Chapter VI

THE _mamur_, who was personally conducting our party, had arranged that we should look in at Gedida. On the way there we passed the village of Mushia, lying in an area of blown sand, which in some places seemed to be encroaching on the cultivation. Most of the land was planted with palms, of which there were said to be about twenty-six thousand. The village itself proved to be uninteresting, its most noticeable peculiarity being the painting of geometrical patterns which decorated the outer walls of some of the houses. The inhabitants showed more signs of progress here than in most of the villages of the oasis, as a number of _sagias_—waterwheels—had been erected to irrigate the cultivated land, where the partial failure of the wells had rendered this necessary.

At Gedida, however, they seemed more conservative. The water supply was failing, owing, according to the inhabitants, to the large amount of water yielded by the big modern wells at Rashida, and many of their palms were dying for want of irrigation. A few _shadufs_ had been introduced to raise the water; but the inhabitants complained bitterly of the hard labour required to work them. When asked why they did not use _sagias_, they apathetically replied that no one knew how to make them, and seemed to think it would be too much trouble to import them from the Nile Valley.

At Gedida I heard another story of Zerzura. It appears that many years ago—the exact number was not stated—when the forebears of the present inhabitants all lived scattered about the district in little hamlets and _ezbas_ some very tall black men, with long hair and long nails, came up out of the desert and stole their bread at night. In the morning the natives followed their tracks out into the desert, found the wells they had drunk from when coming into the oasis, and filled them up with salt to prevent them from being used again. They then returned to Dakhla Oasis, and, banding together, built the village of Gedida (the “new town”) for mutual protection.

We reached Mut just at sunset, passing a number of the natives driving in their cattle to be housed in the little walled enclosures that surround the town.

I found Abd er Rahman waiting to report on the state of the camels. Everything he said had gone well, except that the green camel had bitten the blue one, and that the red one had been attacked by mange. Abd er Rahman, however, said that he had buttered him well—which, he added, had made him very angry, and he hoped now that he was cured.

The _’omda_ of Rashida dropped in during the afternoon. On leaving, he expressed a fervent wish that I might find Zerzura, and that I should find a lot of treasure there. I soon found that it was quite useless to attempt to persuade any native into the belief that I was only intending to make maps and collect scientific information. Even the more intelligent of them—such as the native officials, the Mawhub family and the _’omda_ of Rashida—were quite unable to realise that anyone could be so foolish to do work of that kind unless he were paid to do so, and they were such confirmed treasure seekers themselves, and so secretive in their methods of conducting their hunt for buried riches, that they all considered that the reason I gave for my journey was only a cloak to disguise the fact that I was really looking for treasure.

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.

With the exception of the Kufara group of oases, on its extreme western side, practically the whole Libyan Desert to the south and west of Dakhla was quite unknown, so the south-west quarter was the one that appealed to me most, as any journey made in this direction would lead right into the heart of the largest area of unknown ground in Africa, or for the matter of that outside it, and it was in this quarter, too, that the maps showed the great dune-field, the crossing of which was one of the main objects of my journey, so this was the part I decided first to tackle.

It was then that I found myself faced with the problem. What was to be my objective? Between west and south there are a great many bearings upon which one can march. In which direction should I go?

The prospect of being able to find a well, perhaps only a two-foot shaft in the ground—very probably silted up with sand—by wandering out haphazard into several hundred thousand square miles of desert is remote.

The maps gave little assistance in solving the problem. Many of them left this space entirely blank. Those that placed anything there at all, described it as being entirely covered with large dunes, or as some of them put it, “impassable dunes.”

The nearest point to Dakhla in this south-western quadrant, that was marked in the maps, was an oasis which native information placed eighteen days’ journey to the south-west. Eighteen days, that is over ordinary desert, which might mean thirty at least if large dunes had to be crossed, and from what I had seen of those dunes it was doubtful if they were negotiable at all. It was said to be inhabited; but even its name was unknown. It was also said to have an old road leading from it towards Egypt. This looked somewhat promising, but the place was too far off to be of any use as a first objective, as until its position was accurately known, so that I could be certain of finding it at my first attempt, it would be necessary for me to arrange to get back again in the event of my not being able to reach it—and this would have necessitated a thirty-six days’ journey away from water, over easy desert, or two or three months over large dunes.

When it is considered that a camel, laden only with grain, will consume its own load in about a month, and that the amount of water that would have to be taken in addition on a journey of this description would be far heavier than the grain required, it will be easily realised that such a journey as this would be quite impossible without adopting some system of depots or relays, which, owing to the risk of their being tampered with, I felt disinclined to do until I knew more about the district. Before I could hope to reach this place, it was necessary for me to find some nearer oasis, or well, from which I could start afresh; so it was clear that this intermediate oasis, or well, must be my first objective. But where was this place to be found?

In the absence of more reliable information, it occurred to me that possibly some indication of its whereabouts might be gathered from the legends of Zerzura. The story of Rohlfs’ excavations in the Der el Hagar, told me by men who had actually been living in the neighbourhood at the time when they were said to have taken place, showed the extent to which even comparatively recent events are contorted by the natives.

But the name Zerzura itself was suggestive. Zerzur means literally a starling, but is a term often loosely applied to any small bird. Assuming the name to be derived from this source, it would have some such meaning as “the place of little birds,” a name that seemed of such a fanciful nature that it appeared to me unlikely to be applied to any definite place, and, taken in conjunction with the somewhat mystical character of the stories with which the oasis was associated, I concluded that either no place of that name ever existed, or, which seemed more likely, that Zerzura was a generic name applied to any unknown or lost oasis, and that the various legends I had heard of it were, in some cases at all events, garbled versions of events that had really occurred in the past; and judging from the speed with which the story of Rohlfs’ excavations had been distorted, a past that was not necessarily very remote.

Zerzura was said to lie to the south-west of Dakhla, and the other indications, small as they were, all pointed to this being the most promising direction in which to go. Not only was the unknown oasis, with the road running back towards Egypt, marked on the map as lying approximately in this direction, but what was probably the best indication of all, a large migration of birds came up annually from this part of the desert. Certainly there was not much to go upon in deciding to adopt this route, but in the absence of more reliable information, I was compelled to follow such indications as there were. Later on—in my last season in the desert—I was able to collect from various natives a large amount of data as to the unknown parts, from which I was able to construct a more or less complete map. But the information came too late for me to make use of it. It may perhaps be of service in affording an objective for future travellers. If I had had this intelligence to go upon when I first went out into the desert I should have tackled the job in an entirely different manner.

The red camel having recovered from his buttering, and being declared by Qway to be cured of the mange, I decided to start at once.

Much curiosity existed in the oasis as to the direction in which I intended to go. The majority of the natives, influenced perhaps by my enquiries about Zerzura, were firmly convinced that I was bent upon a hunt for the hidden treasure to be found there, and any statement that I made to the contrary only had the effect of strengthening them more strongly in their opinion. No native, when he is starting treasure seeking, ever lets out where he is going, he tries to mislead his neighbours as to his real intentions, and any statements I made as to the object of my journey were invariably regarded from this standpoint.

The _mamur_ came to see me off, and, just before starting, asked me in what direction I intended to go. I told him the south-west. The _mamur_ was too polite to contradict me, but his expression showed his incredulity quite plainly—incredulity and some admiration. His thoughts put into words were: “Liar, what a liar. I wish I could lie like that.”

On my return he was one of the first to come round to “praise Allah for my safety.” Having got through the usual polite formalities, he asked me where I had _really_ been. When I said I had gone to the south-west as I had told him I should, he looked extremely surprised and glanced across to Qway, drinking tea on a mat near the door, for confirmation. Qway laughed. “Yes, he did go to the south-west,” he said.

“But—but—but—,” stammered the _mamur_, “that’s where you said you were going.”

Even then I don’t think he quite believed it. When asked questions of this kind, I invariably told the exact truth and never made any secret of my plans. I knew quite well they would not believe me, and at first they never did. Afterwards, when they began to realise that my statements were correct, they looked on me, I believe, as rather a fool. They did not seem to understand anyone speaking the truth, when he merely had to lie in order to deceive.

This raises a somewhat intricate question in morality. When you know that if you speak the truth, you will not be believed, and so will deceive as to your real intentions, isn’t it more strictly moral to lie?

I had made somewhat elaborate preparations for crossing the dunes. I had brought with me several empty sacks to spread on the sand for the camels to tread on, and for my own use I had a pair of Canadian snow-shoes, with which I had found it perfectly easy to cross even the softest sand.

I walked out to have a nearer look at the dunes. At close quarters they seemed to me even more formidable than when viewed from a distance. Not only were they of considerable size, but, what was infinitely worse, the sand of which they were composed was so loose and soft that the camels would have sunk in almost to their hocks. It was obvious that, if the whole dune-field was of this character, to get a caravan over many days’ journey of this soft sand was an almost hopeless task.

However, I made up my mind to give it a trial. So the evening before starting out into the desert, I sent Qway off on his _hagin_ to find the best place for us to enter the dune belt, with the result that, instead of setting out towards the south-west, he led the caravan towards the north-west, where he had found a low point in the sand hills, but it was with a good deal of trepidation that I set foot on the first dune we came to, and realised that I had embarked on the desperate attempt to solve the riddle of the sands of the “Devil’s Country”—it was an awful prospect.