Chapter XXIV

WE started the next morning at dawn. Soon after leaving ’Ain Sheykh Murzuk, Qwaytin showed me a pass ascending the scarp of a small plateau, the Guss abu Said, on our right, over which, he said, passed a road to Iddaila. From Iddaila, he said, a road ran direct through Nesla and Bu Mungar to Dakhla Oasis.

Two hours after our start we reached a very small oasis, only an acre or two in extent, known as ’Ain el Agwa. It contained a few palms and evidently a well, though the place was so covered with drifted sand that the palms in some cases were buried nearly to their crowns, and the well was completely invisible.

About an hour farther on we reached a similar oasis, called ’Ain Khalif. There were no traces of inhabitants at either of these places; the dead leaves left hanging on the palms showed that they were entirely uncultivated, and at ’Ain el Agwa the trees themselves seemed to be dying.

These little places do not seem to have been previously reported, though Rohlfs’ route must have passed fairly close to where they were situated. From the size of the palms they seemed to be only about twenty years old, so possibly the wells were sunk since the time of his visit.

Though the sand had to some extent encroached on the oasis at ’Ain el Agwa, it had not done so to anything like the same extent as at ’Ain Khalif, and the feeble well, discharging into a tiny pool a few yards across, was still quite clear of sand.

As the water proved to be good, we stopped here for half an hour, while we refilled the _gurba_ and examined the oasis.

Shortly before sunset we reached a place where the road forked. A line of small stones had been laid across the right-hand track—a common sign among the Arabs that the road was not to be followed. Qwaytin took the left-hand branch and soon afterwards we came to the top of the descent into Bu Mungar. The path at this point was a narrow cleft, a few yards long and not more than a foot or two wide, that proved as difficult to negotiate as the very similar one leading from the ’Ain Amur plateau down towards Dakhla. Below it lay a sandy slope that extended to the bottom of the cliff and presented little difficulty.

On reaching the bottom of the slope we set out for Bu Mungar, which lay a short distance ahead of us. But on reaching the _hattia_, Qwaytin, as usual, got lost, and it was some time before we could find the well.

It had been a stiflingly hot day and we had marched for over thirteen hours, with only a short halt at ’Ain Khalif. I had done the whole distance on foot, so I was dog tired, and extremely thirsty. So, as the evening of our arrival was cloudy, and as to get in a set of observations would probably have meant that I should have had to sit up for several hours for the clouds to clear off, I put off the work until the following day, meaning to leave the place in the afternoon.

My tent was pitched on the extreme eastern end of the _hattia_. The cliff of the plateau formed a huge semicircular bay on our east, the southern point of which could be seen about twenty-five miles away to the south-east of the camp. In the middle of this bay lay a second large detached scrub-covered area.

Bu Mungar contains at least two wells, as in addition to the one near which we were camped, the men found a second one, about a quarter of a mile away to the south-west, the position of which was marked by a group of trees—acacias and palms, so far as I can remember.

The other well, that lay about two hundred yards to the north-west of the camp, seemed to be an artesian one, similar to those in the Egyptian oases. A little stream ran from it for a short distance till it lost itself in the sandy soil. So far as I was able to see the trees were larger and the vegetation more luxuriant than in the Kairowin _hattia_.

To the south, a huge area covered as far as the horizon with sand dunes was visible. A large dune overhung the camp on its eastern side, and drift sand seemed to be encroaching in many places on the vegetation. In the neighbourhood of the camp was a praying place, or “desert mosque,” made according to Qwaytin after one of the Senussi models. This consisted of a line of stones laid out on the ground much in the shape of a button-hook, the straight portion of which pointed in the direction of Mecca, to indicate the direction in which worshippers should face when performing their devotions. It was the only praying place of the shape that I ever saw.

The wells of the _hattia_ perhaps dated from Roman times, as at a short distance to the south of the camp was a small mud building (_der_) which the natives attributed to that period. The remains of the vaulted roofs and the arched tops of the openings in the walls tended to confirm this view.

I managed the next day to get the necessary astronomical observations to fix the position of the place, but was not able to make a thorough examination of it, as complications with the Senussia that, from numerous indications I had seen since leaving Assiut, I had been expecting for some time suddenly came to a rather unpleasant head.

It was not until I got to Bu Mungar that I discovered that all the men in my caravan belonged to the Senussia. Qwaytin and his three men, I knew, had always been of that persuasion, and, while in Farafra, Abd er Rahman, Ibrahim and Dahab had all been so worked upon by Sheykh Ibn ed Dris that, just before we left that oasis, they too had joined the order, and showed all the fanaticism to be expected from new converts.

A party of thirty Tibbus, sent from Kufara for my entertainment, by Sheykh Ahmed Esh Sherif, at that time head of the Senussia, were hanging round somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bu Mungar, close enough for Qwaytin to start signalling to them by firing shots at imaginary pigeons and lighting an enormous and quite unnecessary bonfire at dusk—a well-known Arab signal.

Twenty more men had been sent from Kufara to reinforce the Mawhubs at their _ezba_, in the north-west corner of Dakhla, which I should have to pass in order to enter the oasis on my way to Egypt; while the inhabitants of Farafra—the only other oasis I could fall back upon with my small caravan—were members of the order almost to a man, and were on the look out for me if I returned that way. It was explained to me that they had allowed me to go to Bu Mungar instead of to Iddaila—my original intention—in order that I should leave Egypt, and then, as I had altered my plans, no one would know “where it happened!”

It was a neat little trap that I had foolishly walked into; but it had its weak points. It was nearly dusk when Qwaytin fired his signal shots that led to my enquiries, and, better still, a howling sandstorm was blowing. If once we got out into the desert in these circumstances, I felt confident of getting away without difficulty. But the prospect of having the camp rushed before we could get off gave me such a bad attack of cold feet that I decided to start running as soon as possible in order to get them warm.

Qwaytin and his men, however, when told to do so, flatly refused to leave the _hattia_. But he and his crowd were such a feeble lot that I had little difficulty in reducing them to order. We lost so little time that I got the tanks filled and the caravan off just after sunset.

Before starting it occurred to me that I might borrow a trick from Abd er Rahman. So finding a sand-free space near the well, I scratched the Senussi _wasm_ with a stick deeply into the ground, and then, to mislead the Senussi when they came as to the direction in which we had gone, drew a line from it pointing towards the west—the direction in which I knew they feared that I should go—and then set out towards the south-east to Dakhla.

Almost immediately after leaving the camp we got on to the sand hills. I then left the road, and, to Qwaytin’s intense disgust, struck out into the dunes to the south, where the tearing gale that was blowing very quickly obliterated our tracks.

After marching for two and a half hours, the dunes became considerably larger, and, as the moon had set, travelling was attended with such great difficulty that we halted till daylight.

But after leaving Bu Mungar our journey to Mut began to get too much in the nature of “adventures” to be described in detail. It took me all that I had learnt, during seven seasons spent in the desert, to get my caravan into Dakhla, without creating that incident that I had been warned to avoid, and which might easily have resulted in something in the nature of a native rising.

No one in the caravan but Qwaytin had been over the road before, and he, of course, got hopelessly lost, and in any case was not reliable, so I had to take over his job and do the best I could as guide.

After leaving Bu Mungar our road for the first day lay all over the dunes. Late in the afternoon we came across three _sifs_—dunes with an A-shaped section running up and down wind—which, since they stretched across our path, gave us some difficulty. They were all under twenty feet in height, but their sides were at such a steep angle that the camels were quite unable to climb them, and the men had to scoop paths diagonally up the face of the dunes and down again on the farther side, over which the camels one by one with difficulty were forced. Small as these _sifs_ were they caused a considerable delay. But these three ridges proved to be the last of the dune belt, and the remainder of our road, till we reached the dunes near Dakhla, we found to be easy going.

A long cliff runs from Bu Mungar to Dakhla Oasis, the road between the two lying at its foot.

The sand dunes that form a long north and south belt to the south of the great hill—Jebel Edmondstone—that lies some fifteen miles to the west of Qasr Dakhl, gave us considerable trouble, not only on account of their height, but because of their extreme softness. The camels sank into them in places literally up to their hocks.

In the softest parts the caravan absolutely came to a standstill, being quite unable to make any progress without assistance. I had to put one man on either side of each camel, and make them take the weight of the loads on their backs, and lift them up with every step that the camels gave, in order to get them along at all. Then having got a beast through the soft places, I had to fetch the others across, one by one, in the same manner. Our rate of progress consequently fell to something like half a mile an hour.

On the evening of the fifth day after leaving Bu Mungar we arrived in Mut, having lost some of the baggage, two men and two out of our seven camels, and with the rest of the caravan pretty well foundered from over-driving.

During the journey down from Bu Mungar, my own men, as I expected, finding that, as members of the Senussia, they had to give up smoking, gradually came round and recovered from their attack of Senussism. So, before reaching Mut, we halted out of sight of the town, and I put Abd er Rahman up on a camel and sent him in to find out how the land lay in the oasis.

He returned extremely pleased with himself. He had left his camel tied up among the dunes and had then gone into Mut “like a thief,” as he expressed it, so that no one should see him and had gone to the house of a friend of his, who told him that some Tibbus had been several times into Mut, but had not been seen there recently. They had gone back to the _zawia_ at Qasr Dakhl. Here, as I afterwards heard, they were seen and photographed by a native who happened to have come into the oasis from the Nile Valley. His friend thought it would be quite safe for us to come into the oasis, as when once we had been seen there, the Senussi would not dare to molest us. So we packed up our traps again and started.

On reaching Mut, I again put up in the old store. Having seen my baggage safely deposited there, I went round to the post office to get my mail.

I found Sheykh Senussi—the poetical clerk of the _qadi_—had managed to get his son appointed as postmaster in the oasis, a position that must have been of considerable use to the Senussi, on account of the thinness of the envelopes used by the natives.

Though office hours, so far as they can be said to exist in Dakhla, were long over, the door of the office itself was open, and I entered without being heard. I found the intelligence department of the Senussi in the oasis, consisting of Sheykh Senussi and his son, hard at work examining the mails. They held each letter up in turn to the light, and, if the contents were of interest, read them through the envelope. A letter lying on the top of a basin of hot water had presumably been undecipherable in this way, and so the flap of the envelope had to be steamed open. A stick of wax and a bottle of gum, lying on the counter, seemed to indicate that sometimes they experienced some difficulty in reclosing the correspondence after it had been read.

I walked quietly away from the door, and then returned clearing my throat loudly and making as much noise as I could and asked for my mail. Sheykh Senussi welcomed me most cordially. The basin of water, the gum and the sealing wax had all disappeared. The postmaster was busily engaged in sorting the letters. But I fancy that I had just seen one of the many ways in which information gets known in Egypt!

Affairs in Mut I found to be in a very queer state. A new _mamur_ had arrived on the scene, who, according to reports, both drank and took _hashish_ to such an extent that he had gone practically mad. He had quarrelled so violently with the police officer, his understudy, that one day he had fired three revolver shots at him, from a window in his house, as he crossed the square by the mosque. I was shown the places where the bullets had ploughed up the ground, so something of the sort had probably happened.

The _mamur_, after this exhibition, shut himself up in his house and never went out even to the _merkaz_, and declined to see anyone. The policeman was doing his feeble best to keep things going; but as he was afraid to go to the _merkaz_, which lay close to the _mamur’s_ house, for fear that he should be shot at again, he was somewhat handicapped in his work.

I passed once through the mosque square and caught a glimpse of the _mamur_ peeping at me through the crack by the hinge of his half-opened door, but this was the only view I had of him.

He sent me, however, a roundabout message to the effect that he had seen me pass his house and he considered it an _ayb_ that I had not called on him as he was the head of the Government in the oasis, and a much more important person than I was myself. He added that he expected me to do so at once. As my views as to our relative importance differed from his, I continued to _ayb_ him in the same way till I left the oasis.

The day after our arrival, Qwaytin asked permission to go for the day to the village of Hindau. There was, I knew, a small Senussi _zawia_ there, but it would have been useless for me to refuse him permission, so long as he was at liberty, and with the existing state of affairs in the oasis it was quite out of the question to try and get him arrested. So I thought it best to pretend I did not see what he was driving at and allowed him to go.

Later in the day I was in my room in the upper floor of the store when, rather to my surprise, I heard Qwaytin’s voice in the court below talking to Dahab and Abd er Rahman. As I had not expected him back so soon, I suspected that he was up to some mischief, so had no hesitation at all in listening to the conversation, especially as I wished to know more exactly the terms on which he stood with my men.

They were immediately below my window; but Qwaytin was speaking in such a low voice that I could only catch a word here and there of what he was saying. But I caught enough of the conversation to become greatly interested.

He was apparently giving them instructions from a certain Sheykh Ahmed, whose identity I was unable to ascertain. Repeatedly I heard him mention a certain _kafir_ (infidel) and once a “dog,” of whose identity I entertained no doubt at all—listeners proverbially hear no good of themselves. Several times I heard him state “Sheykh Ahmed says—” something that was quite inaudible, followed by expostulations from Dahab and Abd er Rahman, and then again they were told that “Sheykh Ahmed says—” something else that the _kafir_ would have given a good deal to have heard.

Eventually, I heard Qwaytin take himself off, and, shortly afterwards, Dahab, looking terribly scared, came into the room, announcing that Dakhla was a very bad place indeed, and that we must get out of it as quickly as possible.

Abd er Rahman next burst unceremoniously in and asked abruptly when I intended to start. I told him I meant to get off as soon as I possibly could. He looked immensely relieved, and said that the sooner we started the better.

I tried to find out from them exactly what was in the wind, but native-like I could not get them to be in the least explicit.

I went out and interviewed Qwaytin and told him I intended to start the next day. He grinned and refused absolutely to let me have the camels. I felt inclined to take them, but a large trading caravan with several _bedawin_ had come in during the day, and these men all hung round listening to our conversation in what seemed to be anything but a friendly frame of mind, and I thought it best not to make the attempt. I sounded one or two of the traders with a view to hiring their camels, but met with a surly refusal. I might, of course, have tried to get the Government authorities in the oasis to force Qwaytin to fulfil his arrangement with me; but it does not do, in a case of this sort, for a white man to appeal to a native official for assistance, so I had to look round for some other means of continuing our journey.

After some difficulty, I succeeded in hiring three other camels that were in the oasis. Then, having arranged to leave part of my baggage, for which I had no immediate use, in safe keeping in Mut till I could send for it, I prepared to start on the following morning.

I told Abd er Rahman to send his friend out into the village to gather information as to the Senussia. During our visits to Mut, this man on several occasions made himself considerably useful to us; but fearing to appear openly as being favourable to us, he always conducted his operations in a clandestine manner.

Abd er Rahman, who was always in his element in anything in the nature of an intrigue, introduced him secretly into the store in the middle of the night, and brought him up to my room. His information was entirely satisfactory. I was unable to get out of him exactly what scheme the Senussi had devised for our benefit, but he declared that our intention to make an early departure had entirely checkmated them, and that they were furiously angry in consequence.

But the Mawhubs, he said, were extremely cunning, and as we had now got the better of them, their one desire was that the whole episode should be forgotten and that they should now appear as our best friends. He said that, if we got away quickly, we had nothing to fear from them; but he emphasised the importance of not wasting any time. I sent him off with a thumping _bakhshish_.