Chapter XXI

DURING my first two seasons I had managed to get out to the middle of the desert and had succeeded in mapping a large area of it; but the main object to which these two years had been devoted—the crossing of the desert from north-east to south-west had not been attained—there seemed no prospect of my being able to accomplish it, for Owanat, the first stage on the journey, was evidently so far out that it could only be reached by adopting some elaborate system of depots or relays, that Qway’s escapade had shown to be too dangerous. The Senussi had certainly won the first trick in the game; but I did not feel at all inclined to let them have things all their own way.

It was, however, pointed out to me that the omens to any further journeys were by no means propitious just then, as the natives were much excited over the Italian invasion of Tripoli, and, moreover, the Senussi were clearly prepared to take an active hand in the game and, even at that time, were evidently contemplating an invasion of Egypt, should a suitable opportunity occur.

The latter fact, however, seemed to me to cut both ways, for the Senussi were quite wide-awake enough to realise that, if an European got scuppered by them, some form of punitive expedition was extremely likely to follow, which might force them into hostilities at an inconvenient time—so I concluded that they would just as unwillingly start scrapping as I would myself—and that was saying a good deal.

As crossing the desert seemed an impracticable scheme just then, I abandoned that part of my programme, and as there were plenty of other large areas waiting to be explored, decided to try a different district, and set out to explore as much as possible of the unknown parts of the eastern and western sides of the huge depression in which lies the oasis of Farafra.

I intended, too, to visit the little oasis of Iddaila, that lies not far to the west of Farafra, and I hoped to score a trick off the Senussia by making a dash into the dunes to the south-west of Farafra and locating the oasis of Dendura, that was used sometimes by them as a half-way house when travelling from Egypt to Kufara.

Unfortunately—though I did not learn this till afterwards—before my start some rag of a native paper in Cairo announced that I had come out again to Egypt and intended to go in disguise to Kufara, and a copy of the paper had been sent out to that oasis itself. This was a piece of pure invention on the part of that journal that led to rather unpleasant consequences.

I was advised to take as my guide some man who was admittedly a member of the Senussia and camel drivers of the same persuasion. The advice did not commend itself very strongly to me; but in deference to the views of those whom I expected to know a good deal more of the country than I did, I so far accepted it as to decide on taking a Senussi guide and one or two of his camel men, while adding Abd er Rahman, Ibrahim and Dahab as well to the caravan—Abdulla unfortunately was not available.

I eventually engaged a man called Qwaytin, who was stated to be reliable. Haggi Qwaytin Mohammed Said—to give him his full name—though a native of Surk in Kufara Oasis, at that time was living in the Nile Valley, in the Manfalut district, near Assiut. For some time he had acted as a tax-collector among the Bedayat for ’Ali Dinar, the Sultan of Darfur, and when he was inclined to be communicative could impart a considerable amount of information about unknown parts of the desert. He seemed to have led a fairly wandering existence and to be at home in most parts of North and Central Africa; at any rate he had a Bedayat wife in Darfur, a Tawarek one somewhere near Timbuktu and one—if not two—others near Manfalut.

He was a queer fellow, and I did not altogether take a fancy to him. When I told him that I already had two camel drivers and did not want more, he was very much put out and declared that he could not trust his camels to strangers. Eventually we compromised the question by arranging that he should take three men and that I, in addition, should bring Abd er Rahman, Ibrahim and Dahab.

I asked to see the men he was going to bring with him. The three he produced—Mohanny, Mansur and ’Abd el Atif—were even less prepossessing than Qwaytin himself. They were typical specimens of the low-class _bedawin_ camel drivers that the camel owners engage on nominal wages, to take charge of their beasts when they hire them out. They proved to be most indifferent drivers. But Qwaytin and his men were such an obviously feeble lot that, with my three men to back me up, I had no doubt of being able to deal with them, if they gave any trouble.

I intended to pump Qwaytin as dry as I could of the information he could give me of the unknown parts of the desert and, with the assistance of my own men, to compel him, by force if necessary, to take me within sight of Dendura, after we had left Farafra.

These preliminaries having been gone through, I sent for Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim to come up and join me in Assiut—Dahab was already with me. While waiting in the little Greek pub, where I stayed for the arrival of my men, I made the acquaintance of an educated Egyptian, who was engaged in some sort of literary work, the exact nature of which I was unable to discover. His English was excellent, and he was evidently anxious to practise it, for he stuck to me like a leech.

He was never tired of dilating on the beauties of Arabic as a literary language. In Arabic literature, he said, the great thing was to use as many metaphors as possible, and the best metaphors were those that were the most obscure or, as he expressed it, that made the reader “work his brain” the most. Certainly some of the examples he gave left nothing whatever to be desired in that direction.

He insisted in coming to see me off at the station, where he explained that he had lain awake for a considerable part of the night, in order to be able to think of a really good metaphor for me at parting.

It certainly was a poser. If, he said, he described a man as having a very cowardly dog, what should I think he meant? I suggested various possible solutions: that he was a brutal man who thrashed his dog unmercifully; that he was a very poor man who could not afford to buy a good one; or a very mean man who nearly starved the beast to death. As none of them was correct, I asked him to explain. But he preferred to keep me on tenterhooks and declined to do so, chuckling with delight at the way in which he was making me “work my brain.”

It was not until the train began to move, that he condescended to solve the problem. When he said that a man had a cowardly dog, he meant that he was so very hospitable that his dog got tired of barking at the innumerable guests who came to his house! As a literary language Arabic must be very hard to beat.

Near Nazali Genub, where I camped while buying my camels, I found an acquaintance whose job consisted in surveying and drawing the hieroglyphics on the tombs, where, to relapse into metaphor, in mere English:

“The long phantasmal line

Of Pharaohs crowned divine

Are dust among the dust that once obeyed them.”

I shared a very comfortable tomb with him during the time I spent there.

After about a week, during which Qwaytin with Abd er Rahman visited the surrounding villages and markets in search of the camels that he required to complete the caravan, we moved over to Qwaytin’s house, some seven miles away, and on the following morning, 24th March, started off for our journey into the desert; Ibrahim at the start, as usual, banging off his gun after the Arab custom to scare away evil spirits during our journey.

I decided first to make for an uninhabited oasis called Bu Gerara, which had not previously been reported, that Qwaytin said he knew of, and that lay some little distance off the Derb et Tawil, and not very far to the north-east of Dakhla. This oasis he said contained palms, wells and some old buildings, but had been deserted for many years.

The Derb ed Deri—the monastery road—that we followed starts from near an old _der_, or monastery, called the Der Muharug, from which it takes its name, and is a branch of the great Derb et Tawil—“the long road”—that, starting from the Nile Valley near Manfalut, runs right across the desert plateau to Dakhla Oasis.

On getting up on to the plateau, Qwaytin pointed out in the distance to the west a low hill, which he said was called the Jebel Jebaïl, where, he stated, there are many tombs.

The plateau was level and as featureless as that between the Nile Valley and Kharga Oasis, to which it bore a strong general resemblance. There were the same patches of sand and pebbles, interspaced with areas of limestone, showing all the same types of sand erosion—_kharashef_, _kharafish_, _battikh_ and _rusuf_.

In many places the limestone appeared as marble, sometimes polished by the action of the sand blast. White, black, grey, yellow and beautiful rose pink, in various combinations, were seen in the stone. Much of it showed large cracks on the surface, but there were considerable areas of stone, especially of the grey marble with darker grey lines, that seemed to be quite solid. The rock in places was translucent and appeared to be alabaster, but of very inferior quality. Some of the pink marble looked to be of a fine colour and texture; but it is doubtful, in such an inaccessible position, if it would ever repay working.

Early on our second day in the desert we joined the main road—the Derb et Tawil, or “long road.” Close to the east of the point, where the two roads met, was one of the low rocky hills with which the plateau was studded. From the foot of this ran a little used road leading to ’Ain Amur, via ’Ain Embares, an undiscovered well that I had tried to reach by way of the small depressions leading out of the ’Ain Amur wady. It was reported to be almost sanded up and to give very little water.

On the following day we passed the point where a road branches off to the west from the Derb et Tawil to go direct to Qasr Dakhl. This road, which does not appear to be much used, is known as the “Derb el Khashabi,” or “wooded road,” owing to the fact that about two days’ journey from the point where it leaves the Derb et Tawil, there is a patch of dead trees about ten feet high. It is said to be an easy one to traverse.

The next day we reached the Abu Moharik dune belt that took us three hours and twenty minutes to cross, which at the rate of two and a half miles an hour, was equivalent to a distance of eight and a half miles. The dunes of which it was composed were all, so far as we saw, of the crescentic type, and were probably all considerably under fifteen feet in height. Where the road crossed the belt, was a sand-free gap, the dunes in that part being rather thinly distributed, though farther to the north they appeared to lie much closer together. The whole of the road, where it ran through the belt, was entirely free from drift sand. We camped that night in the middle of the dunes.

On leaving the dunes for Bu Gerara, I sent Qwaytin and Abd er Rahman off to look for another oasis that the former had heard of, that was said to lie some distance to the west of our road, which, however, he failed to find. In the evening before his departure, he came into my tent and announced that “his book said” that on the following day we should reach the Gara bu Gerara. There, he said, the road forked, and one branch, leaving the usual road followed by caravans going to Dakhla, and keeping more to the west, led to Bu Gerara—the oasis we were in search of.

This was the first mention he had made of any “book,” so I enquired what the book was to which he referred. Qwaytin seemed rather surprised that I had not heard of it before, and said that it was his “book of treasure!”

Cautious questioning elicited the fact that he had never been to Bu Gerara before, but that he was relying entirely on the directions given in this precious volume to take me there, and evidently expected, when we reached the place that we should all fall to digging in search of the buried riches that the book said were to be found there, instead of getting on and mapping the desert.

He was clearly under the impression that he was conferring a great favour on me by taking me into the secret of the vast wealth that he expected to find. To have thrown any doubt on the reliability of his wonderful book would have mortally offended him, as natives are very sensitive on these subjects. But as following out his instructions did not seem likely to take me far from the part to which I wanted to go, and would lead me into new ground, I thought it best to humour him, trusting that, when he failed to find the place, he would be willing to come down to the more mundane occupation of mapping the desert. So, much against my inclination, I found myself at last fairly launched on a treasure-hunting expedition!

Soon after our start on the following morning one of the camels fell ill. What the particular disease was I was unable to discover; but the remedy that Mohanny applied was to bleed her from the tip of her tail—an operation that appeared to afford some relief. The _bedawin_ veterinary methods are simple, but, on the whole, effective. They may be summed up in three words—“bleed, butter, or burn.”

Eleven miles’ march from our camp brought us to the Gara bu Gerara—a long, low, flat-topped hill with a small peak at its eastern extremity, where the road to Bu Gerara branched off from the Derb et Tawil, according to Qwaytin’s book of treasure.

Qwaytin had given minute instructions to Mohanny as to finding the place, so, on reaching the hill, he came up to me and announced that it was now necessary to leave the Derb et Tawil, which turned off towards the east, and to follow a road that led straight on.

Our departure for Gara bu Gerara though had to be postponed for a short time owing to the camel developing another attack of whatever the complaint was that she was suffering from, necessitating that she should be again bled—this time from the nose. The operation having been successfully performed, we started off to look for our treasure.

Much to my surprise, we found a very well marked road branched off from the Derb et Tawil, though, judging from its appearance, it had not been used for a very long time. Away to the east of our route—by the side of the Derb et Tawil—was a small, but very conspicuous mound of bright yellow earth—probably ochreous—which I was told was the Garet ed Dahab (golden hillock).

Shortly after we passed through a tract of desert thickly studded with stones. Through this stony area ran a made road. The stones had all been cleared off its surface, which had then been smoothed over with a thoroughness that made it extremely unlikely that the work had ever been done by the _bedawin_, whose contempt for all forms of manual labour always induces them to put up with a bad part in a road, if they cannot circumvent it by a slight detour.

After traversing this stony part of the desert, we reached the top of a steep descent, where again it was evident that some more civilised race than the desert _bedawin_ had been at work, for the road down on to the lower level had been notched out of the side of the scarp in a way that would not have done discredit to a modern engineer. After that I felt prepared for any developments.

After negotiating the Negeb Shushina, as the descent from the plateau to the level of the depression is called, we came on to a level sandy plain, where for a time Mohanny, who had been acting as guide by following the directions Qwaytin had given him from his wonderful book, succeeded in getting completely lost. After wandering about for a time, seeking the marble palaces and gilded domes of Bu Gerara, we at length caught sight of two figures in the distance, who, when examined through the glass, proved to be Qwaytin and Abd er Rahman.