Chapter IX

IN the journey from which we had just returned, we had been a rather long time away from water for that time of year, and the camels were in a very exhausted condition from the hard travelling in the heat on a short allowance of water. It was then May, and March is usually considered in Egypt as being the last month for field work, so I decided to give them a rest to recover their condition, and then go back to Kharga Oasis and the Nile Valley.

The men, with the exception of Khalil, had all settled down to the routine of desert travelling, and were working well. The mainstay of the caravan was Qway. He was a magnificent man in the desert, and was hardly ever at fault.

Finding that the caravan was rather overloaded at our start for our third journey, I left, on our second day out, a tank of water and two sacks of grain in the desert, to be picked up on our way back to Mut. From that point we had gone three days to the south. We had then gone two days south-west; then two days west; another day towards the north-west, and then three days north-east. All but the first four days of this journey had been over ground which was quite unknown to him; but when at the end of this roundabout route I asked him to point out to me where our tank and sacks had been laid, he was able to indicate its position without the slightest uncertainty.

At first sight the faculty that a good desert guide has of finding his way about a trackless desert seems little short of miraculous. But he has only developed to an unusual degree the powers that even the most civilised individual possesses in a rudimentary state.

Anyone, for instance, can go into a room that he knows in the dark, walk straight across from the door to a table, say, from there to the mantelpiece, and back again to the door without any difficulty at all, thus showing the same sense of angles and distances that enabled Qway, after a circuitous journey of a hundred and sixty miles, to find his way straight back to his starting-point. The Arabs, however, have so developed this faculty that they can use it on a much larger scale.

The _bedawin_, accustomed to travelling over the wide desert plains, from one landmark to another, keep their eyes largely fixed on the horizon. You can always tell a desert man when you see him in a town. He is looking towards the end of the street, and appears to be oblivious of his immediate surroundings. This gives him that “far-away” look that is so much admired by lady novelists.

It would be rash, however, to assume that a desert guide does not also notice what is going on around him, for there is very little indeed that he does not see. He may be looking to the horizon to find his next landmark during a great part of his time, but he also scans most closely the ground over which he is travelling, and will not pass the faintest sign or footprint, without noticing it and drawing his own conclusions as to who has passed that way and where they were going. He may say nothing about them at the time; but he does not forget them.

Nor will he forget his landmarks, or fail to identify them when he sees them a second time; a good guide will remember his landmarks sufficiently well to be able to follow without hesitation, a road that he has been over many years before, and has not seen in the interval.

Frequently, after passing a conspicuous hill, I have seen Qway glance over his shoulder for a second or two, to see what it would look like when he approached it again on the return journey, and to note any small peculiarities that it possessed.

In addition to this sense of angles and distances, these desert men have in many cases a wonderfully accurate knowledge of the cardinal points of the compass. This seems at first sight to amount almost to an instinct. It is, however, probably produced by a recollection of the changes of direction in a day’s march which has, through long practice, become so habitual as to be almost subconscious.

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 often tested the sense of direction possessed by my men when we got into camp, by resting a rifle on the top of a sack of grain and telling them to aim it towards the north, afterwards testing their sighting by means of my compass.

Qway and Abd er Rahman were surprisingly consistent in their accuracy, and there was very little indeed to choose between them. There was considerable rivalry between them on this point in consequence. They were very seldom more than two degrees wrong on one side or the other of the true north.

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. He regarded them as an inferior race, and evidently considered it beneath his dignity to take any interest at all in them or their ways. He seldom alluded to them to me without adding some contemptuous remark. He never felt at home in the crowded life of the Nile Valley, declared that he got lost whenever he went into a town—this I believe to be the case with most _bedawin_—that the towns were filthy, the inhabitants all thieves, liars, “women” and worse, and that the drinking water was foul, and even the air was damp, impure, and not to be compared with that of his beloved desert.

The opinion of the Egyptians of the Nile Valley is equally unfavourable to the Arabs. They regard them as an overbearing, lawless, ignorant set of ruffians whom they pretend to despise—but they stand all the same very much in awe of them. After all, their views of each other are only natural; their characters have practically nothing in common, and criticism usually takes the form of “this man is different from me, so he must be wrong.”

Qway, in the caravan, was invariably treated with great respect. He was usually addressed to as “_khal_ (uncle) Qway,” and he was not the man to allow any lapses from this attitude, which he considered his due as an Arab and as the head-man of the caravan. Any falling off in this respect was immediately followed by some caustic reference on his part to the inferiority of slaves, “black men,” or _fellahin_, as the case required.

Abd er Rahman and the camel men all did their work well, and the difficulties due to the sand and the attitude of the natives that I had been warned that I should have to face, all appeared to be greatly exaggerated. With Qway as my guide, I hoped with the experience I had already gained, to make an attempt the next year, with a reasonable prospect of success, to cross the desert, or at any rate to penetrate much farther into it than I had already done, and reach some portion that was inhabited.

But just when I was preparing to return to Egypt, an event happened that put an entirely new complexion upon things, and upset the whole of my plans.

During our absence in the desert, a new _mamur_ arrived in Dakhla Oasis and came round to call on me. He was rather a smart-looking fellow, dressed in a suit considerably too tight for him, of that peculiar shade of ginger so much affected by the Europeanised Egyptians. He had the noisy boisterous manner common to his class, but he spoke excellent English and was evidently prepared to make himself pleasant.

Before he left, he informed me that the postman had just come in, and that news had arrived by the mail of the revolution in Turkey. This revolution had long been simmering, with the usual result that the scum—in the form of Tala’at and the Germanised Enver—had come up to the top. The Sultan had been deposed, and it was considered likely that he would be replaced by some sort of republic. The whole Moslem community was in a very excited state in consequence.

A day or two later the Coptic doctor dropped in. He told me that he had just seen Sheykh Ahmed, from the _zawia_ at Qasr Dakhl—whose guest I had been at his _ezba_—who had told him that if the revolution in Turkey succeeded and the Sultan really were deposed, the Senussi Mahdi would reappear and invade Egypt. The Mahdi, it may be mentioned, is the great Moslem prophet, who according to Mohammedan prophecies, is to arise shortly before the end of the world, to convert the whole of mankind to the faith of Islam.

This, if it were true, was important news. The position was one fraught with considerable possibilities. In order to understand the situation some explanation may perhaps be useful to those unacquainted with Mohammedan politics.

Egypt at that time was a part of the Turkish Empire—our position in the country being, at any rate in theory, merely that of an occupation, with the support of a small military force. The Sultan of Turkey was consequently, nominally, still the ruler of the country.

But in addition to being Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid was also the Khalif of Islam—an office that made him a sort of Emperor-Pope of the whole of the Mohammedans. His claim to be the holder of this title was in reality of a somewhat flimsy character; but whatever his rights to it may have been according to the strict letter of the Moslem law, he was almost universally regarded by the members of the Sunni Mohammedans as their Khalif, that is to say, as the direct successor, as the head of Islam, of the Prophet Mohammed himself, in the same way that the Pope is regarded as the direct successor to St. Peter.

A revolution always loosens the hold that the central Government has over the outlying parts of a country, and in a widespread and uncivilised empire like that subject to the Sultan of Turkey, where centuries of misgovernment have produced a spirit—it might almost be said a habit—of revolt, serious trouble was bound to follow, if the Sultan should be deposed and his place be taken by a republic. Not only would Egypt and Tripoli be deprived of the ruler to whom they owed their allegiance, but the whole native population of North Africa, with the exception of an almost negligible minority, would be left without a spiritual head. This would have been clearly a situation that opened endless possibilities to such an enterprising sect as the Senussia, whose widespread influence through North Africa is shown by the numerous _zawias_ they have planted in all the countries along the south of the Mediterranean and far into the interior of the continent.

Egypt, as the richest of these countries, was likely to offer the most promising prize. The _fellahin_ of Egypt, when left to themselves, are far too much taken up in cultivating their land to trouble themselves about politics, and though of a religious turn of mind, are not fanatical. But, as recent events have shown, they are capable of being stirred up by agitators to a dangerous extent.

I several times heard the Senussi question discussed in Egypt. Opinions on its seriousness varied greatly. Some loudly and positively asserted that the threat of a Senussi invasion was only a bugbear, and, like every bugbear, more like its first syllable than its second. But there were others who relapsed into silence or changed the subject whenever it was mentioned. It was, however, certain that with the small force we at that time possessed in the country, an attempt to invade Egypt by the Senussi accompanied, as it was almost certain it would have been, by a rising engineered by them among the natives of the Nile Valley, would have caused a considerable amount of trouble.

The appearance of a Mahdi—if he is not scotched in time—may set a whole country in a ferment. Not infrequently some local religious celebrity will proclaim himself the Mahdi and gain perhaps a few followers; but his career is usually shortlived. Occasionally, however, one arrives on the scene, who presents a serious problem—such, for instance, as the well-known Mahdi of the Sudan, and the lesser known, but more formidable, Mahdi of the Senussi sect.

The latter, though he seems to have been a capable fellow, was a theatrical mountebank, who preferred to surround himself with an atmosphere of mystery; as it was this mysterious element that complicated the situation, some explanation of it is necessary.

Sidi Mohammed Ben Ali Senussi, the founder of the Senussi dervishes, while travelling, in 1830, from Morocco to Mecca, divorced his wife, Menna, who had proved unfruitful, with the result that, being wifeless, some natives of Biskra took compassion upon him and presented him with an Arab slave girl. This woman is supposed to have borne him a son—Sidi Ahmed el Biskri—who played a somewhat prominent part later on in the history of the Senussia. By another wife he had a son, Mohammed, whom he declared on his deathbed to be the long-expected Mahdi.

These two half-brothers, Mohammed and Ahmed, are said to have borne a striking resemblance to each other.

An old Senussi that I met in Dakhla, who professed to have seen them both, said that not only were they of the same height and figure, but that even their voices and manner were so much alike that no one could distinguish between them.

There seems to be little doubt that when the Senussi Mahdi did not wish to interview a visitor himself, he sent his double, Sidi Ahmed, to do so instead. This deception was made easy by the fact that the Senussi Mahdi, during the latter part of his life, was a veiled prophet who concealed his face whenever he appeared in public by covering his head with a shawl; it is reported that he never even showed his face to his most intimate followers.

The interviews that he accorded to his visitors were few and difficult to obtain. They were invariably short—the Mahdi himself timing the interview with his watch—and the conversation, so far as he was concerned, consisting of a few questions, followed, if necessary, by a decision; his remarks being made in the low dreamy voice of one who received his inspirations from on high—a method of procedure that could hardly fail to impress, as it was evidently intended to do, the credulous followers who came to see him with his extreme sanctity and importance.

This Mahdi was reported to have died some years prior to my visit to Dakhla, and although news of the happenings in the inaccessible parts of North Africa is apt to be unreliable, there was little doubt that he had.

The native version was that he had gone off into the desert and disappeared; but probably he only followed the example of Sheykh Shadhly, the founder of the great Shadhlia sect, and of several other noted Moslem saints, and went off into the desert to die, when he felt his end approaching.

There was, however, a pretty general feeling in the desert that the last of him had not been seen—an impression that the Senussi endeavoured to keep alive by the vague statement that he was “staying with Allah,” and hints that he might at any moment reappear.

There was never much love lost between the Senussia and the Turks. About a year before my visit to the desert, a Turkish official had been sent down to Kufara Oasis, with orders to formally assert the Sultan’s authority over the district, and to hoist the Turkish flag. The fanatical inhabitants, however, had hauled down the flag, torn it to ribbons, trampled it under foot, severely beaten the Turkish officer and expelled him from the oasis, so the annexation of any part of the Turkish Empire would have been a scheme well calculated to appeal to the Senussi.

Ahmed el Biskri—the Mahdi’s double—was also reported to have died. But nothing would have been easier than for the leading Senussi sheykhs to find someone to personate their veiled prophet on his return from “staying with Allah,” and to have used the immense prestige that their puppet would have obtained amongst their credulous followers to increase the influence of the sect, to attract new followers and to work upon their fanaticism. The “reappearance” of the Senussi Mahdi in this way is still a possibility that is worth remembering.

News as to the doings of the leaders amongst the Senussia living in the wilds of the Libyan Desert has always been very difficult to obtain; but at that time they were reported in Dakhla to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tibesti, which lay to the south-west of Dakhla Oasis, in the direction of the road we had been following, and it seemed likely, if they were really contemplating a descent upon Egypt, that they might attempt, if water existed upon this road, to make their way along it into Dakhla, and so on to the Nile Valley.

With these considerations in view, I decided to make another trip into the desert before returning to Egypt, to see if we could not manage to reach the well, or oasis, to which the road ran, and to ascertain if the road we had found was feasible for a large body of men.

I sent a note to one of the British officials I had met in Cairo to let the authorities have news of the rumoured invasion, for what it was worth, and set to work to prepare for the journey.

I had not calculated on staying out in the desert so late in the season, so my provisions had almost run out. The few tins of preserved meat that remained had all suffered considerably from the heat and were not fit for use. I had, however, still a few tins of sardines, which in spite of their pronounced tinniness were still quite edible, and a number of emergency rations, which had not suffered in the least from the heat. These with a large skin of Arab flour and a few pounds of mulberry jam, which Dahab made from some fruit that the good people of Rashida sent me, provided ample food for another journey.

After a few more days spent in feeding up the camels and restoring them to a suitable condition for a long desert journey during the hot weather, Qway thoroughly inspected the beasts, dug his thumb into their quarters to test the consistency of their flesh, expressed himself satisfied with the distended state of their tummies, buttered the red camel again for mange, and then, as he declared the beasts to be in first-rate condition, we prepared to start.