be of sufficiently frequent occurrence to maintain a water-supply in the isolated water-holes and valley-springs, and to allow of the growth of a fairly permanent though scanty herbage in the more favoured areas. The Eastern desert does, therefore, to some extent, support a migratory Arab population. On the other hand, the greater portion of the Libyan Desert is quite devoid of vegetation and water-holes, and is, in consequence, uninhabited even by nomad tribes. At the same time, the extreme barrenness of the region as a whole is in great measure counterbalanced by a number of isolated fertile oases, in which there is a permanent resident population, deriving its water-supplies entirely from underground sources.

The term ‘oasis,’ an ancient Egyptian word signifying a resting-place, in its strict sense means a fertile spot in a desert, but in Egypt has usually been applied to a depression as a whole, each individual cultivated area being known by the name of the well from which its water is derived. The chief groups of oases in the Libyan Desert are the Siwan on the north, that of Kufra on the west, and the Egyptian, including the four large oases of Baharia, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga, on the east. The present volume deals more especially with the last of these.

The Libyan Desert is primarily divisible into two entirely different parts, distinguished by the presence or absence of surface accumulations of blown sand. Extensive dunes are confined to the western portion, where areas of hundreds of square miles are literally buried under deep seas of sand, blown into more or less parallel dunes of great height, lying N.N.W. and S.S.E., in the direction of the prevailing winds. In this country it is almost impossible to travel in a latitudinal direction, so that the sand-covered area forms an effective barrier between the Egyptian oases and Kufra, one of the strongholds and, at any rate until recently, the headquarters of the powerful Senussi sect. It is probable that, within the last century, the area of this sand has extended considerably to the south, as an old caravan road trending westwards, and believed to have originally connected the oases of Dakhla and Kufra, is now lost in the dunes. As long ago as 1874 some of the members of the Rohlfs expedition made an attempt to penetrate westwards from Dakhla, but on reaching the edge of the great sand-region, about 170 kilometres W.S.W. of Qasr Dakhl, were compelled to turn northwards and travel in a direction parallel to the lines of dunes, from which they emerged, after a long and wearisome journey of 400 kilometres, in the neighbourhood of the oasis of Siwa. Outlying portions of this sand invade the Egyptian oases; for instance, the depression of El Daila, lying to the west of Farafra, is to a great extent filled with blown sand, while an extensive area in the south of Farafra itself is buried under dunes.

On the eastern portion the sand is for the most part confined to isolated lines of dunes, the most remarkable being that known as the Abu Mohariq. This commences in latitude 29° 45′ north, at Arûs el Buqar, some 50 kilometres south-west of the Mogara swamp, in the low country to the south of the great east and west Miocene escarpment. From Arûs el Buqar the Abu Mohariq sand-belt runs in an almost straight and unbroken line across the Libyan plateau to the oasis of Kharga, through which it continues into the desert to the south. The average breadth of this line of dunes is only some 6 or 7 kilometres, whereas its length cannot be less than 650. Less extensive accumulations of blown sand are found in the oases themselves, in the depressions of Gharaq and Muailla to the south of the Fayûm, and encroaching on the cultivated lands of the Nile Valley between Bahnessa and Mellawi.

The eastern part of the Libyan Desert, in which are situated the Egyptian oases, is itself divisible into three areas having essentially different characters, the northern being an undulating rolling country of sandstones, grits, and gravels; the central consisting of bare elevated limestone plateaux; the southern a lower-lying expanse of rugged sandstone, broken only occasionally by ridges and bosses of granite and other crystalline rocks.

The Egyptian oases are deep and broad hollows or depressions in the Libyan Desert plateau. In position they appear to coincide with areas where rocks of comparative softness became exposed at the surface during the gradual lowering of the country by denudation. At such points the general rate of weathering must have become greatly accelerated, with the result that those vast depressions, which form such conspicuous features in the configuration of the country at the present day, were eventually cut out.

Underlying the greater part of the Libyan Desert are porous sandstones, and these, when pierced by deep borings put down from the lower-lying parts of the floors of the depressions, yield abundant supplies of water of remarkable purity. As these sandstones, as well as the shales with which they are associated, have a general dip or inclination from south to north, we are led to infer that they outcrop or come to the surface to the south, so that in all probability the water with which they are so highly charged has its origin in that direction. Whether the water obtains access to the sandstones by direct infiltration of the rains of Abyssinia or the Sudan, from the swamps of the sudd region of the Upper Nile, or from the Nile itself in the Nubian reaches, has not yet been decided with certainty. Recent observations, however, show that far more water is lost in some reaches of the Nile than can be accounted for by irrigation and evaporation, and it seems probable, therefore, that the excess disappears by infiltration into these sandstones.

Little is known of the early history of the oases, though the remains of ancient towns and cemeteries are abundant, and only await systematic excavation by Egyptologists to bring our knowledge of this part of Egypt into line with that of the Nile Valley. That the oases were inhabited in prehistoric times is evident from the occurrence of flint implements of Palæolithic types, both on the margins of the surrounding plateaux and within the depressions, though there is not at present sufficient evidence to enable us to affirm that the makers and users of these flints were contemporaneous with Palæolithic man in Europe. Implements of Neolithic type, often of finished workmanship, are, moreover, common in places on the floors of the depressions, but it is probable that these were in use well into the historic period.

In historic times the oases, according to Sayce, were governed by Egyptian Kings in the eighteenth dynasty (1545-1350 B.C.), and the oldest monuments as yet found in the oases-depressions date from this period. The most important of the earlier remains belong, however, to the Persian epoch, notably the temple of Hibis near the modern village of Kharga, which was built by Darius. Ptolemaic remains are also known in Kharga, but the greater number of the historical monuments date from the time of Roman occupation, when the oases appear to have attained a considerable degree of prosperity, which continued to Coptic times. Since the Mohammedan conquest of Egypt they have fallen into a state of neglect, and with the consequent diminution of the water-supply the population has decreased, and large areas of formerly fertile country have been absorbed by the surrounding desert.

It is interesting to speculate on the conditions which obtained in Kharga before the first borings were made, as at the present day we cannot point, so far as I am aware, to a single natural efflux of water on the floor of the depression. Surface-water, of quite a different character from the deep-seated water, is met with at comparatively shallow depths in various localities, and may either represent drainage water from the flowing wells and cultivated tracts, or be water which has escaped from the underground sandstones and found its way to the surface through fissures. Probably it is derived from both sources. In prehistoric times natural springs fed through fissures may have existed here and there within the depressions; and in any case it is probable that prehistoric man obtained sufficient supplies by sinking wells into the upper sandstones, which in some parts of the oasis occur at or near the surface, and contain large quantities of sub-surface or sub-artesian water. Nothing is known as to when flowing wells were first obtained, or by whom the original deep borings were made, and no traces of the implements used have been discovered. Many of these ancient wells, frequently over 120 metres in depth, continue to flow at the present day, although in most cases with a greatly diminished output; a few, however, are still running day and night at the rate of several hundred gallons a minute.

In some parts of the oases water-bearing sandstones occur at or near the surface, and from these beds the Romans obtained additional supplies by the excavation of underground collecting tunnels. Subterranean works of this description are found in all the oases, the most remarkable being in Baharia and at Um el Dabâdib and Jebel Lebekha in Kharga. They are frequently of great length, cut throughout in solid rock, and connected with the surface above by numerous vertical air-shafts. Many of the latter measure from 30 to 50 metres in depth, so that the construction of these and the horizontal carrying channels must have involved an immense amount of labour.

In Roman times water-stations appear to have been maintained at frequent intervals on the desert roads between the oases and the Nile Valley, and a great development of the water-supply took place. After the Arab invasion, however, no attention seems to have been given to irrigation works, the wells, owing to silting, becoming gradually choked up. As the result of this neglect the water-supply diminished to such an extent that a large portion of the population was compelled to emigrate to the Nile Valley, and even the remaining inhabitants were scarce able to raise sufficient supplies for their maintenance. Within the last fifty years a considerable number of new wells have been made by means of simple hand-boring appliances sent out by the Egyptian Government; most of the new bores have been very successful, but latterly, through want of effective supervision, a great deal of harm has been done by promiscuous boring. Moreover, a very large amount of water is wasted owing to the wells not being fitted with regulating and closing appliances; the water, when not required for irrigation, continues to run, finding its way to the low-lying lands, and forming swamps which furnish ideal breeding-grounds for fever-carrying mosquitoes.

Within the last year or two this part of Egypt has received renewed attention; extensive boring operations and land reclamation works have been commenced, and the oasis of Kharga has been brought into railway communication with the rest of Egypt.

The floor-level of the oases varies considerably, but in general the cultivated lands lie between 30 and 120 metres above sea-level. The exact area under cultivation is only known very approximately, but it is certain that with an increased water-supply it could be very much augmented. The existing water-supply is totally insufficient to irrigate the available lands, and such portions of the latter as are tilled are generally left fallow in alternate years, and in many cases are only under crops once every four or five years. Now that an attempt is being made to restore the oases to their former prosperity, the question of ownership of land has become of the greatest importance, and it is one bristling with difficulties. As a general rule the wells are owned collectively, the different proprietors having the right to utilize the flow for periods corresponding to the extent of their holdings in the well. Individual shares may amount to as much as one-third or one-half of the well, or be only the merest fraction; in the latter case the small holders combine so as to obtain control of the flow for an appreciable period. Frequently the whole of the land irrigated by a well is cultivated collectively, the crop on reaping being divided among the owners in portions corresponding to their shares of the water. The question of ownerships is further complicated by there being persons who own water but no land, and by others who claim land but own no water.