THE DESERT
“So on, ever on, spreads the path of the Desert,
Wearily, wearily,
Sand, ever sand—not a gleam of the fountain;
Sun, ever sun—not a shade from the mountain;
As a sea on a sea flows the width of the Desert
Drearily, drearily.”
THE Western Desert of Egypt is regulated by the Frontier Districts
Administration, a comparatively new department of the Egyptian
Government which was formed during the war and took over many of the
duties of the old Egyptian Coastguards Administration. The F.D.A. is
a military Administration with British officers, and is responsible
for the Western Desert, Sinai and the country between the Red Sea
coast and the Nile. In each of these provinces there is a Governor
and several District Officers and officers of the Camel Corps. The
Military Administrator at the head of the whole Administration is
Colonel G. G. Hunter, C.B., C.M.G., and the Governor of the Western
Desert is at present Colonel M. S. Macdonnell. The forces of the
F.D.A. consist of a Sudanese Camel Corps and local police.
On the Western Desert there is one company of Camel Corps, about 170
strong, divided into three sections, of which two are stationed on
the coast and one in the Siwa oasis. The duties of the Camel Corps
are practically those of mounted police, patrolling the coast and
frontier, preventing smuggling and gun running, and keeping order
among the Arabs in case of any disturbance or trouble. But since
the successful termination of the British operations against the
Senussi in 1917 the Western Desert has been very peaceable, and the
Arabs seem to be thoroughly satisfied with the organization by which
they are now governed. During all the trouble in Egypt in 1919-21,
when the country was seething with anti-British agitations, there
were absolutely no disturbances or demonstrations among the Arabs of
the Western Desert, and I have heard them in their tents discussing,
quite genuinely, the foolishness of the goings-on in Egypt.
The F.D.A. Camel Corps was originally formed of Sudanese men from
the Coastguard Camel Corps, with a large proportion of “yellow
bellies” (Egyptians) who were gradually weeded out and replaced
by Sudanese and Sudan Arabs, who were enlisted on the borders of
Egypt, as the Sudan Government does not allow recruiting inside its
territories except for the Egyptian Army. The F.D.A. Camel Corps is
supposed to consist entirely of Sudanese, but a certain number of the
men who were enlisted in the regions of Luxor and Kom Ombo are not
real Sudanis. They are very well paid, provided with good uniforms
and rations, and a certain percentage are allowed to have their wives
with them on the coast. Every camp has its “harimat”—married
quarters—where the married men and their families live. But before
a man is allowed to marry he has to pass a test in musketry. Many
of the men marry Arab women, and this sometimes caused considerable
trouble among the Sudanese wives, who are by no means fond of their
Arab “sisters.” As they all live close together in rather cramped
quarters they have a very lively time. One’s office hours are
often occupied in endeavouring to pacify some irate old Sudanese lady
who brings a furious complaint that the Arab wife of her next-door
neighbour is “carrying on” with her husband. Or one gets a long
involved case like the following story to inquire into, generally
when there is a great deal of other work to be done.
Ombashi (corporal) Suliman Hassan married an Arab lady called Halima
bint—daughter of—Ahmed Abu Taleb; when she married her father
gave her an old primus stove, a favourite possession of the Arabs at
Sollum, which he had bought from the servant of one of the English
officers—this incidentally caused another inquiry. The marriage
was not a success, and after six months of unhappy married life
Ombashi Suliman divorced his wife. Apparently he “celebrated”
the divorce “not wisely but too well,” because on the next day
he got a month’s hard labour for being drunk on duty. He took the
primus with him when he went to prison. Halima retired to Bagbag with
her goods and chattels, and after a suitable interval she married
another Camel Corps man, this time a “naffer”—private—who
brought her back with him to Sollum.
Ombashi Suliman had also consoled himself, and presented the primus
stove, now very worn and shaky, to his new wife, a buxom Sudanese. She
sold it to her married sister. It exploded and set a tent on fire;
so the sister gave it to her little girl Zumzum, a small black infant
with tight curls and one pink garment. Then one day Halima saw the
primus, her primus, in the hands of the small Zumzum, and remembered
about it. She rushed home to her new husband and stirred him to action;
so he arrived at my office with a long incoherent complaint, demanding
justice and the return of the stove.
I had to spend an entire morning unravelling this history and examining
endless witnesses, who all wished to talk about any subject except
the one I was getting at. When the present wife and the divorced wife
of Ombashi Suliman met outside the office they were with difficulty
restrained from fighting, and the lurid details which were wafted
through the window, about the lives and antecedents of both ladies,
were interesting, but quite unprintable. Eventually the small Zumzum,
now in a state of inaudible terror, produced the primus, which was
found to be worn out, irreparable, and absolutely useless.
One of the features of Sollum is a little cluster of tents and huts,
near the Camel Corps Camp, which is known as the “Booza Camp.”
It is run by about a dozen elderly Sudanese widows and divorcees
who manufacture “marissa,” a drink made from barley. The men
are allowed here at certain times and on holidays, as marissa is
not permitted to be brewed in the camp. The wives have the strongest
objection to this institution which attracts their husbands away from
home, as a public-house does in England, though the dusky barmaids
could not possibly be called attractive. One can rightly say of the
Sudanese that their favourite diversions are wine, women and song.
The Sudanis of the Camel Corps are a very likeable lot. They are
thoroughly sporting and have a strong sense of humour, but in many
ways they are very like children. They have an aptitude for drill and
soldiering, but are useless without British officers owing to their
lack of initiative. They are faithful and become very attached to
Englishmen, but they have a keen sense of discrimination. Like all
native troops there is a tendency for each man to consider himself a
born leader, and offer his advice and opinion on all occasions; this
takes a long time to subdue. But with careful training they become
efficient soldiers, and they look very smart in their khaki uniform,
which is rather similar to an Indian’s. Physically many of them
are splendid men, very powerful and muscular, like bronze statues,
but although the climate of their own country is intensely hot they
are by no means immune from the effects of sun, and they seem to be
almost more liable to catch fever than an Englishman.
The three sections take it in turns to go to Siwa, where they generally
remain from six to nine months. It is not a popular place, in spite
of the fact that every man is allowed to marry, with no restrictions,
such as first having to pass a musketry test. The men much prefer
being on the coast where there is more going on, as they are at
heart intensely sociable, and also, though living is cheap at Siwa,
the climate has a bad reputation.
The best time to go to Siwa is in the spring, when the weather is
cool and there is probably water on the road. The trip needs a good
deal of preparing for, especially as one has to take down stores for
many months. A camel patrol from Siwa used to meet a patrol from the
coast at the half-way point on the road once every month, and in this
way the mails were sent down to the oasis. A car patrol was supposed
to go down at certain intervals, but they were very irregular, and
sometimes, on the few occasions when they did come, they forgot to
bring the mail. One depended so much on letters at Siwa that this
was an intense disappointment. The following is a rough diary of a
trek down to Siwa in the hot weather.
_Saturday, July 24th._
Spent a busy morning making final arrangements for the trip and
seeing that everything was ready. We moved off from Sollum at 3.30
p.m., myself, 39 men, 50 camels, and one dog. The whole camp turned
out to see us off, including many small black babies belonging to
the men. Some of the men wept profusely at parting with their wives,
but almost before we were out of Sollum I heard them gaily discussing
which of the Siwan ladies they would honour by marriage. Saturday
is a fortunate day to start on a journey. Apparently the prophet
Mohammed favoured Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but Saturdays
most of all. Another good omen was the appearance of two crows which
we passed just outside the camp; a single crow would have been cause
for anxiety, and to see a running hare before camping at night is
considered a very serious piece of ill-luck. I think this started
from the idea that a running hare was a sign of people on the move
close at hand, probably enemies.
We marched along the bottom of the Scarp and reached Bir Augerin,
where we camped for the night, at sunset. At Augerin there is one of
the many rock cisterns that one finds on the coast. These cisterns are
large rectangular underground tanks, often 40 feet square and 20 feet
high, with one or two square holes in the roof large enough to admit
a man. The Arabs draw the water up in leather buckets on the end of a
rope, or if the supply is low one man goes down and fills the bucket
which is drawn up by the man above. They are always built in the middle
of a hollow with several stone runnels that carry the rain water down
from the higher ground. Generally there is a mound near the well with
a sheikh’s tomb on the top of it, a cairn surrounded by a low wall,
ornamented with a few little white flags which are contributed by
passing travellers as a thank-offering for the water. According to
M. Maspero, the cisterns along the coast were built by the Romans in
the second century A.D., and were in use until the middle or end of the
fourth century. Most of them are now so out of repair that they only
hold water for a very short time after the rains have ceased, and when
they are dry they become the home of snakes, bats and owls; however,
I believe it is proposed to restore several of the most useful of them.
We camped near the well at Augerin. I had an indifferent dinner. My
new cook, Abdel Aziz, seems to be a fool and unaccustomed to being
on trek. He is a Berberin, a despised “gins”—race—but always
considered to be good cooks. The men I have got with me are a fine lot,
all “blacks” and mostly “Shaigis”—from the North Sudan. The
old Bash-Shawish—sergeant-major—was previously in the Coastguards
and knows the country well. I did not bother to put up a tent, but
slept in the open under the stars, which were gorgeous. Not a very
hot night.
_25th._
Moved off at 4.30 a.m. by chilly but brilliant moonlight. Led the
camels and walked for the first hour, then mounted and rode. The men
made a long line riding along in file. Arrived at Bir Hamed, another
cistern, at about 8 a.m. We stay here till to-morrow morning in order
to give the camels a good day’s grazing and watering, as this is
the last well before the real desert. Bir Hamed is a very wild,
picturesque place among the rocky foot-hills below the Scarp. In
the spring it becomes one mass of flowers, but now it looks dry and
barren. The camels drank frantically and then went out to graze. There
is still a fair amount of water in the well, which is icy cold and very
refreshing. I, and almost all the men, had a bath, as it is the last
opportunity till we get to Siwa. I spent a lazy day in my tent and the
men slept most of the time. At four o’clock the camels were driven
in to drink again, this time they were less eager to get to the water
and sipped it in a mincing way like an affected old lady drinking tea.
[Illustration: CAMEL CORPS]
After dinner, when I was sitting outside my tent in the moonlight,
I heard a faint sound of shouting in the distance. I took a couple of
men and walked in the direction the sound came from. About a mile from
the camp we sighted a large number of black Arab tents that showed
up clear in the moonlight on a slight rise in the ground. There had
been a marriage in the tribe and the festivities were being concluded
by a dance.
Two girls were slowly revolving round in the centre of an enormous
circle of white-robed bedouins each holding in her hand, above her
head, a long cane which she flourished in the manner that a dancer
uses a bouquet of flowers. The girls wore the usual Arab dress,
the black, long-sleeved robe and scarlet waist-band, but their faces
were hidden by long black veils, and they wore white shawls fastened
in flounces round the waist, which stuck out almost like a ballet
girl’s skirt. The moon flashed on the heavy silver bangles on their
arms and on their silver necklaces and earrings.
The audience were divided into four parties, the object of each party
being to attract the dancers to them by the enthusiasm of their singing
and hand-clapping. A man playing on a flute and another with a drum
led the tune, which was wearily monotonous but strangely attractive
and a fitting accompaniment to the scene. Gradually the singing became
faster and louder, the white-robed Arabs swayed to and fro urging
the dancers to fresh exertions; the girls revolved more rapidly
and one of them began the “Dance de ventre,” which consists of
rather sensuous quivering movements, not attractive to a European,
but much admired by natives. The singing and hand-clapping became more
violent and finally culminated in frenzied shouting when one of the
girls halted, swaying, before the loudest section of the audience,
and several men flung themselves on their knees, kissing her feet and
exclaiming at her beauty, which if it existed was quite invisible to
me, and praising her skill in dancing with high-flown speeches and
compliments. Outside the circle of brown-faced, white-clad Arabs,
and in the doors of the tents, there were a crowd of women watching
the performance, and a group of dancing girls stood whispering to
each other under their black veils, tinkling their ornaments, as they
waited to step into the circle and relieve their companions.
I stood watching the dancing for a long time, and then returned to
my tent. As I walked away I heard hoarse shouts of “Ya Ayesha—ya
Khadiga,” as two new girls began to dance, and the whistle and the
drum struck up another queer little melody. Not until almost dawn
did quiet reign again on the desert, broken only by the occasional
wail of a wandering jackal.
_26th._
Moved off at 4 a.m. and marched till 9.30. We led the camels for the
first two hours along the rocky, difficult ground below the Scarp,
and then up a steep, stony pass to the top. I reached the top just
as the “false dawn” glimmered with a streak of pale light in the
east. There was a heavy dew; all the country down below looked grey
and misty. Gradually the long, twisting line of led camels reached
the summit, and as we rode off across the level upland towards Siwa
the real sunrise began and the stars faded in the sky. The dew was
so thick that the spiders’ webs on the bushes all sparkled. By
midday it was intolerably hot. We halted at a place called Qur el
Beid, a most depressing spot consisting of three low sand-hills and a
tiny patch of vegetation which the camels sniffed at contemptuously,
probably comparing it in their minds to the much superior grazing near
Bir Hamed. I lunched lightly and lay sweating in my tent with Howa,
my Silugi dog, lying openmouthed and panting at my side till we moved
on again for the afternoon “shid”—march.
The first hour of the afternoon “shid” is the worst of the day. The
swaying motion of the camel, the glare, and the burning sun beating
down, makes one terribly inclined to sleep, and the hard, yellowish
brown desert is absolutely monotonous. A good “hagin”—riding
camel—is very comfortable to ride when it is trotting, but not at a
walk. Its action is peculiar, first the two off legs move together, and
then the two near legs; this is what causes the swinging motion. There
is an idea that when people first ride a camel they are afflicted by a
sort of sea-sickness, but although I am a bad sailor I have never felt
this, nor have I yet met anyone who did. Camels are very easy to ride;
one just sits on the saddle with legs crossed over the front pummel,
and there is very little chance of falling off as long as the camel
behaves itself. The usual way of mounting is to make the camel kneel
down and then step on to the saddle, but if one is long-legged and
active it is possible to spring up into the saddle from the ground,
which is much quicker and useful when the ground is hard and unsuitable
for the camel to kneel on. A camel’s usual pace is a slow trot,
about 4½-5 miles an hour, and they can keep up this pace for hours
on end. Of course they can go at a sort of gallop, if they like, and
when they do this they cover the ground at a terrific speed, but it
is rather difficult to ride them, and they have an unpleasant trick
of suddenly swerving which generally shoots one over the camel’s
head on to the ground. I have known, too, camels that bucked, and
others that suddenly knelt down when one did not expect it, both very
disconcerting tricks. They are not affectionate animals and they never
seem to know their own masters; there was only one among mine that
had any “parlour tricks,” and he used to inhale tobacco smoke
through his nose, apparently with the greatest appreciation.
We saw several gazelle in the afternoon, but all too far away for a
shot. Halted for the night at a place where there were about four
small tufts of vegetation. The camels are less fastidious now and
condescended to nibble at them.
The best time of the day is the evening when the sun sinks low, the
desert becomes a pinkish colour, and our shadows stretch like huge
monsters for yards across the ground. Then I begin to look out for
a camping place, anywhere where there are a few scraps of dried-up
vegetation, or, failing that, a soft-looking patch of ground where
the camels will be comfortable. When we halt the baggage is unloaded
and the camels are allowed to roam about and eat what they can
find; in five minutes my tent is pitched, chair and table unfolded,
and dinner is being prepared. Some of the men begin measuring out
the camels’ dhurra—millet—and others go and collect bits of
stick for the fires, or if there is no wood they use dry camel dung,
which is an excellent fuel. Then the camels are driven in again,
unsaddled and tied down in a long line; at a given signal the men
run along the line and place each one’s food on a sack in front of
its nose. Every man squats down by his own camel and watches it eat,
preventing the ones who eat fast from snatching at their neighbour’s
grain. Afterwards the men have their own supper—lentils, onions,
bread and tea, and soon roll themselves up in their blankets, covering
face and all, and go to sleep behind their saddles, which they use
as shelters against the night wind. The only sound is the munching
of the camels and an occasional hollow gurgle as they chew the cud,
and the footsteps of the sentry as he moves up and down the line,
“till the dawn comes in with golden sandals.”
Abdel Aziz is improving; he produced quite a decent dinner—sausages,
fried onions and potatoes, omelette and coffee, followed by
a cigar. One sleeps splendidly on the desert. Even in the hottest
weather the nights are fairly cool. Towards morning, just before the
“false dawn,” a little cool breeze blows over the sand and stirs
the flaps of one’s tent, like a sort of warning that soon it will
be time to get on the move again.
_27th._
We marched for six hours in the morning and about four hours in the
afternoon, and camped for the night at the half-way point between
Sollum and Siwa, which is a mound ornamented by a few empty tins. The
temperature in my tent at midday must have been about 120 degrees,
and not a scrap of breeze or fresh air. This is real desert; there is
not a vestige of any living thing, animal or vegetable. The ground is
hard limestone covered with dark, shining pebbles, and in some places
there are stretches of dried mud, left from the standing water after
the rains. These mud pans are impassable in wet weather, and one has
to make a wide detour to avoid them. Now they are cracked by the sun
into a number of little fissures of a uniform size, about 6 inches
square. The effect is very curious.
I once motored down to Siwa in a car driven by an English
A.S.C. private who had never been out in the desert before. When we
were running over one of these mud pans he remarked to me, “It
seems wonderful how they have laid bits of this road with paving
blocks—don’t it, sir!” I thought he was trying to be funny,
but when I looked at him I saw that he was perfectly serious, so I
agreed that it was indeed wonderful. Nobody believed the story when
I told it afterwards, but it really did happen.
The mirage is very vivid. Almost all the time one sees what appears
to be a sheet of shining water ahead in the distance, and one can
distinguish bays and islands on it; gradually, as one gets nearer, it
recedes and then fades away. It is like the shimmering heat that one
sometimes sees at home on a hot day, but greatly intensified. Distances
look out of proportion on the desert; little mounds, too small to be
called hills, appear like huge mountains. About every thirty miles
there seem to be slight rises of a terrace-like formation.
Every evening the men make bread, which they call “khuz.” It is
very simply done and quite good when freshly baked. They take flour
and a little salt and mix it together with water, in a basin or on
a clean sack, kneading it into dough with their hands. When it is
solid and firm they smooth it out into a flat, round loaf about 1½
inches thick. Then they go to the fire, scrape aside all the embers,
and lay the loaf on the hot sand. Then they put the embers back on
the top of the loaf. After a few minutes’ cooking they rake aside
the fire again and turn the loaf, replacing the fire on the top as
before. The time taken in cooking depends on the heat, but is generally
about ten minutes. The bread lasts until the following evening.
All the way we are following what is known as a “mashrab,” a desert
road, which consists of a narrow rut about a foot wide, worn by the
passage of camels through many centuries. Without specially looking for
them one would hardly notice these mashrabs, which are almost identical
to the “gazelle paths” that wind aimlessly about the desert, but
one is helped by the cairns of stones which are raised by the Arabs
on every bit of high ground, sometimes to show the way and sometimes
to mark the lonely grave of a less fortunate traveller. Each of these
twisting desert tracks is known to the Arabs by a different name. There
is the “Mashrab el Khamisa,” from Bagbag to Siwa, called thus
because there are five wells on the way; there is the “Mashrab el
Akhwan”—the Brothers’ Road, from Jerabub to the coast, which
was used by the Senussi Brethren when they travelled from their Zowia
at Jerabub into Egypt; and the “Mashrab el Abd”—the Slave’s
Road, as according to legend, once upon a time, in the dim ages, a
slave who was captured and brought by this route into Egypt from his
home in the west, returned to the west and led an army against Egypt
by the very road that he had come by as a captive. Often the mashrab
seems to fade away, and then the trackers have to ride on ahead and
pick it up again. A number of Bisharin from the North-East Sudan were
specially enlisted in the Camel Corps as trackers and guides. They
are thought to be more skilful at this work than any other tribe,
though personally I think a bedouin is cleverer. But when working
in a bedouin country it is best not to employ local natives. Some
of the Bisharin are almost unnaturally clever, they can follow a
footstep over hard, broken ground where anyone else would see no sign
of anything. These men have a natural instinct for finding the way,
a sort of abnormal bump of locality. When they first arrived on the
coast some of them were wearing the usual clothes of their country
and the fuzzy-wuzzy coiffure that is so remarkable a characteristic
of their race. The Arabs had never seen this type of Sudanese and
were intensely interested in them. Small bedouin boys used to stand
and stare at these tall brown men with the great mops of woolly hair
ornamented with a few skewer-like objects, but the Bisharin were
absolutely indifferent.
_28th._
Left “Keimat en Nus”—the half-way tent—at a very early hour
and rode for a long time by moonlight; one can cover more ground
when it is cold, but there is a danger of going off the track. The
mashrab is faint enough in the daytime, but almost invisible at
night. When we start off in the morning all the men shout together
three times, “Ya Sidi Abdel Gader,” invoking a certain sheikh who
is the patron sheikh of travellers. One of my men told me that he was
born in Berber “min zaman”—a long time ago—and used to travel
about the Sudan deserts without water or food. His descendants still
live at Berber where he is buried.
For the first hour or two the men are very lively and rouse the
desert with their singing. Usually one man sings the refrain in a
rather drawling falsetto voice, and then the whole lot take up the
chorus with a real swing, and some of them have very good voices,
too. Sometimes the song is the history of a certain Abu Zeyed,
a legendary character and an exceedingly lewd fellow, from all I
could hear of his doings. Sometimes they would sing stories from the
Thousand and One Nights, or sometimes the songs would be chants that
reminded one of the Gregorian music in a very “High” church at
home. Often I used to ride on ahead, almost out of sight, and then
wait while the chanting voices gradually grew louder, and the long
line of camels came into sight across the white moonlit sands. There
was something very fascinating in the sound of the singing as we rode
through the African desert at night.
But later on, when the sun began to warm up, nobody felt like
singing. Occasionally somebody started, and a few voices joined in,
but they very soon subsided again. At the midday halt the men rigged
up rough bivouacs with blankets, and rifles as tent poles, then for
several hours one lay in the scanty shade, feeling like a pat of
butter that had been left out in the sun by mistake.
Howa is getting very tired. I picked her up and carried her on the
saddle across my knees for several hours to-day. She is quite fit,
but 200 miles in the hot weather does take it out of a dog. The
camels are in good condition but much looking forward to water,
their flanks are beginning to look “tucked in,” and at night
some of them groan and gurgle horribly. To-morrow we should be in
the oasis at the first well. This evening I functioned with the
medicine chest; I gave several of the men pills and Eno’s, which
they enjoyed, and dressed a foot with a bad cut on it. My own knees
are like raw beef from the sun, though I’ve been wearing shorts
all the summer. We have to be “canny” with the water as several
of the “fanatis”—water-cans—are leaking. Fortunately I have
trained myself only to drink a little in the morning and evening,
and I can wash quite thoroughly in two cups of water.
Sometimes in the evening I walk right away from the camp into the
utter quiet of the desert, out of sight of camels and men. It is
a wonderful sensation to be in such absolute silence, with nothing
to see but the horizon and “the rolling heaven itself.” Then I
retrace my footsteps to the camp and enjoy the pleasant feeling of
seeing the twinkling fires in the distance, and arriving at a neatly
laid dinner-table right in the middle of nowhere.
“Daylight dies,
The camp fires redden like angry eyes,
The tents show white
In the glimmering light,
Spirals of tremulous smoke arise, to the purple skies,
And the hum of the camp sounds like the sea
Drifting over the desert to me.”
_29th._
In the early morning, before dawn, we passed a caravan going
north. I rode over to see who they were and found that it was a
party of Mogabara Arabs on their way up to the coast, and thence
into Egypt. One of them, Ibrahaim el Bishari, is quite a well-known
merchant who travels about Egypt, Tripoli and the Sudan. He had come
lately up from Darfur, via Kufra, Jalow and Jerabub, and was going
down to the Sudan again after spending some time in Egypt. He talked
about people I knew in Darfur and carried “chits” from a number
of Englishmen. His fellows looked a fine lot of men, very different
to the few Siwans who were travelling with them. I should have liked
to have seen the stuff in his loads; he said he had some good carpets
that he hoped to sell in Egypt. We wished each other a prosperous
journey, and so parted “like ships that pass in the night.”
We camped at midday within sight of the high country above the
oasis. This morning one of my men was talking about the Sudan and
touched on the “Bilad el Kelab”—the Country of Dogs. All Sudanese
believe that this place exists somewhere down in the south of the
Sudan towards Uganda. I have seen them draw maps on the sand to show
its position. In this mysterious country all the men become dogs at
sunset time and roam about the gloomy forests like the werewolves
of mediæval fiction. I have heard the men yarning over the camp
fires and saying how their cousin’s wife’s brother—or some
such distant relation—actually reached this country and returned
alive. Of course it is always somebody else who saw it, but the story
is firmly believed by all Sudanese, and so it is a very favourite
topic of conversation. Sometimes they enlarge on it and tell how
So-and-So married a wife from that country and one night a number of
dogs arrived at his hut and carried the woman away with them.
This afternoon we ascended from the desert to the high limestone range
that forms a rampart to the oasis on the north, and then we started
crawling down into the Siwa valley. The desert plateau is about 600
feet above sea-level, and the oasis is 72 feet below it, and as the
height of the hills is considerable there is a big drop down into
the oasis. The track winds in and out through strange rocky passes,
among weirdly shaped cliffs whose tortured shapes remind one of Gustave
Doré’s illustration of the Inferno. These wild ravines are utterly
desolate, even in the spring no vegetation grows among them. This is
a land of broken stone where huge boulders seem to have been hurled
about by giant hands. The sun sank low before we had escaped from the
mountains, and the fantastically shaped crags were silhouetted with
monstrous shadows against the yellow sky. Sometimes the narrow road
seemed to cling to the side of a towering cliff, and at other times
it twined in and out through deep, echoing valleys in the shadow of
the overhanging, jagged rocks. In places the camels had to be led in
single file. Once the men began to sing, but the dismal echoes among
the caves sounded almost inhumanly depressing, so they gave it up,
and we marched along in silence. Finally a line of far distant green
appeared down below between two great cliffs, and one could see, very
faintly, the masses of graceful palms nodding their crests over the
murmuring oasis. To weary men after a six days’ camel ride across
the desert the first glimpse of Siwa is like the sight of the sea to
those ancient Greeks on the far-away shores of the Euxine.
[Illustration: CAMEL CORPS TREKKING TO SIWA, NEAR MEGAHIZ PASS]
When all the camels had come out from the last valley among the
rocks we “got mounted” and rode for about half a mile, past
groups of palm trees, already heavy with clusters of yellow dates,
to Ein Magahiz, which is the first spring in the oasis. Here we camped
for the night, watered the camels, who simply revelled in the water,
and I enjoyed a luxurious bathe in the deep cool spring which rises
among a cluster of palm trees. All night we could hear the thudding
of tom-toms in Siwa town, which is only a mile or so away.
“The cadenced throbbing of a drum,
Now softly distant, now more near,
And in an almost human fashion
It, plaintive, wistful, seems to come
Laden with sighs of fitful passion.”
_30th._
The mosquitoes last night were a reminder that we are no longer up on
the high desert; they were maddening, in spite of a net. This morning
everybody bathed and shaved and generally polished up. We rode across
to the town in great style; past the palm-shaded gardens with fences
of yellow “gerida”—palm branches; past the white rest house, on
the terraced side of a curious conical hill called “The Hill of the
Dead,” honeycombed with rock tombs; past the long low “Markaz,”
where the mamur and the police guard turned out to see us; across the
wide market square, and through the narrow streets between tall houses
of sunbaked clay below the enormous high walls of the old town. The
heat was already great, and the streets were almost deserted, except
for a few recumbent figures in a shady corner of the market-place,
who scrambled up as we rode by and then hurried off to tell their
friends that the “Hagana”—Camel Corps—had arrived.
The Camel Corps barracks and the District Officer’s house are out
on the sand about half a mile south of the town. They occupy two
isolated rocks about a quarter of a mile apart, which were formerly
the strongholds of two Siwan sheikhs. The District Officer’s house
stands on a limestone rock about 50 feet high. It is a high house
built of mud and palm log beams. To reach it one goes up a steep path
in the rock with roughly cut steps on to a little terrace with a sort
of loggia that opens through the building into the large courtyard
behind, which is surrounded by a high loopholed wall. There are two
rooms on the ground floor, both high and long, about 30 by 15 feet,
and two more rooms above with a roofed loggia and an open roof. The
rooms have three windows in each, with glass in them, the only glass
in Siwa, facing north and looking across the grove of palm trees
below the house to the strange-looking town on its two rocks. The
house was built by the former District Officer, who added to the old
Siwan fortress which existed there; it has a wonderful position and
is high enough to be free from mosquitoes.
I spent a busy day settling down and fixing up things with S——,
who starts with his section for the coast in two days. S——is
heartily sick of Siwa and longing to see the last of it. We dined
on the terrace outside—to the accompaniment of throbbing tom-toms
over in the town—on soup, chicken, caramel pudding and a dish of
every sort of fruit, which was a pleasant change after months on the
coast without any. Caramel pudding is the “pièce de résistance”
of every cook in Egypt; unless one orders the meal it always appears
on the menu. S——’s cook is an indifferent one. Out here I have
noticed a universal habit of considering, or pretending to consider,
one’s own servants absolute paragons of virtue, honesty, cleanliness
and skill, and invariably running down everybody else’s. I have heard
men hold forth for hours on the excellent qualities of their Mohammed,
or Abdel, knowing myself that Mohammed—or Abdel—or whatever his
name may be, was a double-dyed villain and swindling his master right
and left—but now I am doing it myself!
I think what impressed me most on arriving at Siwa was the intense
heat, the excellent bathing, the enormous height and strange
appearance of the town, and the incessant sound of tom-toms from
sunset onwards. One misses “the slow shrill creak of the water
wheels, a mournful cry, half groan, half wail,” which is such a
feature of Egypt and the Sudan. The average temperature in the summer
was about 108 degrees in the shade, or on warmer days 110 degrees or
112 degrees, but the nights were cool, and every evening regularly
at about eight o’clock a little breeze blew across from the east
and freshened things up. The only way to keep the house cool was by
leaving the doors and windows open all night, and keeping them closed
and tightly shuttered during the day. It resulted in dark rooms,
but at least they were fairly cool and free from flies. I soon made
the house very comfortable with some rough home-made furniture and
a few carpets and mats.
When a new Section of Camel Corps arrived at Siwa one of the first
events that occurred was the “taking over” of wives. In most cases
the men who were leaving handed on their wives to the new men, in the
same way as the stores, barracks, camels, etc., were officially handed
over by the officer who was going away to his relief. On the day before
the new Section rode in all the ladies retired from the camp _en masse_
to the houses of their relations in the town; the new men then entered
into negotiations with the retiring Section for the taking over of
the wives. A few of the men sought fresh pastures, but most of them
took on the wife of a man they knew well in the other Section. On the
day that the departing Section left Siwa all the ladies assembled on
the road that they would pass, carrying their boxes and belongings,
and when the camels came by they shrieked and wept, throwing dust on
their heads, beating their breasts, pretending to tear their clothes,
and showing signs of the most frantic sorrow at the departure of the
men. As soon as the camels were round the corner out of sight they
brushed off the dust, put on their bracelets, tidied themselves up
and hurried merrily across to the “harimat” outside the barracks,
followed by boys carrying their boxes, to their new husbands who were
waiting for them. This performance happened regularly whenever there
was an exchange of Sections. I used to watch the little tragi-comedy
from my terrace. The harimat of Siwa consisted of a number of rush huts
below the rock on which the fort was built. If any of the wives caused
trouble, and they often did, they were ejected and never allowed to
marry a soldier again. Polygamy was forbidden, and each lady, before
she married, was required to produce a certificate stating that she
was a respectable person, signed by several sheikhs and notables of
the town. The Siwans had no objection to these alliances between
Sudanese soldiers and Siwan women, as women in Siwa outnumber the
men at the rate of three to one.
The daily routine at Siwa did not vary very much. In the summer I was
generally called at 5.30, in time to run down from the house and have
one plunge in the cool deep bathing pool in the palm grove below the
rock before dressing. Clothes were a very minor matter; one wore simply
shirt, shorts, shoes and stockings, all of the thinnest material. Then
I used to walk over to the C.C. barracks and take the parade, sometimes
mounted drill, sometimes dismounted. We did mounted drill on a stretch
of firm white sand among the dunes south of the barracks. Breakfast
was at about eight—eggs, coffee, bread and jam, the eggs being even
smaller than Egyptian ones, about the size of bantam’s eggs, so one
needed a lot for a meal. After breakfast I went across to the barracks
again, and then rode down through the town on my pony to the Markaz.
The path to the town passed over a disused cemetery where the pony was
very liable to stick its foot through the thin layer of soil above the
graves, under an archway and into the street that divides the Eastern
and Western quarters. The street itself was hard rock and very steep
in parts, but owing to the height of the tall houses on each side
it was generally cool and shady and a favourite resting-place of the
inhabitants, many of whom lay stretched full length across the street
taking their siesta. But the clattering hoofs of my pony generally
roused them, and they scrambled out of the way when I came. The Siwans
are well mannered, a virtue that one never sees in Egypt nowadays,
and even in the Sudan it is on the wane. When I rode or walked in the
town everybody would stand up as I passed, and if I met people riding
they would dismount until I had gone on. I have heard people at home
say what a scandal it is that in some places the poor downtrodden
natives have to stand up and move off the path for an Englishman,
but after all they would do exactly the same for their own Pashas,
and apart from being an Englishman one was entitled to respect as
being the representative of the Egyptian Government in Siwa. Once I
was badly “had” over this. I was riding through the market with
some policemen following me on my way to make an inspection. There was
a group of Siwans sitting talking on the ground, and as I passed they
all stood up—except one man who remained comfortably seated in the
shade right in the middle of the path. I ordered one of the policemen
to see who he was and to bring him along to the Markaz to answer for
his bad manners. A few minutes later the man from the market was led
into the office. He was stone blind!
The Markaz is a large building outside the town with square courtyard
surrounded by prisons, stores and offices. It has a permanent guard
of locally enlisted police; they are quite smart men, but of little
use when there is trouble in the town, and always at enmity with the
Sudanese Camel Corps. At the Markaz I would usually find a number of
petitions to be read and examined, some cases to be tried, and probably
people applying for permits to cross the frontier who would have to be
questioned and seen. Then the sheikhs would arrive and there would be
discussions about various things—taxes, labour, work on the drains
or Government buildings, new regulations and orders, and then perhaps
the merchants would be summoned, and a heated controversy would follow
about the price of sugar, or the butchers would come to complain of
the cost of meat. It was like a daily meeting of a town council, and
complicated by innumerable interests, rivalries and intrigues. All
these matters, though they sound very small, were of considerable
importance to the Siwans.
There were six sheikhs recognized by the Administration, three of
them eastern, and three western. Sheikh Saleh Said was the most
influential and the most unbiassed by personal considerations. He
was a big handsome man with a dark moustache and features that
might have been copied from the bust of a Roman consul. He always
wore a long blue robe, and was the most dignified and impressive of
the sheikhs. I never saw him in a hurry or at all excited. Sheikh
Thomi was a little dark fellow, and reputed to be the richest man in
Siwa. He had a queer, quick way of speaking, was intensely obstinate,
a staunch Westerner, but honest—as far as I ever knew. I once
offended him very grievously. One day he sent me a basket of grapes,
the first that had ripened in his vineyards. I gave the servant
boy a piastre for bringing them. The boy returned and presented the
piastre to Sheikh Thomi, who was very hurt at being sent 2½d. when
he had made me a gift of fruit. Sheikh Thomi was a man of means and
worth several thousand pounds. I heard about the piastre incident and
explained it to him. To offer to pay for what is meant as a present
is a real breach of good manners, much worse than refusing it.
Sheikh Mohammed Abdel Rahman was a venerable white-bearded individual
who had been to Mecca and apparently lived on his reputation of
excessive sanctity; he always agreed with everything I said, and
then if I veered round and deliberately contradicted myself he did
the same—it was not helpful!
Abdulla Hemeid was a sly, fat, greedy man with a pale face and blue
eyes. He was very stingy and always complaining against taxation or
anything that affected his pocket. He never gave an entertainment, but
I always noticed him eating heartily in other people’s houses. His
family were much esteemed and he had succeeded his father, who had
been a very famous man in Siwa.
Mohammed Ragah was a thin, dark, hawk-like man, more like an Arab than
a Siwan. He was very badly off for a sheikh, but keen and clever,
and not above doing a bit of hard work with his own hands. He was
the only man in Siwa at whose house one was given good coffee. He had
shown great courage during the Senussi occupation in protecting some
Egyptian officials who were in Siwa.
Mahdi Abdel Nebi, Sheikh of Aghourmi, was the youngest of the sheikhs,
and the most reasonable and intelligent, though he had never been out
of Siwa. He was a cheerful, pleasant fellow, but cordially disliked
by the rest of the sheikhs. These six were the men who to a certain
extent controlled the destinies of Siwa.
About once every week when I arrived at the Markaz I would find the
doctor, or the mamur, or the clerk waiting for me in a state of tearful
hysterics, begging me to forward his resignation to the Governor, as
he could exist no longer in the company of his colleagues—the two
other officials. Then would follow a long infantile complaint. If
I could not smooth him down I had to bring in the other two, who
would also dissolve into tears, and try and get to the bottom of the
affair, which was always absolutely childish and ridiculous. On one
occasion the mamur had refused to allow the doctor to have a watchman
to escort him home past a certain graveyard which alarmed him, or
the clerk accused the mamur of inveigling his cook into his service,
or something equally small. Unfortunately the clerk was a Copt, the
doctor a Syrian, and the mamur was a Cairene. It went on unceasingly,
the most preposterous things served to bring one of them weeping to
my office. And when they were relieved their successors were just
the same. Yet they were good men at their work; the clerk had a
heavy amount of office work and did it well; the doctor was quite
clever and had been trained in America; and the mamur was good at
his job. Exactly the same thing occurred among the native officials
on the coast, so it was not only the effect of Siwan solitude.
From the Markaz I rode home, and after a light lunch either painted,
read, or went to sleep till about four, when I had another bathe,
followed by tea. After tea I went over to the Camel Corps for
“stables,” and then generally out for a walk. Sometimes I went
to Gebel Muta, the Hill of the Dead, a rocky hill on the north of
the town full of tombs hewn out of the living rock, some of them
being large and lofty with as many as eight coffin spaces round
the sides. In one of them there were the remains of a coloured wall
painting with figures of men and animals. Other times I climbed up
to the top of the town. The view from the flat roofs of the highest
houses on the rock is very wonderful, especially at sunset. On the
south of the town there is a long ridge of rolling yellow sand-hills
which change their contours when the desert winds sweep across them,
and become pink and salmon-coloured in the evenings; towards the north
one looks across a sea of palm groves and brilliant green cultivation
to the jagged range of mountains that separate Siwa from the desert;
on the west there is a great square mountain with a gleaming silver
salt lake at its foot, and in the east one sees the little village
of Aghourmi crowning another high rock which rises above the tree-tops.
At sunset the scene is exquisite, the hills turn from pink to mauve,
and from mauve to purple, and their peaks are sharply outlined
against the gold and crimson sky; long violet shadows spread across
the rosy-tinted sand-hills, and the palm groves seem to take on a
more vivid shade of green. The smoke ascends in thin spirals from the
evening fires, and a low murmur rises from the streets and squares
below; then suddenly the prayer of the muezzin sounds from the many
mosques, and one can see the white-robed figures swaying to and fro on
the narrow pinnacles of the round towers that in Siwa take the place
of minarets. When the call to prayer is over and the last mournful
chant has echoed across the oasis, and the glow in the sky is fading
away, one hears far down beneath the soft thudding of a tom-tom and
perhaps the faint whine of a reed pipe. When the deep blue Libyan
night covers the city the music becomes louder and seems to throb
like a feverish pulse from the heart of the town.
Often in the evening I rode out and called on the Sheikh of Aghourmi,
which is the little village on another rock two miles from Siwa. Mahdi
Abdel Nebi had recently succeeded to his father as Sheikh of Aghourmi
and was having some difficulty in sustaining his authority, even with
the support of the Administration, against the plots and intrigues
of an old cousin of his, one Haj Mohammed Hammam, a sly old man who
was rich, influential, and a thorough scoundrel, and wished to oust
his cousin and become sheikh himself. After the war Haj Hammam had
carefully cultivated the acquaintance of any British officers who came
to Siwa, and he was inordinately proud of knowing their names and
of certain small gifts that they had given him—a broken compass,
a highly coloured biscuit tin and some photographs. These he showed
on every occasion, and also remarked that they used always to call
him “_The_ Sheikh of Aghourmi”—this apparently being his only
claim to the title.
Hammam used to employ people to let him know immediately when I was
riding out to Aghourmi, so that he, and not the sheikh, should be
waiting to receive me at the gates; then he would try to persuade me
to accept his hospitality instead of the sheikh’s. Sheikh Mahdi
always invited his old cousin to the tea drinking, though I could
well have dispensed with him, but one could not object to the presence
of another guest. Sheikh Mahdi’s house was the only one in which a
woman ever appeared when I was there. She was an old Sudanese slave
woman who had been brought many years ago from the Sudan. Once I got
her to tell me her story, but she spoke such a queer mixture of Arabic
and Siwan that it was difficult to follow.
It appeared that when she was about eight years old she and her small
brother were playing outside their village somewhere in the North-West
Sudan, and a band of Arabs—slave raiders—swooped down and carried
them off. They were taken up into Tripoli and there she was sold
to another Arab who brought her to Siwa on his way to Egypt. She
fell ill and almost died, so the Arab, who did not want to delay,
sold her cheap to the Sheikh of Aghourmi, father of the present one;
he handed her over to his wife who cured the child. She remained
at Aghourmi for the rest of her life. She was a lively old body
and told the story in a very cheerful way, giggling and laughing,
not apparently feeling any wish to return to her own land.
[Illustration: SHEIKH MAHDI ABDEL NEBI, OF AGHOURMI WITH HIS DAUGHTER
AND COUSIN]
Aghourmi is almost more picturesque than Siwa. The road to the gate
passes below the overhanging rock on which the houses stand, which
is thickly surrounded by a luxuriant wilderness of apricot, fig and
palm trees. The steep path to the village goes under three archways,
each with an enormous wooden gateway, and this path is the only
possible means of entering the place. Above one of the gates there
is a high tower, and the houses alongside the path are loopholed
so that an enemy making an attack could be safely fired at from all
sides by the defenders. Inside the town there is the same dark maze
of narrow streets as in Siwa, with wells and olive presses, but all
on a smaller scale than those in Siwa town. There are a few houses
below the walls. The sheikh lives in the middle of the town in a big,
high house with a roof that has as fine a view as any that I have seen.
I got home after sunset and often had another bathe—by
moonlight—before changing into flannels for dinner, which I had
on the terrace in front of the house. I slept upstairs, on the roof,
but I always kept a spare bed ready in the room as quite often a wild
“haboob”—sand-storm—would blow up in the middle of the night,
and even indoors one would be smothered and choked with sand. Such
was the average day at Siwa, and by nine or ten o’clock one was
glad to turn in.
Occasionally after dinner one of the natives who were employed as
secret service agents would arrive very mysteriously at the house
on some excuse and report that there were fire-arms in the house of
So-and-So. Sometimes the information was no more than an exaggerated
rumour, but if it sounded true I would make a night raid on the
person who was supposed to have rifles. These night raids were very
dramatic, but did not always yield the harvest that was expected. The
informer would lead the way, disguised by a turban pulled low over
his head and a scarf muffling his eyes. I followed with a dozen armed
Sudanese. The difficulty was to prevent the owner of the house getting
wind of us before we surrounded the building, and to surround a Siwan
house which has dozens of doors and passages and exits over roofs
is no easy matter. It was not a matter of entering a hostile town,
but of surprising a household. We would pad silently into the town,
and anybody who we met roaming the streets would be attached to the
party to prevent his giving warning. On reaching the house the guide
slipped away in the darkness, and I surrounded the house with men;
then at a whistle each man lit a torch and I beat on the door and
demanded admittance.
Immediately the wildest hullabaloo began inside—men shouting, women
yelling, donkeys braying and hens cackling. Sometimes this was done
in order to distract our attention from somebody who tried to slip out
and remove the rifles to a safe hiding-place. When the door was opened
all the male occupants were marched outside and the harem sent into
one room, where they sat on the floor with shawls over their heads and
reviled us—but in Siwan, so nobody was any the wiser. The house was
searched from top to bottom, the ceilings probed, the mats raised,
and every room examined. Sometimes the rifles were buried in the
floor, or hidden in bales of hay. Occasionally a modern rifle and some
ammunition was found, but usually some old Arab guns and a bag or two
of shot and gunpowder. If we had a successful haul the master of the
house would be marched off in custody to the jail in the Markaz, and
next day he would be tried, and probably heavily fined or imprisoned.