CHAPTER V

CLEANING TAMOUSY SPRINGIt is supposed that the fever is a form of malaria, but when I got it myself, very badly, and had several blood tests taken in Cairo, no germ of any known fever was found. The same thing happened to three other Englishmen who caught the fever in Siwa. So far no careful analysis has been made of the disease, which is spoken of as “malaria” because it is certain that malaria exists in the oasis.Each spring in Siwa is cleaned out once in every two years in the summer-time. On these occasions the owners of the gardens give a free meal to the labourers, and a luncheon party to their friends. It is a popular and pleasant entertainment. Almost all the men in the town turn out and work in relays of fifty or a hundred, baling out the water from the springs with old kerosene tins, leather buckets and earthenware pitchers. It is a slow proceeding; some of the largest springs take several days to finish, and the work must be continuous, as the basins are continually filling. The men and boys, covered with mud, shout and sing as they work, every now and then diving into the water and swimming round. Every man, woman and child in Siwa can swim, and most of them are expert divers. The women swim like dogs, with much splashing, but the men are very good. A pump would drain a well in a single day and save much labour and wasted time. As the water sinks masons and carpenters repair the sides of the basin, fitting in new stones and patching up old ones. A curious custom terminates these occasions. Each guest and labourer is presented by the ownersof the spring with a handful of berseem—clover—as a partial payment for his labour. When the men ride home in the evening they twist the clover in wreaths round their heads and round the donkeys’ ears, then, when they arrive at the town, the donkeys are allowed to eat it.One of the “characters” of Siwa, always very much in evidence on these occasions, was an old, half-witted man known as “Sultan Musa.” He suffered from a delusion that he was the Sultan of Siwa, but I fancy that he was trifle less foolish than he pretended to be. He played the part of court jester at all entertainments. The Siwans found him intensely comic; they asked him questions—how old was he, how many wives, and what he had done; when he mumbled that he was 100 years old and had 20 wives, and various other domestic details, they simply shrieked with laughter. I got heartily sick of the old imbecile and announced that I did not wish to see him when I went anywhere. Sometimes when I arrived at a party I would catch sight of him being hurriedly bundled out of sight, and later I heard the servants in the background laughing hilariously at his dreary witticisms.A few days after my arrival at Siwa I received an invitation to a luncheon in the garden of one of the leading sheikhs. The messenger announced that Sheikh Thomi would call for me at eight o’clock on the following morning; I wondered at the hour—but accepted the invitation. The next morning, while shaving before breakfast, I was disturbed by aterrific hullabaloo. My dogs, who strongly object to unknown natives, a trait which I encouraged, were circling furiously round a party of Siwans who sat on their donkeys below the house. My servants went out and rescued them, explaining that I would be down soon; a few minutes later I joined them. After many salutations and polite inquiries I was introduced to the other guests, a crafty-looking, one-eyed merchant, two venerable, white-bearded sheikhs and several notables of the town. They were all dressed very distinctly in their best, wearing coloured silks or spotless white robes. Sheikh Thomi, a cheerful, rotund little man, with the reputation of being the richest sheikh in Siwa, wore a long white burnous and a gorgeously embroidered scarlet silk scarf, and rode a big black donkey with a satanic expression. I was offered the choice of a number of donkeys. I picked out the largest one, and off we went. The donkeys have no bridles or reins; one steers them by beating their necks with a stick, and very occasionally they go the way one wants them to. Mine was the fastest, so I led the cavalcade, hoping that my mount was sure-footed. We dashed through the town with a tremendous clatter and a cloud of dust, scattering children, hens and old women, out on to the roads, and then for a mile or so at a hard gallop towards some gardens. My donkey knew the way. We arrived at the garden as it was beginning to grow hot, and were met at the entrance by a troop of servants who took the donkeys.Sheikh Thomi led me, slightly dishevelled, througha thick palm grove, followed by the rest of the party, to a large summer-house built of logs and thatch, set on the edge of a round spring from whose green-blue depths constant streams of silver bubbles rose to the surface. Little green frogs swam in the water and numbers of scarlet dragon-flies hovered over it. The walls of the summer-house were hung with gaily striped Tripoli blankets—vermilion, white and green—the floor was covered with beautiful old Persian carpets, and cushions were ranged round the sides. Through the open ends of the building I saw long vistas of palm trunks, and the sun caught the scarlet blossoms of the pomegranates and the shining, purple grapes on their trellis frames. The air was heavy with the scent of orange blossom and “tamar-el-hindi,” and the deep shade inside the hut was a welcome relief. Outside the white-robed servants hurried to and fro, carrying baskets and dishes, while two boys, in the distance, sang curious Siwan songs, answering each other back as they swung to and fro high up on two palm trees. Sheikh Thomi, with much whispering and smiling, went outside. I leant back on my cushions lulled by “the liquid lapse of murmuring streams,” thinking how absolutely Eastern the whole scene was.Suddenly—to my horror—I heard a hideous grinding sound and a shrill, raucous voice with a pronounced American accent began singing, “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” a tune which I always object to. It was a gramophone, very old and decrepit, the most prized possession of Sheikh Thomi. I tried tolook as if I enjoyed the tune, which was played over and over again for about half an hour, and followed by some slightly less repulsive records of native music.After listening to this musical interlude a servant brought in a bunch of pink and white sweetly scented China roses which were distributed among the guests, and then the meal began. A dozen boys served as waiters, carrying the dishes from an open-air fire round the corner where several cooks presided over the food. At first it was suggested that I should eat alone, in solitary state, but I protested, so Sheikh Thomi and three others ate with me, while the rest of the guests retired outside to eat later, probably with more ease in my absence. We sat cross-legged on the ground, a position that without considerable practice causes the most agonising “pins and needles.” The meal was eaten almost in silence, broken only by the noisy sounds of eating.A round wooden table was placed in the centre, and each guest was provided with several flat round wheaten loaves, which served as plates, and some strips of thin native bread, which looks rather like pancake, only darker and more solid. The meal consisted mostly of mutton, cooked in various ways—boiled, fried and stewed—with different kinds of vegetables, salads, spices, curries and flavourings. One of the dishes, a very excellent one, was stewed doves, eaten with fresh grapes. The pudding was the least appetising dish on the menu, it was madeof crumbled bread, mixed into a sticky mass with “semna” oil and sugar. There were about a dozen courses. Each one was brought in in a big dish of polished ebony and placed on the table. The guests ate from the central dish, using the thin bread to pick up the meat. One takes a piece of thin bread between finger and thumb, dips into the dish, sandwiching the meat in the bread. It sounds a messy proceeding, but after a little practice I found it quite simple. Servants brought round a brass ewer, and each guest washed his hands after every course; the Siwans also rinsed their mouths—noisily. Every now and then some one would fish out an extra succulent morsel and hand it to me, or if one man had secured a tasty bone he would tear off the meat and heap it on to my loaf. Towards the end of the meal a few loud hiccoughs are not considered amiss, and to loosen one’s belt, very obviously, is thought most complimentary. One needs it too!The food was very good, excellently cooked, and so tender that there was no difficulty in separating the meat from the bones. When I thought, and felt, that we had finished, there followed an enormous dish heaped high with perfectly plain boiled rice. This is called “Shawish”—The Sergeant—because it clears away the other dishes! Afterwards an enormous copper tray was carried in by two boys loaded with every kind of fruit—plums, peaches, pears, grapes, apricots and figs. Last of all came tea, and bowls of palm wine for those who liked it. It is made from the sap of the date palm, and whenfreshly drawn it tastes like sweet ginger-beer, but a little goes a very long way.Tea-drinking in Siwa is as solemn a ceremony as after-dinner port at home. The host either dispenses it himself, or as a compliment invites one of the guests to pour out. Towards the end of my time at Siwa I was thought to have acquired sufficient experience, and occasionally I poured out myself. The guest invariably pretends to refuse, protests that he is not worthy, but eventually accepts the honour. The pourer-out is called the “Sultan” of the party, and every “Sultan” tries to make the best tea in the town. People are very critical, and opinions vary as to who is the super Sultan in Siwa. As soon as the “Sultan” takes over the job he becomes, for the time, master of the house. He calls loudly for more sugar, boiling water, and scolds the servants as if they were his own. If he doesn’t like the quality of the tea, he says so and the host apologises. A servant brings a low table with a number of little glasses about 4 inches high, a locked chest containing three divisions for red and green tea, and sugar, and a bowl of hot water to rinse the cups. One is asked which kind of tea is preferred, red or green, and the safest and most popular reply is “A mixture of both.” The “Sultan” then very deliberately rinses the glasses from a kettle of boiling water which stands on a little brazier at his side, measures out the tea into the pot, adds a little water, pours it away, then carefully makes the tea, pours out a little, tastes it, and finally, if he approves ofthe flavour, hands one glassful to each guest. The tea is drunk with no milk; the first brew is rather bitter, with a very little sugar, the second is very sweet, and the third, and best, is flavoured with rose petals, orange blossom, or fresh mint. Each guest drinks one glass only of each brew, and what is over is poured out and sent to the servants, or into the harem. It should be sipped noisily, and satisfaction expressed in the sound of drinking. One drinks either three glasses, six, or nine. I have known twelve, but that is considered rather an excess in polite society. Personally I consider it one of the best drinks I know, but at first people dislike it.The Siwans are greedy, when they get the chance, and on these occasions their appetites are enormous. They have the greatest admiration for anyone who eats copiously. A certain Government official, whose fondness for large meals was famous, came down to Siwa. He attended a luncheon party, which was given in his honour by some of the sheikhs. The meal was a matter of some dozen or fifteen courses. I myself, by using the greatest discretion, and only eating a few mouthfuls of each dish, managed to last out. But the guest of the day took, and ate, a liberal helping of each course. The Siwans themselves became a trifle languid towards the end of the meal, but he persevered. Even the plain boiled rice did not daunt him, or the sticky oily pudding. It earned him an everlasting admiration in Siwa, and his name is always mentioned atSiwan parties as a really fine fellow, “The Englishman who ate of everything.”Meat is difficult to get in the oasis. When a bedouin convoy arrives the Arabs often slaughter and sell a camel. There are a few sheep and goats imported from the coast, but the price of meat makes it impossible for the poorer folk to buy it. I had with me a number of dogs. One of them, an attractive mongrel, produced a litter of pups. Several people asked me to give them one, and I did so. I was pleased to see how well their new owners looked after them; they appeared even fatter and fitter than when I had them. Then I went into Cairo on local leave. When I returned, about a month or so later, I inquired after the puppies. One of the men who had taken one told me, “They were fine, so fat and so large——” But “Where are they now?” I asked. He looked surprised, pointed to his stomach, which was a very obvious one, and explained that they had all been eaten last month on the “Eid el Kebir,” one of the Mohammedan festivals. He said that nobody could ever imagine that I had given them away for any other reason than for eating. There was nothing to be done, but I never gave away another puppy. I drowned the next litter, and it was considered extremely wasteful.The Siwans eat cats too, and mice and rats. At one time there were many cats in Siwa and no rats. Now there are rats but no cats. Cats were easier to catch than rats, so they went first. One man, a merchant, complained that his house and shopwas overrun with mice and rats. He had gone to great trouble and brought a cat from Egypt, but as soon as it was full grown it disappeared! Dogs are considered “unclean” by the Mohammedan religion, and they are never eaten in any other places in Egypt.Dogs are useful at Siwa both as watch-dogs and companions. My dogs used to sleep on the high terrace of the house, and they always gave one warning of anybody coming over the half mile of sand from the town. Besides, dogs are the most human and affectionate of all animals, and one gets to feel the need of companionship at Siwa. It is a solitary life. One either likes it or hates it; there is no compromise, and most men hate it. Sometimes one does not see a single white man for several months, and then, when a car patrol arrives, they stay a few hours in the town and dash back on the same day. One needs a certain temperament to stand living at Siwa. In the summer the heat is so great that one does not go out much in the middle of the day, unless there is urgent necessity, consequently for many hours every day there is nothing to do. If one sleeps much in the daytime one is unable to sleep at night. A man at Siwa must have some form of hobby in which he can interest himself without needing the assistance of other people. Painting, writing, photography and reading all serve the purpose. I mention them as they formed my own spare-time occupations. But without something of this kind life becomes unbearable. It is an ideal placefor painting and photography. The strangely varied scenery, the brilliant sunshine, the picturesque natives, and the wonderful colouring, especially the sunsets, provide a variety of subjects on every side. Siwan men quite enjoy being photographed, but the women strongly dislike it. Eventually by teaching my Sudanese servant to use a camera I managed to secure a few indifferent photos of women. When one “snaps” people they immediately demand a copy of the photo, imagining that the camera is also a simultaneous printer and developer.According to the proverb “Two is company, three is none,” but I think most men who have experienced it would agree that in an isolated district three is generally company and two is purgatory. The odds are one in a thousand that “the other man” will be congenial, and if he is not life is insufferable. If there is a third man things feel better, but to live for months on end with one other man, who one does not really like, results in mutual detestation. This may sound morbid and unnatural, but one sees so many examples. I knew two quite ordinary normal men posted in a lonely district where they rarely saw another Englishman. For the first month they lived together quite happily, in the second month they quarrelled, in the third month they took to living in separate houses, and at the end of four months they were not on speaking terms! Then there are other men who cannot stand living alone. They have no personal occupation, they become depressed, take to whiskey inlarge quantities—or worse, and therein lies the way to madness.Then there is the question of marriage. In most cases the authorities do not encourage, or rather do not allow, men to marry. They very reasonably consider that married men are unsuitable for desert work; they either leave their wives in Egypt, and worry about them, which is not surprising, or they manage to “wangle” a permission out of the powers that be and take their wives out to the desert. Then, of course, a married man is stationed in a pleasanter place than one who has no wife. It is a difficult problem, and in most cases results in men wasting the prime of their life in a bachelor condition on the desert.But one was kept fairly busily employed at Siwa. A considerable part of the work consisted in judging cases, similar to the duties of a magistrate at home (this, to my mind, was the most interesting part of the routine); also there was a section of Camel Corps to keep in training, and the local police. I went out on patrol for a few days every month, but after once exploring the whole neighbourhood these “treks” were not exciting. Most of the law cases were not of great interest; they consisted mainly of petty thefts, assaults and infringement of Government regulations. Divorce and questions of inheritance were not supposed to be dealt with by me, as they came before a special Mohammedan court, whose representative, an old kadi, went on circuit every year, though he always avoided Siwa, owing to the tedious journeyand the huge file of cases that were waiting for his decision. The Siwans knew almost to the penny how much they would have to give him for a favourable decision on any case.Sometimes, however, I did get curious cases, and the following one illustrates the social conditions in the town.A young Siwan woman called Booba, about fifteen years old, after a series of very varied matrimonial experiences, married an Arab who was settled in the town. Although she had been married many times she was considered a very respectable person and related to one of the leading sheikhs. Divorce is considered no disgrace, and a divorced woman does not lose caste as in other parts of the country. Very soon the Arab husband died. This occurred in January, by the end of March she had married again; this time her husband was a Siwan merchant. He quickly grew tired of her and divorced her after a month of married life, but he treated her well and paid the residue of her marriage money to her brother who was her nearest male relation. She returned to her brother’s family, who were by no means pleased to see her. Being an exceptionally good-looking girl she was courted again by another man, the young son of a sheikh, who was considered rather a “catch.” He married her in June, and very soon after she gave birth to a child. As the child was a girl, the husband divorced her two days after its birth. The wretched woman was turned out of the house in the night by her late mother-in-law. She managed to get to herown home, but her brother’s wife refused to let her in. The brother himself was away. Eventually she found a lodging with an old woman, a relative of one of the earlier husbands, who had, it seemed, some liking for the girl. While staying here the child died—possibly from exposure, possibly from other reasons.Immediately the families of the last three husbands hurried to give information against her, and charged her with murdering the child. The doctor examined it and found signs of possible suffocation. I listened for several days to the evidence of a number of witnesses, mostly repulsive old women who enlarged with horrid keenness on the most disagreeable details. But eventually nothing was proved, and the girl was acquitted. It was a disagreeable case, but one could almost find parallels to it in the English police-court news.Female witnesses at Siwa were very difficult to manage. They never spoke or understood any Arabic, so the six sheikhs, who acted as a jury, interpreted for them. I used to sit on a platform at one end of the room, and the six sheikhs occupied a bench along one side. Women pretended to hate coming into the court-house, but I think they really rather enjoyed it. The orderly, one of the police, would firmly propel the lady into the middle of the room, she being completely covered from head to foot with clothes. As soon as the orderly retired she sidled over to the wall and propped herself against it, generally with her back turned on me. The sheikhswould remonstrate, “For shame, turn round Ayesha, daughter of Osman, and speak to the noble officer.” The lady would wriggle round a little and allow one eye to appear through the drapery. When questioned she mumbled inaudible replies, growing slightly more coherent if she was personally concerned in the case, but if there was another woman giving evidence she would gradually lower her veils, speak louder, and finally show her whole face as she shrieked abuse at her opponent—quite regardless of the eyes of the court. The sheikhs were invaluable on these occasions; it would have been very difficult to work without them.One woman, who sued her neighbour for throwing stones at her hens, disturbed the court considerably. When she was led in by the policeman she appeared particularly cumbered with clothes. Suddenly a terrific disturbance began among her shawls and draperies; she gave a shrill squeal and two hens disentangled themselves from her clothes and dashed madly round the court-house. Two of my dogs, who were lying at my feet, sprang after the birds and chased them round the room, which plunged the proceedings into the wildest confusion. The woman had carried in the hens intending to confront her opponent, at the critical moment, with the injured victims. Judging from their activity they had not been much injured.One man, Bashu Habun, son of the old sheikh who was hanged, caused more legal work than the whole of the rest of the population together. He spent histime appropriating the property of one of his brothers who was in prison. The brother had an agent in Siwa, a foolish old sheikh called Soud, who was too honest, or stupid, to withstand the sly cleverness of Bashu Habun. At one time there were seven cases between them, involving many hundreds of pounds. I settled the first three, but found that the latter dealt with inheritance, and so were beyond my jurisdiction, but I got heartily sick of the sharp, foxy face of Bashu Habun and the noisy, foolish obstinacy of old Sheikh Soud. Both of them tried to secure my support by sending donkey-loads of fruit to my house before the cases were tried, and on one occasion the servants met both bringing presents, and returned together with their offerings to the town. The idea of “baksheesh” is so firmly planted in the native mind that it takes a long while to die out. Still, one finds that the natives really appreciate and prefer an impartial administration of justice, in place of justice—of sorts—which depends on which of the two parties can offer the highest bribe to the judge. The Senussi were by no means above this method, but they let political considerations weigh equally with “baksheesh” on their scale of justice. In the days when a Turkish governor ruled in Siwa he made his money by accepting and extorting bribes, and if, when British Administration retires from Egypt, the oasis is ruled again by a native mamur, the same system will possibly flourish.IN THE WESTERN QUARTERCHAPTER VSUBURBAN OASES“. . . tufted islesThat verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.”SIWA itself is the largest, richest and most important oasis in a little group of oases which are mostly uninhabited. Similar oases, such as the Kufra group and the Augila group, are scattered at intervals, few and very far between, over the vast arid surface of the great Sahara desert. In most of them there are fresh-water springs surrounded by small patches of green, which have an appearance of almost magical beauty to those who arrive at them, weary after days of travel over the hot and barren solitudes of the desert. Ancient poets compared the yellow desert to a leopard’s tawny skin, spotted with occasional oases. Doubtless when Siwa was more thickly populated than it is to-day each of the outlying ones was inhabited, but now the ever-shrinking population is insufficient even to cultivate all the gardens in the immediate vicinity of Siwa itself.About 20 miles east of Siwa town, at one end of a long salt lake, there is a village called Zeitoun, and close by it a cluster of rich gardens which are thefinest and best cared-for in the oasis, famous for the olives which give the place its name. In the whole of Siwa there are about 40,000 fruit-bearing olive trees, and a large quantity of olive oil is manufactured locally. Rough wooden olive presses are used by the natives, which are so primitive that a large proportion of the oil is wasted. The oil is of an excellent quality and is very profitable when exported, but owing to the difficulty of obtaining suitable tins and vessels to store it in only a small amount is sent up to the coast. It is bought by the Greeks at Matruh and Sollum, who dilute it and sell it at an enormous profit to the Arabs.Along the shores of the lake there are several other groups of gardens, and at one of them the ex-Khedive proposed to start a model farm, but as usual he got no further in his scheme than erecting some huts for the labourers to live in. He also did a certain amount of excavating in this neighbourhood, and according to hearsay he carried away camel-loads of “antikas” which he dug up among some ruins at a place called Kareished. Some of the gardens slope right down to the shores of the lake, and there are several fine springs among them. I often thought that Kareished would be quite a pleasant place to live in if one built a good house and had a boat to cross the lake to Siwa. The people in these outlying villages ride into Siwa town every few days to do their shopping, across a long causeway which divides the lake and the mud swamp.North-east of Zeitoun, across 90 miles of highdesert tableland, one comes to the oasis of Gara, or “Um es Sogheir”—the Little Mother. The word “Um”—mother—is used indiscriminately by the Arabs in names of places, hills, valleys and rocks. According to one theory this practice originates from very ancient times when places were named after certain female deities or goddesses. Gara is a lonely valley about 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, surrounded by precipitous cliffs that one can only descend in a few places, sprinkled with vast isolated masses of rock, upon one of which the village is perched. Many of the rocks have had their bases so worn away that they look like gigantic mushrooms, and one can camp most comfortably in their shade as under an umbrella. There are nine wells and springs in the oasis, but the water has an unpleasant bitter taste, which is mentioned in the accounts of Alexander’s journey to Siwa. Owing to the bad water and lack of labour the Garites are unable to grow anything except dates of a poor quality and a few onions and tomatoes. Grapes and fruit trees will not flourish in the oasis. The people eke out a miserable existence by selling dates, mats and baskets to the caravans which pass between Siwa and Egypt. They are wretchedly poor, exceedingly dirty and very distinctly darker in complexion than the Siwans. In former days they were too weak-spirited to be aggressive and too poor to be attacked, although owing to the position of Gara on the Siwa-Egypt caravan route they might easily have made themselves very awkward to travellers by levying a toll onconvoys calling at Gara for water on their way to Egypt.THE SPRING OF ZEITOUNBut on the one solitary occasion when the Garites did attempt to do this they fared very badly. According to the tradition a famous religious sheikh called Abdel Sayed was travelling from Tripoli to join the pilgrim caravan at Cairo. He had with him a few attendants and some devout men who were also on their way to do the Pilgrimage. When they halted at Gara the inhabitants, instead of feeling honoured and entertaining the travellers, came out of the town and attacked them. The sheikh and his followers managed to escape, and when they were safely out of the valley the venerable Abdel Sayed stood on a rock and solemnly cursed the people of Gara, swearing that there should never be more than forty men alive in the village at once. Since then, although the total number of inhabitants is over a hundred, there have never been more than forty full-grown men. When the number exceeds forty, one of them dies. On this account the Garites have a great objection to strangers, and when I arrived, with a dozen fully grown Camel Corps men, the sheikh anxiously begged me to forbid them to enter the village, but as there were under forty men living there at the time I myself and an orderly went up into the town. Presumably if we had all walked up several of the Garites must have died.The village is a miserable imitation of Aghourmi, but dirty and squalid. A steep winding pathwayleads up the rock to the gateway, and in the centre there is a square open market where nothing is ever bought or sold as nobody has any money except the sheikh, and he spends it at Siwa when he rides in every fortnight on a donkey to report at the Markaz. The sheikh himself is an intelligent man, but scarcely able to speak any Arabic. One of his duties is to look after the telephone from Siwa which passes Gara on its way to Matruh. This telephone was erected by the army after the Senussi operations, and is remarkably clear considering the distance of desert which it crosses. My visit caused a great sensation, as the people had not seen an Englishman for a very long time. The inhabitants came out to my camp and sat in silent rows gazing at us, until they were politely “moved on,” and the women spent the whole day looking down on us from the roofs. I believe, during the war, a car patrol visited the place, but as the sheikh said, “They came—whirrrr—and they went—brrrrr!”According to another legend some bedouin raiders once attacked Gara. The people retired to the village, shut the gates, and prayed to the patron sheikh, who is buried outside, for help. The spirit of the dead sheikh rose to the occasion and so dazzled the eyes of the enemy that they wandered round and round the rock and were totally incapable of finding the gate. Eventually they became so exhausted that the Garites were emboldened to come down from the town and kill them. The old muezzin of the mosque of Gara related this story to me, and anaudience of Garites, who evidently knew it well, with what I considered unjustifiable pride, and he did not seem to think at all that his forebears had played rather a cowardly part in this signal victory.Between Siwa and Gara there is a pass through a rocky gorge called Negb el Mejberry. Across the track there is a line of fifty little heaps of stones, each a few feet high. Once, many years ago, a rich caravan set out from Siwa to the coast, via Gara. They reached the negb (pass) at twilight and noticed the heaps of stones, but thought nothing of it. Suddenly, when they were quite close to them, a bedouin leaped up from behind each heap and rushed on the caravan. With great difficulty the merchants beat off the robbers, and the ambuscade failed, but not without several men being killed. The merchants buried them close to the place, which is haunted to-day by the ghosts of the brigands who still appear lurking behind the stone heaps. The pass has an evil reputation, and natives prefer to cross it in broad daylight, and not when the sinking sun plays strange tricks with the shadows of the rocks, or when the moon lends an air of mystery to the rugged ravine.Due west of Zeitoun there is a string of “sebukha”—salt marshes—which lie at the foot of a line of cliffs, a continuation of the mountains that surround Siwa on the north. In this country, which is rarely crossed, one finds little plantations of gum trees that remind one of the Sudan, and also patchesof camel thorn bushes. I have not seen these growing in any other part of the Western Desert. Possibly they may have grown from seeds dropped by caravans passing up from the Sudan. There is no fresh water in this area, but the country is very full of gazelle.South-west of Siwa there are two other uninhabited oases, El Areg and Bahrein—the two lakes. El Areg is a very surprising place. Riding along the flat rocky stretch of country on the east of the Pacho mountains, named after a European explorer who visited Siwa in the early nineteenth century, one arrives suddenly on the brink of a precipice which is the top of the cliffs that surround the oasis. There are two steep, difficult paths leading down between enormously high white rocks with bunches of straggling, overgrown palm trees at their foot. Much of the oasis is a salt marsh, but at one end there is a mass of bushes and tall palm trees, with two springs of drinkable water among them. The cliffs are very high indeed, and their whiteness makes them look strange at night. In places there are stretches of fossilized sea-shells, and I especially noticed sea-urchins and starfish. In a kind of bay in the cliff, between two enormous high rocks, there is a natural terrace, and in the centre of the terrace there are remains of a building; in the surrounding cliffs, sometimes so high up on the face that one wonders how and why they were made, there are the square entrances of rock tombs or dwellings. Some of them are quite large, but in all cases very low. All thelower ones are full of skulls and human skeletons, but many are so covered with sand-drifts that I could not get inside. The oasis is full of gazelle, which feed on the luscious vegetation round the marshes.At Bahrein there are two long, brilliantly blue salt lakes, fringed with a tangled mass of vegetation and palm trees, surrounded by yellow sand-dunes. Bahrein always reminded me of“A tideless, dolorous, midland sea;In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”Here also are rock tombs in some of the cliffs, and in one of them I discovered the remains of a coloured mural painting, a picture very much obliterated, of a cow and some palm trees with large clusters of dates on them, roughly done in brown and blue colours. Evidently at one time the oasis was inhabited, and if one sought complete seclusion it would be quite a pleasant place to live in. There are several thousands of date palms at El Areg and Bahrein which would produce fruit if they were pruned and looked after. At one time men used to come out from Siwa and tend the trees, collecting the fruit later on, but now there is not enough labour in Siwa to cultivate all the gardens, so both these oases are deserted. The route from Siwa to Farafra passes through El Areg and Bahrein, and there is another caravan track from El Areg to the Baharia oasis, and thence to the valley of the Nile, which it touches somewhere near Assiut. But practically no travellers pass this way, and the Mashrabs are almost lost to knowledge.West of Siwa town, at the end of the lake, at the foot of an enormous flat-topped mountain, there is a little hamlet called Kamissa, and a number of gardens. Beyond this, if one crosses the cliffs by a rocky pass, one arrives at a valley called Maragi, where there is another salt lake surrounded by gardens which belong to a colony of about sixty Arabs who settled here some fifty years ago and have remained ever since. They do not intermarry with the Siwans but “keep themselves to themselves,” as they consider that they are very superior to the natives. They live in tents and breed sheep and cattle, and are to all appearances similar to the Arabs on the coast, except that they have no camels. At one time two of these Arabs moved into Siwa and settled in houses, but they were regarded as renegades by the remainder. Further west there is yet another salt lake called Shyata, a long patch of blue among the yellow sand-hills, with good grazing around it and fresh water which can be obtained by digging in certain places, which one needs to know from experience, as there is no indication of its whereabouts.North-west of Shyata there is a cluster of uninhabited oases, Gagub, Melfa and Exabia. They are queer wild places with wonderful rock scenery, huge towering limestone cliffs, deep morasses, and stretches of shining water, edged with rotting palm trees, like“. . . That dim lakeWhere sinful souls their farewell takeOf this sad world.”These oases have a strangely evil appearance, one could well imagine the witches of Macbeth celebrating their midnight orgies in such places. At night a feverish miasma rises from the dark rotting vegetation, and with it myriads of venomous mosquitoes. By moonlight the scene is even moremacabre; the gigantic masses of strangely shaped rocks take on the appearance of“Dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,A city of death, distinct with many a towerAnd wall impregnable——.”and the dead branches on the gaunt palm trunks sway like corpses on a gallows tree. When I trekked in these parts I always tried to camp for the night above the cliffs, but this was no easy matter, as in places they rose perpendicularly from the ground.Yet the presence of innumerable sepulchral chambers cut in the cliffs shows that these melancholy valleys were once inhabited. The water here is practically undrinkable. At Gagub there is a well, and on one occasion my men all drank from it, but it was so strongly impregnated with sulphur that it had the same effect as a very powerful dose of physic! There is a great difference between these deep gloomy valleys, with their oozing marshes and dead funereal palm trees, and Siwa itself, with its rich gardens, cool defiles and long green vistas among the trees. From the top of a hill near Melfa, the westernmost oasis, one can see the dome of the mosque at Jerabub. In Siwa the mosques have no domes, so one becomesunaccustomed to the sight of them, and for this reason the dome at Jerabub looks quite impressive, though it is actually only about the size of those that one sees over tombs in numbers of the cemeteries of Cairo.Jerabub used to be the Mecca of Senussiism, but what glory it ever had has now passed away. To-day it only contains about a hundred half-starving natives, and a few old sheikhs who still teach the children in the zowia (religious school). Lately the people were in such sore straits that the Senussi Wakil, Sidi Ahmed, had to send down a convoy of grain from the coast, and the Siwans who rode into Jerabub to sell things returned with their goods and complained that nobody had any money to spend. The dates in the Jerabub gardens are very inferior, so the Siwans export quite a lot of dates to their neighbours.The only man of any wealth in Jerabub was an old retired merchant called Mohammed el Ithneini. He was so old, and so enormously fat, that he was unable to walk, and had to be carried about by his slaves in a litter. In his day he had been a great merchant, travelling between Tripoli, Wadai, Egypt and the Sudan, and in course of time he had amassed considerable riches. But lately, finding himself short of cash, with a large family to support, he began to raise money on his belongings.One day I got information that two men from Jerabub had passed through Siwa on their way to the coast and Egypt without coming to the office to see whether they had anything on which to paycustoms. Customs are collected at Siwa on imports from the west. I sent a patrol after them and brought them back to the Markaz. One of them was a grandson of the old sheikh, and the other was his cousin. I examined their camels, and ordered them to turn out their bags, which they did very reluctantly. They spread the contents out on the steps of the Markaz. It was quite like a scene from the Arabian Nights. There were heavy silver anklets, curiously chased bangles, silver earrings shaped like a young moon with filigree bosses from which hung long silver chains with little pendants, rings, brooches, necklaces, several small lumps of gold, two complete sets of trappings and armour for an Arab horse made of silver-gilt and gold-fringed velvet, filigree ornaments and cases for charms and a little bag full of seed pearls; all this was emptied out of two dirty old leather bags. It made a fine show shining in the sunlight and I longed to make a bid for some of it, but I came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be done. They were taking it to sell to a certain merchant in Cairo, so I sent them up with a Camel Corps patrol who were going to the coast, as already the Siwans were casting envious eyes on the stuff. The men returned two months later and told me that they got £140 for the lot, which I myself had estimated as being worth a very great deal more. For several years the old merchant had been sending stuff to be sold in Cairo, and every year I imagine he received as small a price.Among the valuables in his house there are anumber of old Persian and Turkish carpets, but these he keeps as they are too heavy to send about. I had entered into negotiations with him about some of these, but just when the bargain was being completed I got a bad “go” of fever and had to leave for the coast. A few of the Siwan sheikhs have good carpets, but they know their worth and are very unwilling to part with them. Other household articles that some Siwans possess and are very proud of are large brass Turkish samovars which they use with charcoal for making tea. Their owners say that they were originally brought from Constantinople, but now they have become quite like heirlooms, and curiously enough they do not seem to wear out.South of Siwa, beyond the shifting yellow sand-hills, there is a vast stretch of desert without a single shred of vegetation which reaches down to the Sudan. Only the first hundred miles has been explored, beyond that isterra incognita. The Arabs call this the Devil’s country, and rightly so. In these huge silent spaces one sees incessant mirage, for which the native name is Devil’s water, and frequently “the genii of the storm, urging the rage of whirlwind,” sends a high hurricane of hot stinging sand tearing across the desert, smothering men and beasts in blinding dust, snatching up anything that is loose and bearing it away.“In solitary length the Desert lies,Where Desolation keeps his empty court.No bloom of spring, o’er all the thirsty vastNor spiry grass is found; but sands insteadIn sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.A land of fears! where visionary forms,Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fireSwarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,The secret hag and sorcerer unblestTheir Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,Spoils of the violated graves——”I once trekked down here in summer-time on the track of some gun-runners who were supposed to be making for Egypt from the west. It is a dreary region, horribly dead and monotonous, consisting of alternate stretches of hard ground covered with shining black pebbles, and white sand-dunes, stretching east and west, where the sand is so soft and powdery that camels and men sink deep into it, and the surface is so hot that one can hardly bear to feel it. There are no tracks or mashrabs, and we were the first party to set up cairns on the hills, wherever there were stones. If one travelled on and on for about a thousand miles one would arrive at Darfur, in the north-west corner of the Sudan. Until the war Darfur was an independent kingdom whose Sultan, Ali Dinar, reigned from his capital El Fasher in a similar manner to the Sultan of Wadai.The Kufra, sometimes spelt “Kufara,” group of oases lie south-west of Siwa, but owing to its distance from all civilization Kufra was never of any importance historically or politically, though comparatively lately it has become a convenient retreat for some of the Senussi sheikhs. Quite a number of natives who had recently been in Kufra visited Siwa during the time that I was there, and whenI questioned them, and various Siwans who knew Kufra well, they all described it as being very thinly populated, less fertile and very inferior to the Siwa oasis—from their point of view. When I discussed the possibilities of visiting it they were exceedingly surprised at the idea of anybody wishing to see Kufra, which they described as being “muskeen”—wretched—but at the same time they said that the people in Kufra would certainly not object to anybody going there, as it was in no way a sacred place like Jerabub used to be at one time. At Kufra there is no strange metropolis like that of Siwa, and as recently as 1854 an English traveller who visited Jalow and Augila stated that Kufra was practically uninhabited, except during a certain month of the year when natives from the other oases went there in order to gather the dates.There is a great fascination in travelling over unexplored desert; somehow I always had the feeling that perhaps beyond the rocky skyline, or perhaps over the next ridge of sand-hills, there might possibly appear the languidly swaying palm trees of some unknown oasis. Nobody has penetrated into the heart of this desert, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are oases, either inhabited like the lost land of Atlantis or like the mysterious desert cities that the story-tellers describe to their evening audience in the market-place, hidden away among those unmapped plains of the Sahara.There are still great possibilities of excavating at Siwa, and in the outlying oases, which have beeneven less explored, but I myself had neither the leisure nor the money to do any serious digging. In many parts of the oasis, sometimes in the middle of a palm grove, one finds what appear to be the foundations of ancient buildings, made of well-squared stones; and many of the rock tombs, especially in the cliffs of the more distant oases, still contain mummies. I examined a number of them myself, but with no luck, as they were, apparently, of a very inferior class and had no ornaments buried with them. Near some of them there were broken earthenware pots of an antique shape not made in Siwa to-day. All the tombs whose entrances are visible in the Hill of the Dead, the great rock mausoleum outside Siwa town, have been rifled many year ago and nothing is left except scattered bones, skulls and scraps of grave wrappings. A few of the finest tombs have been converted into dwellings by some poor Siwans who are courageous enough to brave the demons of the hill in order to secure a freehold residence, cool in summer and warm in winter, and scented with the

CLEANING TAMOUSY SPRING

CLEANING TAMOUSY SPRING

CLEANING TAMOUSY SPRING

It is supposed that the fever is a form of malaria, but when I got it myself, very badly, and had several blood tests taken in Cairo, no germ of any known fever was found. The same thing happened to three other Englishmen who caught the fever in Siwa. So far no careful analysis has been made of the disease, which is spoken of as “malaria” because it is certain that malaria exists in the oasis.

Each spring in Siwa is cleaned out once in every two years in the summer-time. On these occasions the owners of the gardens give a free meal to the labourers, and a luncheon party to their friends. It is a popular and pleasant entertainment. Almost all the men in the town turn out and work in relays of fifty or a hundred, baling out the water from the springs with old kerosene tins, leather buckets and earthenware pitchers. It is a slow proceeding; some of the largest springs take several days to finish, and the work must be continuous, as the basins are continually filling. The men and boys, covered with mud, shout and sing as they work, every now and then diving into the water and swimming round. Every man, woman and child in Siwa can swim, and most of them are expert divers. The women swim like dogs, with much splashing, but the men are very good. A pump would drain a well in a single day and save much labour and wasted time. As the water sinks masons and carpenters repair the sides of the basin, fitting in new stones and patching up old ones. A curious custom terminates these occasions. Each guest and labourer is presented by the ownersof the spring with a handful of berseem—clover—as a partial payment for his labour. When the men ride home in the evening they twist the clover in wreaths round their heads and round the donkeys’ ears, then, when they arrive at the town, the donkeys are allowed to eat it.

One of the “characters” of Siwa, always very much in evidence on these occasions, was an old, half-witted man known as “Sultan Musa.” He suffered from a delusion that he was the Sultan of Siwa, but I fancy that he was trifle less foolish than he pretended to be. He played the part of court jester at all entertainments. The Siwans found him intensely comic; they asked him questions—how old was he, how many wives, and what he had done; when he mumbled that he was 100 years old and had 20 wives, and various other domestic details, they simply shrieked with laughter. I got heartily sick of the old imbecile and announced that I did not wish to see him when I went anywhere. Sometimes when I arrived at a party I would catch sight of him being hurriedly bundled out of sight, and later I heard the servants in the background laughing hilariously at his dreary witticisms.

A few days after my arrival at Siwa I received an invitation to a luncheon in the garden of one of the leading sheikhs. The messenger announced that Sheikh Thomi would call for me at eight o’clock on the following morning; I wondered at the hour—but accepted the invitation. The next morning, while shaving before breakfast, I was disturbed by aterrific hullabaloo. My dogs, who strongly object to unknown natives, a trait which I encouraged, were circling furiously round a party of Siwans who sat on their donkeys below the house. My servants went out and rescued them, explaining that I would be down soon; a few minutes later I joined them. After many salutations and polite inquiries I was introduced to the other guests, a crafty-looking, one-eyed merchant, two venerable, white-bearded sheikhs and several notables of the town. They were all dressed very distinctly in their best, wearing coloured silks or spotless white robes. Sheikh Thomi, a cheerful, rotund little man, with the reputation of being the richest sheikh in Siwa, wore a long white burnous and a gorgeously embroidered scarlet silk scarf, and rode a big black donkey with a satanic expression. I was offered the choice of a number of donkeys. I picked out the largest one, and off we went. The donkeys have no bridles or reins; one steers them by beating their necks with a stick, and very occasionally they go the way one wants them to. Mine was the fastest, so I led the cavalcade, hoping that my mount was sure-footed. We dashed through the town with a tremendous clatter and a cloud of dust, scattering children, hens and old women, out on to the roads, and then for a mile or so at a hard gallop towards some gardens. My donkey knew the way. We arrived at the garden as it was beginning to grow hot, and were met at the entrance by a troop of servants who took the donkeys.

Sheikh Thomi led me, slightly dishevelled, througha thick palm grove, followed by the rest of the party, to a large summer-house built of logs and thatch, set on the edge of a round spring from whose green-blue depths constant streams of silver bubbles rose to the surface. Little green frogs swam in the water and numbers of scarlet dragon-flies hovered over it. The walls of the summer-house were hung with gaily striped Tripoli blankets—vermilion, white and green—the floor was covered with beautiful old Persian carpets, and cushions were ranged round the sides. Through the open ends of the building I saw long vistas of palm trunks, and the sun caught the scarlet blossoms of the pomegranates and the shining, purple grapes on their trellis frames. The air was heavy with the scent of orange blossom and “tamar-el-hindi,” and the deep shade inside the hut was a welcome relief. Outside the white-robed servants hurried to and fro, carrying baskets and dishes, while two boys, in the distance, sang curious Siwan songs, answering each other back as they swung to and fro high up on two palm trees. Sheikh Thomi, with much whispering and smiling, went outside. I leant back on my cushions lulled by “the liquid lapse of murmuring streams,” thinking how absolutely Eastern the whole scene was.

Suddenly—to my horror—I heard a hideous grinding sound and a shrill, raucous voice with a pronounced American accent began singing, “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” a tune which I always object to. It was a gramophone, very old and decrepit, the most prized possession of Sheikh Thomi. I tried tolook as if I enjoyed the tune, which was played over and over again for about half an hour, and followed by some slightly less repulsive records of native music.

After listening to this musical interlude a servant brought in a bunch of pink and white sweetly scented China roses which were distributed among the guests, and then the meal began. A dozen boys served as waiters, carrying the dishes from an open-air fire round the corner where several cooks presided over the food. At first it was suggested that I should eat alone, in solitary state, but I protested, so Sheikh Thomi and three others ate with me, while the rest of the guests retired outside to eat later, probably with more ease in my absence. We sat cross-legged on the ground, a position that without considerable practice causes the most agonising “pins and needles.” The meal was eaten almost in silence, broken only by the noisy sounds of eating.

A round wooden table was placed in the centre, and each guest was provided with several flat round wheaten loaves, which served as plates, and some strips of thin native bread, which looks rather like pancake, only darker and more solid. The meal consisted mostly of mutton, cooked in various ways—boiled, fried and stewed—with different kinds of vegetables, salads, spices, curries and flavourings. One of the dishes, a very excellent one, was stewed doves, eaten with fresh grapes. The pudding was the least appetising dish on the menu, it was madeof crumbled bread, mixed into a sticky mass with “semna” oil and sugar. There were about a dozen courses. Each one was brought in in a big dish of polished ebony and placed on the table. The guests ate from the central dish, using the thin bread to pick up the meat. One takes a piece of thin bread between finger and thumb, dips into the dish, sandwiching the meat in the bread. It sounds a messy proceeding, but after a little practice I found it quite simple. Servants brought round a brass ewer, and each guest washed his hands after every course; the Siwans also rinsed their mouths—noisily. Every now and then some one would fish out an extra succulent morsel and hand it to me, or if one man had secured a tasty bone he would tear off the meat and heap it on to my loaf. Towards the end of the meal a few loud hiccoughs are not considered amiss, and to loosen one’s belt, very obviously, is thought most complimentary. One needs it too!

The food was very good, excellently cooked, and so tender that there was no difficulty in separating the meat from the bones. When I thought, and felt, that we had finished, there followed an enormous dish heaped high with perfectly plain boiled rice. This is called “Shawish”—The Sergeant—because it clears away the other dishes! Afterwards an enormous copper tray was carried in by two boys loaded with every kind of fruit—plums, peaches, pears, grapes, apricots and figs. Last of all came tea, and bowls of palm wine for those who liked it. It is made from the sap of the date palm, and whenfreshly drawn it tastes like sweet ginger-beer, but a little goes a very long way.

Tea-drinking in Siwa is as solemn a ceremony as after-dinner port at home. The host either dispenses it himself, or as a compliment invites one of the guests to pour out. Towards the end of my time at Siwa I was thought to have acquired sufficient experience, and occasionally I poured out myself. The guest invariably pretends to refuse, protests that he is not worthy, but eventually accepts the honour. The pourer-out is called the “Sultan” of the party, and every “Sultan” tries to make the best tea in the town. People are very critical, and opinions vary as to who is the super Sultan in Siwa. As soon as the “Sultan” takes over the job he becomes, for the time, master of the house. He calls loudly for more sugar, boiling water, and scolds the servants as if they were his own. If he doesn’t like the quality of the tea, he says so and the host apologises. A servant brings a low table with a number of little glasses about 4 inches high, a locked chest containing three divisions for red and green tea, and sugar, and a bowl of hot water to rinse the cups. One is asked which kind of tea is preferred, red or green, and the safest and most popular reply is “A mixture of both.” The “Sultan” then very deliberately rinses the glasses from a kettle of boiling water which stands on a little brazier at his side, measures out the tea into the pot, adds a little water, pours it away, then carefully makes the tea, pours out a little, tastes it, and finally, if he approves ofthe flavour, hands one glassful to each guest. The tea is drunk with no milk; the first brew is rather bitter, with a very little sugar, the second is very sweet, and the third, and best, is flavoured with rose petals, orange blossom, or fresh mint. Each guest drinks one glass only of each brew, and what is over is poured out and sent to the servants, or into the harem. It should be sipped noisily, and satisfaction expressed in the sound of drinking. One drinks either three glasses, six, or nine. I have known twelve, but that is considered rather an excess in polite society. Personally I consider it one of the best drinks I know, but at first people dislike it.

The Siwans are greedy, when they get the chance, and on these occasions their appetites are enormous. They have the greatest admiration for anyone who eats copiously. A certain Government official, whose fondness for large meals was famous, came down to Siwa. He attended a luncheon party, which was given in his honour by some of the sheikhs. The meal was a matter of some dozen or fifteen courses. I myself, by using the greatest discretion, and only eating a few mouthfuls of each dish, managed to last out. But the guest of the day took, and ate, a liberal helping of each course. The Siwans themselves became a trifle languid towards the end of the meal, but he persevered. Even the plain boiled rice did not daunt him, or the sticky oily pudding. It earned him an everlasting admiration in Siwa, and his name is always mentioned atSiwan parties as a really fine fellow, “The Englishman who ate of everything.”

Meat is difficult to get in the oasis. When a bedouin convoy arrives the Arabs often slaughter and sell a camel. There are a few sheep and goats imported from the coast, but the price of meat makes it impossible for the poorer folk to buy it. I had with me a number of dogs. One of them, an attractive mongrel, produced a litter of pups. Several people asked me to give them one, and I did so. I was pleased to see how well their new owners looked after them; they appeared even fatter and fitter than when I had them. Then I went into Cairo on local leave. When I returned, about a month or so later, I inquired after the puppies. One of the men who had taken one told me, “They were fine, so fat and so large——” But “Where are they now?” I asked. He looked surprised, pointed to his stomach, which was a very obvious one, and explained that they had all been eaten last month on the “Eid el Kebir,” one of the Mohammedan festivals. He said that nobody could ever imagine that I had given them away for any other reason than for eating. There was nothing to be done, but I never gave away another puppy. I drowned the next litter, and it was considered extremely wasteful.

The Siwans eat cats too, and mice and rats. At one time there were many cats in Siwa and no rats. Now there are rats but no cats. Cats were easier to catch than rats, so they went first. One man, a merchant, complained that his house and shopwas overrun with mice and rats. He had gone to great trouble and brought a cat from Egypt, but as soon as it was full grown it disappeared! Dogs are considered “unclean” by the Mohammedan religion, and they are never eaten in any other places in Egypt.

Dogs are useful at Siwa both as watch-dogs and companions. My dogs used to sleep on the high terrace of the house, and they always gave one warning of anybody coming over the half mile of sand from the town. Besides, dogs are the most human and affectionate of all animals, and one gets to feel the need of companionship at Siwa. It is a solitary life. One either likes it or hates it; there is no compromise, and most men hate it. Sometimes one does not see a single white man for several months, and then, when a car patrol arrives, they stay a few hours in the town and dash back on the same day. One needs a certain temperament to stand living at Siwa. In the summer the heat is so great that one does not go out much in the middle of the day, unless there is urgent necessity, consequently for many hours every day there is nothing to do. If one sleeps much in the daytime one is unable to sleep at night. A man at Siwa must have some form of hobby in which he can interest himself without needing the assistance of other people. Painting, writing, photography and reading all serve the purpose. I mention them as they formed my own spare-time occupations. But without something of this kind life becomes unbearable. It is an ideal placefor painting and photography. The strangely varied scenery, the brilliant sunshine, the picturesque natives, and the wonderful colouring, especially the sunsets, provide a variety of subjects on every side. Siwan men quite enjoy being photographed, but the women strongly dislike it. Eventually by teaching my Sudanese servant to use a camera I managed to secure a few indifferent photos of women. When one “snaps” people they immediately demand a copy of the photo, imagining that the camera is also a simultaneous printer and developer.

According to the proverb “Two is company, three is none,” but I think most men who have experienced it would agree that in an isolated district three is generally company and two is purgatory. The odds are one in a thousand that “the other man” will be congenial, and if he is not life is insufferable. If there is a third man things feel better, but to live for months on end with one other man, who one does not really like, results in mutual detestation. This may sound morbid and unnatural, but one sees so many examples. I knew two quite ordinary normal men posted in a lonely district where they rarely saw another Englishman. For the first month they lived together quite happily, in the second month they quarrelled, in the third month they took to living in separate houses, and at the end of four months they were not on speaking terms! Then there are other men who cannot stand living alone. They have no personal occupation, they become depressed, take to whiskey inlarge quantities—or worse, and therein lies the way to madness.

Then there is the question of marriage. In most cases the authorities do not encourage, or rather do not allow, men to marry. They very reasonably consider that married men are unsuitable for desert work; they either leave their wives in Egypt, and worry about them, which is not surprising, or they manage to “wangle” a permission out of the powers that be and take their wives out to the desert. Then, of course, a married man is stationed in a pleasanter place than one who has no wife. It is a difficult problem, and in most cases results in men wasting the prime of their life in a bachelor condition on the desert.

But one was kept fairly busily employed at Siwa. A considerable part of the work consisted in judging cases, similar to the duties of a magistrate at home (this, to my mind, was the most interesting part of the routine); also there was a section of Camel Corps to keep in training, and the local police. I went out on patrol for a few days every month, but after once exploring the whole neighbourhood these “treks” were not exciting. Most of the law cases were not of great interest; they consisted mainly of petty thefts, assaults and infringement of Government regulations. Divorce and questions of inheritance were not supposed to be dealt with by me, as they came before a special Mohammedan court, whose representative, an old kadi, went on circuit every year, though he always avoided Siwa, owing to the tedious journeyand the huge file of cases that were waiting for his decision. The Siwans knew almost to the penny how much they would have to give him for a favourable decision on any case.

Sometimes, however, I did get curious cases, and the following one illustrates the social conditions in the town.

A young Siwan woman called Booba, about fifteen years old, after a series of very varied matrimonial experiences, married an Arab who was settled in the town. Although she had been married many times she was considered a very respectable person and related to one of the leading sheikhs. Divorce is considered no disgrace, and a divorced woman does not lose caste as in other parts of the country. Very soon the Arab husband died. This occurred in January, by the end of March she had married again; this time her husband was a Siwan merchant. He quickly grew tired of her and divorced her after a month of married life, but he treated her well and paid the residue of her marriage money to her brother who was her nearest male relation. She returned to her brother’s family, who were by no means pleased to see her. Being an exceptionally good-looking girl she was courted again by another man, the young son of a sheikh, who was considered rather a “catch.” He married her in June, and very soon after she gave birth to a child. As the child was a girl, the husband divorced her two days after its birth. The wretched woman was turned out of the house in the night by her late mother-in-law. She managed to get to herown home, but her brother’s wife refused to let her in. The brother himself was away. Eventually she found a lodging with an old woman, a relative of one of the earlier husbands, who had, it seemed, some liking for the girl. While staying here the child died—possibly from exposure, possibly from other reasons.

Immediately the families of the last three husbands hurried to give information against her, and charged her with murdering the child. The doctor examined it and found signs of possible suffocation. I listened for several days to the evidence of a number of witnesses, mostly repulsive old women who enlarged with horrid keenness on the most disagreeable details. But eventually nothing was proved, and the girl was acquitted. It was a disagreeable case, but one could almost find parallels to it in the English police-court news.

Female witnesses at Siwa were very difficult to manage. They never spoke or understood any Arabic, so the six sheikhs, who acted as a jury, interpreted for them. I used to sit on a platform at one end of the room, and the six sheikhs occupied a bench along one side. Women pretended to hate coming into the court-house, but I think they really rather enjoyed it. The orderly, one of the police, would firmly propel the lady into the middle of the room, she being completely covered from head to foot with clothes. As soon as the orderly retired she sidled over to the wall and propped herself against it, generally with her back turned on me. The sheikhswould remonstrate, “For shame, turn round Ayesha, daughter of Osman, and speak to the noble officer.” The lady would wriggle round a little and allow one eye to appear through the drapery. When questioned she mumbled inaudible replies, growing slightly more coherent if she was personally concerned in the case, but if there was another woman giving evidence she would gradually lower her veils, speak louder, and finally show her whole face as she shrieked abuse at her opponent—quite regardless of the eyes of the court. The sheikhs were invaluable on these occasions; it would have been very difficult to work without them.

One woman, who sued her neighbour for throwing stones at her hens, disturbed the court considerably. When she was led in by the policeman she appeared particularly cumbered with clothes. Suddenly a terrific disturbance began among her shawls and draperies; she gave a shrill squeal and two hens disentangled themselves from her clothes and dashed madly round the court-house. Two of my dogs, who were lying at my feet, sprang after the birds and chased them round the room, which plunged the proceedings into the wildest confusion. The woman had carried in the hens intending to confront her opponent, at the critical moment, with the injured victims. Judging from their activity they had not been much injured.

One man, Bashu Habun, son of the old sheikh who was hanged, caused more legal work than the whole of the rest of the population together. He spent histime appropriating the property of one of his brothers who was in prison. The brother had an agent in Siwa, a foolish old sheikh called Soud, who was too honest, or stupid, to withstand the sly cleverness of Bashu Habun. At one time there were seven cases between them, involving many hundreds of pounds. I settled the first three, but found that the latter dealt with inheritance, and so were beyond my jurisdiction, but I got heartily sick of the sharp, foxy face of Bashu Habun and the noisy, foolish obstinacy of old Sheikh Soud. Both of them tried to secure my support by sending donkey-loads of fruit to my house before the cases were tried, and on one occasion the servants met both bringing presents, and returned together with their offerings to the town. The idea of “baksheesh” is so firmly planted in the native mind that it takes a long while to die out. Still, one finds that the natives really appreciate and prefer an impartial administration of justice, in place of justice—of sorts—which depends on which of the two parties can offer the highest bribe to the judge. The Senussi were by no means above this method, but they let political considerations weigh equally with “baksheesh” on their scale of justice. In the days when a Turkish governor ruled in Siwa he made his money by accepting and extorting bribes, and if, when British Administration retires from Egypt, the oasis is ruled again by a native mamur, the same system will possibly flourish.

IN THE WESTERN QUARTER

IN THE WESTERN QUARTER

IN THE WESTERN QUARTER

SUBURBAN OASES

“. . . tufted islesThat verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.”

“. . . tufted islesThat verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.”

“. . . tufted islesThat verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.”

“. . . tufted isles

That verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.”

SIWA itself is the largest, richest and most important oasis in a little group of oases which are mostly uninhabited. Similar oases, such as the Kufra group and the Augila group, are scattered at intervals, few and very far between, over the vast arid surface of the great Sahara desert. In most of them there are fresh-water springs surrounded by small patches of green, which have an appearance of almost magical beauty to those who arrive at them, weary after days of travel over the hot and barren solitudes of the desert. Ancient poets compared the yellow desert to a leopard’s tawny skin, spotted with occasional oases. Doubtless when Siwa was more thickly populated than it is to-day each of the outlying ones was inhabited, but now the ever-shrinking population is insufficient even to cultivate all the gardens in the immediate vicinity of Siwa itself.

About 20 miles east of Siwa town, at one end of a long salt lake, there is a village called Zeitoun, and close by it a cluster of rich gardens which are thefinest and best cared-for in the oasis, famous for the olives which give the place its name. In the whole of Siwa there are about 40,000 fruit-bearing olive trees, and a large quantity of olive oil is manufactured locally. Rough wooden olive presses are used by the natives, which are so primitive that a large proportion of the oil is wasted. The oil is of an excellent quality and is very profitable when exported, but owing to the difficulty of obtaining suitable tins and vessels to store it in only a small amount is sent up to the coast. It is bought by the Greeks at Matruh and Sollum, who dilute it and sell it at an enormous profit to the Arabs.

Along the shores of the lake there are several other groups of gardens, and at one of them the ex-Khedive proposed to start a model farm, but as usual he got no further in his scheme than erecting some huts for the labourers to live in. He also did a certain amount of excavating in this neighbourhood, and according to hearsay he carried away camel-loads of “antikas” which he dug up among some ruins at a place called Kareished. Some of the gardens slope right down to the shores of the lake, and there are several fine springs among them. I often thought that Kareished would be quite a pleasant place to live in if one built a good house and had a boat to cross the lake to Siwa. The people in these outlying villages ride into Siwa town every few days to do their shopping, across a long causeway which divides the lake and the mud swamp.

North-east of Zeitoun, across 90 miles of highdesert tableland, one comes to the oasis of Gara, or “Um es Sogheir”—the Little Mother. The word “Um”—mother—is used indiscriminately by the Arabs in names of places, hills, valleys and rocks. According to one theory this practice originates from very ancient times when places were named after certain female deities or goddesses. Gara is a lonely valley about 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, surrounded by precipitous cliffs that one can only descend in a few places, sprinkled with vast isolated masses of rock, upon one of which the village is perched. Many of the rocks have had their bases so worn away that they look like gigantic mushrooms, and one can camp most comfortably in their shade as under an umbrella. There are nine wells and springs in the oasis, but the water has an unpleasant bitter taste, which is mentioned in the accounts of Alexander’s journey to Siwa. Owing to the bad water and lack of labour the Garites are unable to grow anything except dates of a poor quality and a few onions and tomatoes. Grapes and fruit trees will not flourish in the oasis. The people eke out a miserable existence by selling dates, mats and baskets to the caravans which pass between Siwa and Egypt. They are wretchedly poor, exceedingly dirty and very distinctly darker in complexion than the Siwans. In former days they were too weak-spirited to be aggressive and too poor to be attacked, although owing to the position of Gara on the Siwa-Egypt caravan route they might easily have made themselves very awkward to travellers by levying a toll onconvoys calling at Gara for water on their way to Egypt.

THE SPRING OF ZEITOUN

THE SPRING OF ZEITOUN

THE SPRING OF ZEITOUN

But on the one solitary occasion when the Garites did attempt to do this they fared very badly. According to the tradition a famous religious sheikh called Abdel Sayed was travelling from Tripoli to join the pilgrim caravan at Cairo. He had with him a few attendants and some devout men who were also on their way to do the Pilgrimage. When they halted at Gara the inhabitants, instead of feeling honoured and entertaining the travellers, came out of the town and attacked them. The sheikh and his followers managed to escape, and when they were safely out of the valley the venerable Abdel Sayed stood on a rock and solemnly cursed the people of Gara, swearing that there should never be more than forty men alive in the village at once. Since then, although the total number of inhabitants is over a hundred, there have never been more than forty full-grown men. When the number exceeds forty, one of them dies. On this account the Garites have a great objection to strangers, and when I arrived, with a dozen fully grown Camel Corps men, the sheikh anxiously begged me to forbid them to enter the village, but as there were under forty men living there at the time I myself and an orderly went up into the town. Presumably if we had all walked up several of the Garites must have died.

The village is a miserable imitation of Aghourmi, but dirty and squalid. A steep winding pathwayleads up the rock to the gateway, and in the centre there is a square open market where nothing is ever bought or sold as nobody has any money except the sheikh, and he spends it at Siwa when he rides in every fortnight on a donkey to report at the Markaz. The sheikh himself is an intelligent man, but scarcely able to speak any Arabic. One of his duties is to look after the telephone from Siwa which passes Gara on its way to Matruh. This telephone was erected by the army after the Senussi operations, and is remarkably clear considering the distance of desert which it crosses. My visit caused a great sensation, as the people had not seen an Englishman for a very long time. The inhabitants came out to my camp and sat in silent rows gazing at us, until they were politely “moved on,” and the women spent the whole day looking down on us from the roofs. I believe, during the war, a car patrol visited the place, but as the sheikh said, “They came—whirrrr—and they went—brrrrr!”

According to another legend some bedouin raiders once attacked Gara. The people retired to the village, shut the gates, and prayed to the patron sheikh, who is buried outside, for help. The spirit of the dead sheikh rose to the occasion and so dazzled the eyes of the enemy that they wandered round and round the rock and were totally incapable of finding the gate. Eventually they became so exhausted that the Garites were emboldened to come down from the town and kill them. The old muezzin of the mosque of Gara related this story to me, and anaudience of Garites, who evidently knew it well, with what I considered unjustifiable pride, and he did not seem to think at all that his forebears had played rather a cowardly part in this signal victory.

Between Siwa and Gara there is a pass through a rocky gorge called Negb el Mejberry. Across the track there is a line of fifty little heaps of stones, each a few feet high. Once, many years ago, a rich caravan set out from Siwa to the coast, via Gara. They reached the negb (pass) at twilight and noticed the heaps of stones, but thought nothing of it. Suddenly, when they were quite close to them, a bedouin leaped up from behind each heap and rushed on the caravan. With great difficulty the merchants beat off the robbers, and the ambuscade failed, but not without several men being killed. The merchants buried them close to the place, which is haunted to-day by the ghosts of the brigands who still appear lurking behind the stone heaps. The pass has an evil reputation, and natives prefer to cross it in broad daylight, and not when the sinking sun plays strange tricks with the shadows of the rocks, or when the moon lends an air of mystery to the rugged ravine.

Due west of Zeitoun there is a string of “sebukha”—salt marshes—which lie at the foot of a line of cliffs, a continuation of the mountains that surround Siwa on the north. In this country, which is rarely crossed, one finds little plantations of gum trees that remind one of the Sudan, and also patchesof camel thorn bushes. I have not seen these growing in any other part of the Western Desert. Possibly they may have grown from seeds dropped by caravans passing up from the Sudan. There is no fresh water in this area, but the country is very full of gazelle.

South-west of Siwa there are two other uninhabited oases, El Areg and Bahrein—the two lakes. El Areg is a very surprising place. Riding along the flat rocky stretch of country on the east of the Pacho mountains, named after a European explorer who visited Siwa in the early nineteenth century, one arrives suddenly on the brink of a precipice which is the top of the cliffs that surround the oasis. There are two steep, difficult paths leading down between enormously high white rocks with bunches of straggling, overgrown palm trees at their foot. Much of the oasis is a salt marsh, but at one end there is a mass of bushes and tall palm trees, with two springs of drinkable water among them. The cliffs are very high indeed, and their whiteness makes them look strange at night. In places there are stretches of fossilized sea-shells, and I especially noticed sea-urchins and starfish. In a kind of bay in the cliff, between two enormous high rocks, there is a natural terrace, and in the centre of the terrace there are remains of a building; in the surrounding cliffs, sometimes so high up on the face that one wonders how and why they were made, there are the square entrances of rock tombs or dwellings. Some of them are quite large, but in all cases very low. All thelower ones are full of skulls and human skeletons, but many are so covered with sand-drifts that I could not get inside. The oasis is full of gazelle, which feed on the luscious vegetation round the marshes.

At Bahrein there are two long, brilliantly blue salt lakes, fringed with a tangled mass of vegetation and palm trees, surrounded by yellow sand-dunes. Bahrein always reminded me of

“A tideless, dolorous, midland sea;In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”

“A tideless, dolorous, midland sea;In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”

“A tideless, dolorous, midland sea;In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”

“A tideless, dolorous, midland sea;

In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”

Here also are rock tombs in some of the cliffs, and in one of them I discovered the remains of a coloured mural painting, a picture very much obliterated, of a cow and some palm trees with large clusters of dates on them, roughly done in brown and blue colours. Evidently at one time the oasis was inhabited, and if one sought complete seclusion it would be quite a pleasant place to live in. There are several thousands of date palms at El Areg and Bahrein which would produce fruit if they were pruned and looked after. At one time men used to come out from Siwa and tend the trees, collecting the fruit later on, but now there is not enough labour in Siwa to cultivate all the gardens, so both these oases are deserted. The route from Siwa to Farafra passes through El Areg and Bahrein, and there is another caravan track from El Areg to the Baharia oasis, and thence to the valley of the Nile, which it touches somewhere near Assiut. But practically no travellers pass this way, and the Mashrabs are almost lost to knowledge.

West of Siwa town, at the end of the lake, at the foot of an enormous flat-topped mountain, there is a little hamlet called Kamissa, and a number of gardens. Beyond this, if one crosses the cliffs by a rocky pass, one arrives at a valley called Maragi, where there is another salt lake surrounded by gardens which belong to a colony of about sixty Arabs who settled here some fifty years ago and have remained ever since. They do not intermarry with the Siwans but “keep themselves to themselves,” as they consider that they are very superior to the natives. They live in tents and breed sheep and cattle, and are to all appearances similar to the Arabs on the coast, except that they have no camels. At one time two of these Arabs moved into Siwa and settled in houses, but they were regarded as renegades by the remainder. Further west there is yet another salt lake called Shyata, a long patch of blue among the yellow sand-hills, with good grazing around it and fresh water which can be obtained by digging in certain places, which one needs to know from experience, as there is no indication of its whereabouts.

North-west of Shyata there is a cluster of uninhabited oases, Gagub, Melfa and Exabia. They are queer wild places with wonderful rock scenery, huge towering limestone cliffs, deep morasses, and stretches of shining water, edged with rotting palm trees, like

“. . . That dim lakeWhere sinful souls their farewell takeOf this sad world.”

“. . . That dim lakeWhere sinful souls their farewell takeOf this sad world.”

“. . . That dim lakeWhere sinful souls their farewell takeOf this sad world.”

“. . . That dim lake

Where sinful souls their farewell take

Of this sad world.”

These oases have a strangely evil appearance, one could well imagine the witches of Macbeth celebrating their midnight orgies in such places. At night a feverish miasma rises from the dark rotting vegetation, and with it myriads of venomous mosquitoes. By moonlight the scene is even moremacabre; the gigantic masses of strangely shaped rocks take on the appearance of

“Dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,A city of death, distinct with many a towerAnd wall impregnable——.”

“Dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,A city of death, distinct with many a towerAnd wall impregnable——.”

“Dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,A city of death, distinct with many a towerAnd wall impregnable——.”

“Dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable——.”

and the dead branches on the gaunt palm trunks sway like corpses on a gallows tree. When I trekked in these parts I always tried to camp for the night above the cliffs, but this was no easy matter, as in places they rose perpendicularly from the ground.

Yet the presence of innumerable sepulchral chambers cut in the cliffs shows that these melancholy valleys were once inhabited. The water here is practically undrinkable. At Gagub there is a well, and on one occasion my men all drank from it, but it was so strongly impregnated with sulphur that it had the same effect as a very powerful dose of physic! There is a great difference between these deep gloomy valleys, with their oozing marshes and dead funereal palm trees, and Siwa itself, with its rich gardens, cool defiles and long green vistas among the trees. From the top of a hill near Melfa, the westernmost oasis, one can see the dome of the mosque at Jerabub. In Siwa the mosques have no domes, so one becomesunaccustomed to the sight of them, and for this reason the dome at Jerabub looks quite impressive, though it is actually only about the size of those that one sees over tombs in numbers of the cemeteries of Cairo.

Jerabub used to be the Mecca of Senussiism, but what glory it ever had has now passed away. To-day it only contains about a hundred half-starving natives, and a few old sheikhs who still teach the children in the zowia (religious school). Lately the people were in such sore straits that the Senussi Wakil, Sidi Ahmed, had to send down a convoy of grain from the coast, and the Siwans who rode into Jerabub to sell things returned with their goods and complained that nobody had any money to spend. The dates in the Jerabub gardens are very inferior, so the Siwans export quite a lot of dates to their neighbours.

The only man of any wealth in Jerabub was an old retired merchant called Mohammed el Ithneini. He was so old, and so enormously fat, that he was unable to walk, and had to be carried about by his slaves in a litter. In his day he had been a great merchant, travelling between Tripoli, Wadai, Egypt and the Sudan, and in course of time he had amassed considerable riches. But lately, finding himself short of cash, with a large family to support, he began to raise money on his belongings.

One day I got information that two men from Jerabub had passed through Siwa on their way to the coast and Egypt without coming to the office to see whether they had anything on which to paycustoms. Customs are collected at Siwa on imports from the west. I sent a patrol after them and brought them back to the Markaz. One of them was a grandson of the old sheikh, and the other was his cousin. I examined their camels, and ordered them to turn out their bags, which they did very reluctantly. They spread the contents out on the steps of the Markaz. It was quite like a scene from the Arabian Nights. There were heavy silver anklets, curiously chased bangles, silver earrings shaped like a young moon with filigree bosses from which hung long silver chains with little pendants, rings, brooches, necklaces, several small lumps of gold, two complete sets of trappings and armour for an Arab horse made of silver-gilt and gold-fringed velvet, filigree ornaments and cases for charms and a little bag full of seed pearls; all this was emptied out of two dirty old leather bags. It made a fine show shining in the sunlight and I longed to make a bid for some of it, but I came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be done. They were taking it to sell to a certain merchant in Cairo, so I sent them up with a Camel Corps patrol who were going to the coast, as already the Siwans were casting envious eyes on the stuff. The men returned two months later and told me that they got £140 for the lot, which I myself had estimated as being worth a very great deal more. For several years the old merchant had been sending stuff to be sold in Cairo, and every year I imagine he received as small a price.

Among the valuables in his house there are anumber of old Persian and Turkish carpets, but these he keeps as they are too heavy to send about. I had entered into negotiations with him about some of these, but just when the bargain was being completed I got a bad “go” of fever and had to leave for the coast. A few of the Siwan sheikhs have good carpets, but they know their worth and are very unwilling to part with them. Other household articles that some Siwans possess and are very proud of are large brass Turkish samovars which they use with charcoal for making tea. Their owners say that they were originally brought from Constantinople, but now they have become quite like heirlooms, and curiously enough they do not seem to wear out.

South of Siwa, beyond the shifting yellow sand-hills, there is a vast stretch of desert without a single shred of vegetation which reaches down to the Sudan. Only the first hundred miles has been explored, beyond that isterra incognita. The Arabs call this the Devil’s country, and rightly so. In these huge silent spaces one sees incessant mirage, for which the native name is Devil’s water, and frequently “the genii of the storm, urging the rage of whirlwind,” sends a high hurricane of hot stinging sand tearing across the desert, smothering men and beasts in blinding dust, snatching up anything that is loose and bearing it away.

“In solitary length the Desert lies,Where Desolation keeps his empty court.No bloom of spring, o’er all the thirsty vastNor spiry grass is found; but sands insteadIn sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.A land of fears! where visionary forms,Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fireSwarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,The secret hag and sorcerer unblestTheir Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,Spoils of the violated graves——”

“In solitary length the Desert lies,Where Desolation keeps his empty court.No bloom of spring, o’er all the thirsty vastNor spiry grass is found; but sands insteadIn sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.A land of fears! where visionary forms,Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fireSwarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,The secret hag and sorcerer unblestTheir Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,Spoils of the violated graves——”

“In solitary length the Desert lies,Where Desolation keeps his empty court.No bloom of spring, o’er all the thirsty vastNor spiry grass is found; but sands insteadIn sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.A land of fears! where visionary forms,Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fireSwarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,The secret hag and sorcerer unblestTheir Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,Spoils of the violated graves——”

“In solitary length the Desert lies,

Where Desolation keeps his empty court.

No bloom of spring, o’er all the thirsty vast

Nor spiry grass is found; but sands instead

In sterile hills, and rough rocks rising grey.

A land of fears! where visionary forms,

Of grisly spectres from air, flood and fire

Swarm; and before them speechless Horror stalks.

Here, night by night, beneath the starless dusk,

The secret hag and sorcerer unblest

Their Sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,

Spoils of the violated graves——”

I once trekked down here in summer-time on the track of some gun-runners who were supposed to be making for Egypt from the west. It is a dreary region, horribly dead and monotonous, consisting of alternate stretches of hard ground covered with shining black pebbles, and white sand-dunes, stretching east and west, where the sand is so soft and powdery that camels and men sink deep into it, and the surface is so hot that one can hardly bear to feel it. There are no tracks or mashrabs, and we were the first party to set up cairns on the hills, wherever there were stones. If one travelled on and on for about a thousand miles one would arrive at Darfur, in the north-west corner of the Sudan. Until the war Darfur was an independent kingdom whose Sultan, Ali Dinar, reigned from his capital El Fasher in a similar manner to the Sultan of Wadai.

The Kufra, sometimes spelt “Kufara,” group of oases lie south-west of Siwa, but owing to its distance from all civilization Kufra was never of any importance historically or politically, though comparatively lately it has become a convenient retreat for some of the Senussi sheikhs. Quite a number of natives who had recently been in Kufra visited Siwa during the time that I was there, and whenI questioned them, and various Siwans who knew Kufra well, they all described it as being very thinly populated, less fertile and very inferior to the Siwa oasis—from their point of view. When I discussed the possibilities of visiting it they were exceedingly surprised at the idea of anybody wishing to see Kufra, which they described as being “muskeen”—wretched—but at the same time they said that the people in Kufra would certainly not object to anybody going there, as it was in no way a sacred place like Jerabub used to be at one time. At Kufra there is no strange metropolis like that of Siwa, and as recently as 1854 an English traveller who visited Jalow and Augila stated that Kufra was practically uninhabited, except during a certain month of the year when natives from the other oases went there in order to gather the dates.

There is a great fascination in travelling over unexplored desert; somehow I always had the feeling that perhaps beyond the rocky skyline, or perhaps over the next ridge of sand-hills, there might possibly appear the languidly swaying palm trees of some unknown oasis. Nobody has penetrated into the heart of this desert, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are oases, either inhabited like the lost land of Atlantis or like the mysterious desert cities that the story-tellers describe to their evening audience in the market-place, hidden away among those unmapped plains of the Sahara.

There are still great possibilities of excavating at Siwa, and in the outlying oases, which have beeneven less explored, but I myself had neither the leisure nor the money to do any serious digging. In many parts of the oasis, sometimes in the middle of a palm grove, one finds what appear to be the foundations of ancient buildings, made of well-squared stones; and many of the rock tombs, especially in the cliffs of the more distant oases, still contain mummies. I examined a number of them myself, but with no luck, as they were, apparently, of a very inferior class and had no ornaments buried with them. Near some of them there were broken earthenware pots of an antique shape not made in Siwa to-day. All the tombs whose entrances are visible in the Hill of the Dead, the great rock mausoleum outside Siwa town, have been rifled many year ago and nothing is left except scattered bones, skulls and scraps of grave wrappings. A few of the finest tombs have been converted into dwellings by some poor Siwans who are courageous enough to brave the demons of the hill in order to secure a freehold residence, cool in summer and warm in winter, and scented with the

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