SUBURBAN OASES
“. . . 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 the finest 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 high desert 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 on convoys calling at Gara
for water on their way to Egypt.
[Illustration: 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 pathway leads 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 an audience 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 patches of 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 the lower 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 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 more _macabre_; the gigantic masses of strangely
shaped rocks take on the appearance of
“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 becomes unaccustomed 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 pay customs. 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 a number 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 is _terra 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 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 when I
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 been even 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
“——Faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled.”
But on the whole Siwans strongly disapprove of interfering with the
tombs, although they firmly believe that some of the hills near the
town contain hidden treasure, more valuable
“Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold
Than all the gems of Samarcand.”
All the more obvious places, such as the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter
Ammon, at Omm Beyda, have been thoroughly dug about, but after spending
some time in the oasis one comes across various places that appear
to be untouched—virgin soil for the excavator.
Behind the hill on which my house, Kasr Hassuna, was built there
stood another great, isolated, limestone rock about 70 feet high with
a circumference of about 400 yards. One evening, when I was climbing
on this rock looking for a hawk’s nest, I came across the entrance
of what I supposed to be a cave right at the top. I went in, but as
I found that it stretched far into the rock I sent for my servants
and an electric torch; then armed with this I pushed on into the
darkness. There was a narrow tunnel about 5 feet high and 3 feet
wide cut out of solid rock, and sloping downwards so steeply that in
some places one could almost have sat down and tobogganed along. The
tunnel, which was about 10 or 11 yards long, terminated at the mouth
of a deep, dark shaft like a well, going straight down into the depths
of the earth. I did no more exploring that day.
On the next morning some of the sheikhs, who had evidently heard
of my discovery from the servants, told me the following story
very solemnly. Many years ago, in the time of their grandfathers,
Sheikh Hassuna, the owner of the kasr—castle—discovered, as I
had, the tunnel in the rock. He naturally supposed that it was the
entrance to a place of hidden treasure, but he did not like the idea
of going down the shaft himself, and he could find nobody else who
would. There was at this time a very venerated Fiki in Siwa, and
eventually Sheikh Hassuna persuaded him to make the first descent,
in order that he might exorcise the jinns and make it safe for the
sheikh to secure the treasure. The Fiki was lowered at the end of a
rope, with a torch, a Koran and a supply of incense. A few seconds
afterwards the people who were in the tunnel and looking into the
pit were startled by a rushing of wings and a great cloud of black
smoke, which was the jinns escaping from the place. When they hauled
up the Fiki he told them the following tale. At the bottom of the
pit there was a vast chamber hewn out of stone, and at one end of it
there was an iron door. When the Fiki began to read from the Koran
the door swung open and two terrible jinns passed out of it, escaped
up the shaft, and another jinn, a female, with huge wings, appeared
and ordered him to depart and to warn all others never to visit the
place again. So since that day nobody in Siwa disturbed the genii
of the hill. Finally, the sheikhs advised me, if I would go down,
to take with me somebody who could read the Koran.
The same afternoon I called on an old Sudanese Fiki, called Haj
Gabreen, and invited him to come exploring with me. He was a stalwart
old Sudani about sixty years old, much respected by his compatriots
of the Camel Corps and reputed skilful in doctoring and magic. He was
decidedly nervous, but at length agreed to come, mainly, I suppose,
owing to the audience of Camel Corps men who were listening. The
affair was now, to my mind, patronized by the Church. I got a dozen
of my stoutest men and a long rope. They lowered me down first, then a
couple of men, followed by the Fiki who bumped from side to side with
many groans and ejaculations of “Ya salaam”—“wallahi.” It
was very disappointing. The shaft was about 25 feet deep, narrow at
the top, but widening as it got lower. At the bottom there certainly
was a sort of chamber cut out of the rock, but very roughly done;
the floor of it was covered with a mass of loose stone and rubble
which had evidently fallen in at some time, possibly during one of
the earthquakes which are mentioned as occurring frequently at Siwa
by the eighteenth-century travellers who visited the oasis. There was
absolutely nothing in the shape of a door or a tomb, but one could
not tell what there was further down as it was choked with loose stuff.
I had men working at it for several days, trying to clear out the
debris, but there seemed to be no end to it, and as one had to haul
up every basket of stone to the top and then pass it from hand to
hand along the tunnel, the difficulty was very great. The atmosphere,
too, was very close and hot. Eventually we came to some large pieces
of detached rock which we were unable to raise, and as the work had
no appreciable result I finally gave it up.
Some time afterwards I went to see the tombs of the kings at Thebes. My
orderly, who had been at Siwa, was with me, and we were both struck
by the similarity between the tombs of the kings and the underground
place at Siwa, the latter of course being on a very small scale. Later,
when I discovered that Siwa was at one time famous for its emerald
mines, the idea suggested itself that this might have been an old
mine. Unfortunately, not being an archæologist, I was unable to
determine from the size and construction of the place whether it was
likely to be a tomb or not. I afterwards discovered another passage,
narrow but higher, cut into the outside of the rock about half-way
down, apparently with the idea of tapping the shaft, but it only
reached a few yards and then seemed to have been left uncompleted.
Haj Gabreen, the old Fiki who went down the shaft with me, evidently
spread a very fantastic rumour of my discoveries, because after I left
Siwa I got messages from the Governor inquiring whether I really had
found an iron door in the middle of the hill.
There seemed to be an abnormally large number of old men in Siwa,
as the climate is apparently conducive to old age. Siwans, like many
other natives, are very vague about their own ages. Often if one asks
them how old they are they reply, “Whatever age you would wish,” or
sometimes, “The same age as your Excellency”—which they seem to
consider a polite answer. Certainly most of the deaths that occur are
those of young children or very old people. Considerable deference
is paid to old age, although it may not always be accompanied by
corresponding virtue. When I was at Siwa the “Oldest Inhabitant”
was a wrinkled old man called Haj Suliman, the grandfather of
one of the principal merchants. He used to spend most of his time
sitting outside his house gossiping to the passers-by, and I often
stopped to talk to him. Unfortunately he was deaf and had no teeth,
so conversation between us was not very brisk. He and his relations
told me that he was 102 years old; he looked about 90, and could not
have been less than 85. He used to tell me about his one and only
visit to Cairo, some sixty years ago, on his way home from Mecca. He
also remembered and described quite clearly the visit of a certain
English traveller to Siwa in 1869.
One day I heard a great deal of noise in the neighbourhood of
Haj Suliman’s house; on inquiry I was told that there was a
“fantasia” going on, so I strolled over to see it. I found a
number of dancers, music in the shape of drums and whistles, and free
“lubki” being handed round. Carpets were spread in the courtyard
and Haj Suliman, very gaily dressed, was receiving the company,
surrounded by his sons and grandchildren. He looked very pleased with
himself and invited me to drink tea, which I did. All the time he
stood near, evidently expecting me to say something to him. Eventually
I asked him why he was giving a “fantasia”—at which the whole
family began talking and telling me that it was for a wedding. “But
where is the bridegroom?” I asked, and Haj Suliman leant forward
with a silly grin on his antique face. Then, to my amazement, they
told me that the old gentleman himself was the bridegroom, this being
his thirty-sixth wedding and the bride was 14 years old. I realized
that he had been expecting my congratulations, so I offered them,
as he was evidently not of the opinion that “crabbed age and youth
cannot live together.” He died suddenly about eight months later,
“a victim of connubiality.” I had seen him the day before in
his garden working hard with an enormous iron hoe as big as a spade,
which is much used in Siwa.
Another very old man in Siwa was an aged Sudani who sold a queer
little collection of oddments in a corner of the market. At one time
he had acted as postman for the Senussi between Siwa and Kufra. He
told me, and I heard it besides from various sources, that he used to
go alone to Kufra by a track across the sand-dunes south of Siwa. He
was paid three pounds for each trip, but the danger was enormous;
if his camel had strayed or fallen ill he would have been absolutely
done for. Another queer old character was an old woman called Hanoui,
who was at one time a secret agent and remarkably clever at acquiring
information. She was also useful when one wanted to get baskets made.
The only real industry in Siwa, and it is not an important one, is the
making of mats and basket work from palm fronds. Mats and large coarse
hampers for carrying dates on camels are made by men. The mats are
usually round, very strong, lasting and useful. The Arabs buy large
quantities of them when they come down for dates in the autumn. The
baskets are made entirely by women. They are manufactured from thin
strips of palm leaves which become like raffia; sometimes they are
coloured with dye, but the better kinds are ornamented with minute
patterns of coloured silk worked into the sides, and decorated with
tassels of variegated coloured silks and scarlet leather flaps in
which to fasten cords for holding them.
The work is very fine indeed, so fine that in some cases the baskets
will even hold water. They are made in various shapes, but generally
round with a conical cover. Besides baskets they make dishes and
platters with covers to them, which are used for carrying food
and fruit. These baskets are exceedingly attractive and useful and
command a high price in Cairo and in England. They are very light
and can be made in “nests” of five or six, in order to be more
easily conveyed. They are very distinctive and quite different to
those that are made at Assuan, in Sinai, or the Sudan.
Siwan women also make a rough kind of pottery. They get the clay from
a hill near Siwa, and another kind of clay which they make into paint
from another place on the oasis. The pottery is all made by hand,
not on a wheel, so it is very rough, but it acquires a good colour
and a slight glaze. It is used for making bowls, dishes, pitchers
and little braziers for a charcoal fire on which the kettle is kept
hot when the Siwans make tea. These utensils are ornamented with
rude patterns of a darker colour, the ground being generally yellow,
or a reddish brown. I found that there was one old man in Siwa who
was a professional toy-maker, which is an occupation that one rarely
comes across among Mohammedans, all forms of statues or images being
forbidden by the Koran as tending towards the worship of idols. But the
Siwan children have dolls and toy animals, and they are very cleverly
made, too. This old man made them chiefly of rags stuffed with sawdust,
and they really compared very favourably with the “Teddy bears”
and other monstrosities that one sees at home. Siwan children are
queer little things, very solemn and not as lively as the small
Sudanese. They start working at an early age, and before that they
seem to spend most of their time dabbling about in the streams among
the gardens. One difference that one notices between these small
children and ones of the same age at home is that the former are not
given to the tiresome habit of continually asking questions.
In trying to develop the basket-making industry one meets with many
difficulties. The women are casual and lazy, so that it is almost
impossible to ensure a definite supply of baskets by a certain
date. The fact that the baskets are made only by women who live
in strict seclusion is a great disadvantage, as one has to explain
everything through a third person. Once as a great privilege I was
allowed to see a woman at work on some baskets. She was the mother
of one of the policemen, quite a venerable old thing, but for the
occasion she sat swathed in a thick veil with only one eye showing,
and thus with great difficulty she gave a demonstration of how baskets
were made. I suggested several new shapes and patterns which she very
quickly understood and taught to the others.
[Illustration: SIWA TOWN FROM THE SOUTH]
With the bedouin women it is different. During the war, especially at
the close of the Senussi operations, there was great destitution among
the Arabs. Numbers of men who had served with the Senussi were killed,
and many others retired over the frontier and never returned. Their
wives and children were left unprovided for. As usual the English,
against whom they had been fighting, turned and helped these
refugees. Miss Baird, the daughter of the late Sir Alexander Baird,
collected a number of these women and their children at Amria, in the
desert west of Alexandria, and in conjunction with the F.D.A. started a
carpet-making industry. She lived amongst them herself, superintended
the work, and by degrees she acquired a wonderful influence over
them. She became somewhat like Lady Hester Stanhope in the Lebanon,
only her influence was not due to religious superstition. I once
stopped at Amria on my way from Cairo to Sollum by camel in the early
days of the industry, and I shall never forget my first impression
of the four or five hundred wild bedouin women working away at the
carpets like girls in a factory at home, absolutely controlled by
one young Englishwoman right out in the desert. Miss Baird’s death
in 1919 was a very great loss, but the work that she began is still
being carried on by the F.D.A., who have moved the factory from
Amria and installed it in an imposing building at Behig, which is
the headquarters of the Eastern District of the Western Desert.
One of the things that is noticeable at Siwa is the absence of
flowers. Owing to there being no rain there is no sudden burst of
vegetation in the spring, as there is along the coast. At certain times
there is blossom in the gardens on the various trees—apples, almonds,
pomegranates, lemons, etc.—and for a month or two there are roses and
a very heavily scented flowering shrub called “tamar-el-hindi.”
But one does not see the riot of colour that follows on the track of
the rains. There are very few wild animals, too. In the neighbouring
oases one sees gazelle and a few foxes, and in Siwa itself there are
quantities of jackals. According to the natives an animal which they
call “Bakhr wahash”—wild ox—is to be found at a place called
Gagub, an uninhabited oasis, consisting of a salt lake surrounded by
sterile palm trees, between Siwa and Jerabub. But when I went there
I saw no signs of the creature. It is described as being the size of
a donkey, of a yellowish brown colour, with two horns like a cow’s.
In Siwa there are very few domestic animals. None of the people
keep camels, partly because they have no need for them, and partly
owing to the presence of the “ghaffar” fly which inoculates
camels and horses with a disease that shortens their life very
considerably. For this reason one set of camels belonging to the
F.D.A. remain permanently at Siwa in order to avoid spreading the
disease among the camels on the coast. Almost every man in Siwa has
a donkey, and some of the large landowners have thirty or forty. One
meets them everywhere, in the streets trotting along under enormous
loads, but carrying them apparently with the greatest ease. The Siwans
rarely walk any distance, they always ride. The donkeys are stout
little beasts and are better treated on the whole than in Egypt. They
are imported by the Gawazi Arabs from Upper Egypt and the Fayum, via
Farafra, the oasis of “Bubbling Springs,” which lies south-east
of Siwa, but they breed freely in Siwa, and their diet of dry dates
seems to suit them well.
Donkeys are also used as a threshing machine. When the barley is
ripe it is cut and collected and spread out in a circle on a smooth,
hard piece of ground. Ten or fifteen donkeys are harnessed abreast,
in line, and driven round and round over the barley; when they wheel
the innermost donkey moves very slowly, and the outer ones trot
fast. In this way the corn is crushed out of the husks. Afterwards
it is winnowed by the simple process of throwing it up into the air
so that the straw blows away and leaves only grain. There are about
a hundred cows in Siwa; they are small animals, about the size of a
Jersey, but they give very good milk.
At certain times one sees quite a number of birds at Siwa, but they
are mostly migratory. I have noticed crane, duck, flamingo and geese
on the salt lakes; hawks, crows, ravens and owls among the cliffs;
doves, pigeon, hoopoes, wagtails and several varieties of small singing
birds in the gardens. Some of them nest in the oasis, and I collected
about a dozen different kinds of eggs, but unfortunately they all got
broken. There is one bird which is, I believe, indigenous to Siwa,
it is known by the natives as “Haj Mawla.” It is about the size
of a thrush, black with white feathers in its tail, and a very pretty
song somewhat similar to the note of a robin.
Lately the Administration has installed lofts of carrier pigeons along
the coast and at Siwa. On the coast they have been quite successful,
but so far no pigeons have been trained to cross the desert. The hawks
at Siwa are a serious menace to them, and quite a number have been
killed. In former days the Libyan Desert produced ostriches. Browne,
in 1792, mentions that he saw broken eggs and tracks of ostriches on
his way to Siwa. But nowadays there are none. Many of the lions that
were used in the arenas of Rome were brought from Libya, but these
too are now extinct.
“So some fierce lion on the Libyan plain,
Rolls its red eyes, and shakes its tawny mane.”
But the Arabs who travel between the Sudan and Tripoli tell of a long
wadi, with water and vegetation, north of Darfur, which takes three
days to cross by camel, and this wadi, so they say, is full of wild
animals—lions, tigers, giraffe, etc.—which have never been hunted.
Siwa is a bad place for snakes, scorpions and tarantulas. The cerestes,
or horned viper, is very common, as well as several other poisonous
species. One of the most deadly is a little light-coloured snake
with a hard prong at the end of its tail like a scorpion, which lies
half covered with sand. I also saw a specimen of the puff adder. My
house seemed to be a favourite abode of snakes, which may possibly
have been because I had a pigeon loft close to it. Several times I
was awakened in the night by my dog barking in the room and found
a big snake slithering along the floor, or underneath the edge of
the matting. Three men were bitten by snakes while I was there and
died as a result; in each case they had stepped on a snake with bare
feet. Strabo relates that in these parts of Africa the workmen had to
wear boots and rub garlic over their feet to protect themselves. The
local cure, which seems quite ineffective, is to rub the powdered
stems of a broombush on to the bite. Nothing will induce the natives
to touch a snake, dead or alive, with their fingers, as they say the
smell sticks to them and attracts other snakes. I was only once bitten
by a scorpion, and unfortunately I was out on trek without a first-aid
box. It was a large, blackish green scorpion, one of the worst kind,
and it caught me on the end of one of my fingers. But my men knew
what to do from previous experience. They tied my arm tightly at the
elbow and the wrist with a tourniquet, and then cut several gashes
with a razor blade across the finger which had been bitten. It was
very painful during the night, and I had a good deal of fever, but
I was none the worse for it after a couple of days. The cure for
a scorpion bite is a powder made from a snake’s tail, cooked and
pounded, and a few of the natives specialize in making this powder.
There are no snake charmers in Siwa, and I have seen none anywhere on
the Western Desert. In Egypt one meets many, the most famous perhaps
is a man at Luxor. I saw him perform a few days before I left Egypt,
and I was most impressed by his exhibition. One evening, without any
warning, I took him out with me to a place near Karnak, having first
examined him and satisfied myself that he had no snakes hidden about
his clothes. In about a quarter of an hour he discovered seven or
eight snakes. He used no whistle, but walked about in a very small
area muttering to himself, stopping dead every now and then in front
of a stone or a bush, thrusting his hand into it and withdrawing it
clasping a writhing lively snake. Several of the snakes were known to
me as being venomous. He took two of these, one by one, held them to
his wrist, and let them bite him so that when he pulled them off his
flesh they left blood on his hand. Anybody else would have suffered
severely, and would probably have died, but the snake charmer was
immune. His father and his grandfather had practised the same trade
before him, and according to him they had neither of them suffered
in any way by their profession.