WE found Abd er Rahman and Qwaytin diligently engaged in grubbing
about in the ground. In reply to my question as to whether they
had seen anything of Bu Gerara, I was told that we were standing on
it. Qwaytin pointed out the foundations of several walls that could
just be seen showing above the sandy surface of the ground and a lot
of broken pottery lying about on the desert. He then led me a few
yards away to where a circular patch of unusually sandy soil, a few
feet in diameter, was to be seen, which he said was the mouth of a
well, and produced as the first instalment of the “treasure” to
be found, a piece of broken purple glass, that had apparently once
formed part of a cup or bowl, and a copper coin of the Ptolemaic
period, which he had dug up.
The sight of that coin was too much for my men. It was all I could do
to get them to unload the camels and pitch my tent, before they were
all off digging away into the ground for dear life, expecting every
moment to find the untold wealth that the book had described. They
continued until it was too dark for them to see. They then set to
work to cook their evening meal.
Qwaytin’s men were even more primitive in their culinary
arrangements than Abd er Rahman and Ibrahim. Their food supply
consisted of the usual leathern sack of flour, an earthenware jar,
covered with raw hide, which contained clarified butter, that
they slung on a camel, and several tin canisters containing a very
anæmic-looking cheese. They mixed the flour, water, salt and butter
together into a dough, which they rolled out into thick slabs with
a stick about three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the top of
one of my provision boxes. They then lighted a huge bonfire from
the surrounding scrub, and when the sand was sufficiently heated
and the wood was reduced to glowing embers, scraped the fire away,
laid the slab of dough down on the heated sand and covered it over
again with the cinders. After about a quarter of an hour’s baking
the bread was considered to be ready to eat. My men cooked their
dough on a slightly dished iron plate called a _saj_.
Qwaytin came into my tent in the evening, highly elated at having
found Bu Gerara. To my disgust I discovered that he was not thinking
of going on into Farafra at all, but was fairly off on a treasure
hunt, and seemed to imagine that he was going to drag me all over the
desert with him searching for buried riches. His book, he explained,
not only described the road as far as Bu Gerara, but said that close
by there was a hill to the west, standing in the same wady—Qwaytin
pointed out a hill standing by itself to the west as a conclusive
proof that his book was correct—and that a road ran past the
foot of the hill that, if followed, led to a big hill, on the top
of which was a well in which the treasures of three Sultans were
buried. He said he had seen the road at the foot of the hill in
the morning. He had never followed it to see where it led to; but
he had seen a hill some years before in the direction of which the
road was going, and had noticed a lot of pigeons alight on the top
of it, and thought that perhaps it was the one the book referred to,
and that they had gone there to drink from the well.
His mind was fairly obsessed with the idea of treasure, and I could
get him to talk of nothing else.
I tried to get some information from him about Farafra and
Iddaila—but it was of no use; he got round again to treasure at
once. The last time he was in Farafra, he said, he was on his way
back from Tibesti, where he said he had found a seam of diamond
that stood up two feet above the ground like a wall, and ran for a
long distance. He had chopped some lumps of diamond off and they cut
glass. But the Senussi sheykhs had apropriated them for the benefit
of the Senussia. He was clearly very sore on the subject.
I tried to switch him off on to the Bedayat country—but it was
almost equally useless. He said he knew of a number of places there
where there were ruins that probably contained treasure and asked
to see my map.
He studied it for some time, asking me to read out the names and then
declared that it was all wrong, and asked for a pencil and piece of
paper, saying that he would draw me a better one. He laid the paper
on the ground, sucked the end of the pencil and began to draw the
roads joining the places he was going to tell about, now and then
consulting a cheap bar compass to make sure that he had got them
running in the right direction. This framework, when completed,
looked more like a broken spider’s web than anything else.
He next proceeded to place on his “map” a number of enormous
dots, to represent the positions of the places he wished to insert in
it, and began to reel out a lot of names that are not found on any
printed map. The conversation commenced to become interesting, and
a good deal more in my line than fables relating to buried treasure.
But the names given to places by Arabs, Tibbus and Sudanese are
not easily remembered, or even grasped, the first time they are
heard. I allowed him to run on until he had completed his list,
and then took the pencil from him and began to write opposite his
dots the names of the places they stood for, and their distances
and bearings from each other. Qwaytin at once became impatient, as I
found he always did whenever I questioned him as to his statements,
or he saw me writing them down, and I was not able to get more than
two or three of the names before he took himself off in a huff.
He was a most exasperating man to get information from. If I
questioned him about some part of the world that he had visited, he
would very often give me no information at all. Sometimes a suggestion
on my part that perhaps he did not know anything about it, would put
him on his mettle and cause him to divulge some of his knowledge;
but as often as not it only had the effect of making him reel out a
lot of lying statements that probably appealed to his yokelish mind
as being facetious, but which subsequent questioning showed to be
incorrect—every statement that he made I had to check in order to
guard against this peculiar sense of humour that he possessed.
I usually verified his information by getting him to repeat what
he had said after an interval of a week or more, by which time I
calculated that, if he had lied, he would have forgotten what he
had said.
The first time I caught him misleading me, I pulled him up. But this
proved to be quite the wrong line to take, and nearly had the effect
of making him withhold his information altogether. He was greatly
incensed, and for many days he would tell me nothing at all. Then
late one night, while I was sitting up, waiting for a star to come
on to the meridian in order to get a latitude, just when it had
almost got there and I was going to take the observation, Qwaytin
came quietly up and said that he would tell me about the country
of the Bedayat. I had to give up the observation and go and sit
down in the tent, where under a coat thrown over my knees, under
pretence of feeling cold, so that he should not see me doing so,
I took down all he said in writing.
The information that he volunteered in this way I found to be
nearly always reliable—but he generally chose some time when I
was going to bed, or in the middle of some other work, to come and
impart his knowledge, and broke off at once if he saw me writing
it down. During the day’s march, too, I would sometimes get him
in a communicative mood, and he would describe to me the route that
joined two places. The difficulty of writing all he said down before
I forgot it was easily solved in this case, by stopping to take
a compass bearing, as he had often seen me do before, and then by
writing in my route book the information he had volunteered under
pretence of keeping up the survey.
Collecting data from natives on which to base a map is not quite
so simple as it sounds. The habit that so many _bedawin_ have of
deliberately misleading one, makes it necessary to check the routes
described most carefully. But even bona-fide information collected
in this way will make a most inaccurate map unless some means for
adjusting it can be found.
The plan I adopted was to get the data whenever possible, in the
form of through routes, joining two places whose positions had been
previously fixed. Roads so described can then be plotted on the map,
their accuracy tested and the route as a whole adjusted, so as to
fit the positions of the places that are already known. In this way
the errors can be minimised as far as possible.
But collecting this information from Qwaytin was anything but
easy. Like nearly all the _bedawin_ he was entirely illiterate,
and so could not give me the spelling of the names of the places
that he gave me in the Libyan Desert, the Sudan, Tibesti and Endi,
and these could not be found on any map. Many of them were almost
unpronounceable, and in some cases introduced sounds that could not be
reproduced by even the Arabic alphabet. They were presumably those of
the Tibbu or Bedayat languages—the latter being a tongue that Qway
had described to me as sounding like “the chattering of monkeys.”
It will easily be imagined that to take down a long string of new
names such as these, when rapidly reeled off, was a matter of some
difficulty.
But it seemed worth taking some trouble to get them. I had been asked
to get any information I could about the unknown parts of the desert,
for the Senussi question was in the air—the Government were by no
means so fast asleep as people were led to suppose—and at that
time, moreover, a rod was being laid in pickle for ’Ali Dinar,
the Sultan of Darfur, whose goings on did not always meet with the
approval of the authorities; so information on these unknown parts
was likely to be of some practical use, beyond spoiling the virginal
whiteness of this part of the map of Africa.
Qwaytin’s knowledge of the least known parts of North and Central
Africa was profound, and he had the great virtue, from my point of
view, of being so densely stupid that he was unable to realise the
value of all that he let out. Before I had done with him, he gave me
enough data to form a fairly complete map of the unknown portions
of the Libyan Desert, with a great deal of the Bedayat country and
Endi. In addition I learnt from him much information of the orography
of the desert and the distribution of the sand dunes. The map when
completed contained the names of some seventy places that, I believe,
had not previously been recorded; many of them have been found since,
approximately in the position in which they were shown. Maps of this
kind do not, of course, err on the side of accuracy, but they have
their uses—principally in giving future travellers that definite
objective to look for, that I had so greatly needed when starting work
in this desert. If I had been able to collect during my first year the
information I eventually obtained, mainly from Qwaytin, in my last,
I should certainly have tackled the job in an entirely different way.
The morning after our arrival at Bu Gerara, the men fell seriously
to work to dig about in the site, with the result that by midday a
few pieces of broken pottery and glass and two or three more small
copper coins had been unearthed. As I wished to ascertain whether
any water was to be found in the well, in the afternoon, much to
their disgust, I set the men to clear it out.
Qwaytin’s men, after they had been working for a short time, downed
tools, declaring that that sort of work was a job that was only fit
for the _fellahin_, and beneath the dignity of the Arabs. It was
not until I pointed out that the well was the most likely place in
which to look for treasure, and reminded them that the three Sultans
were said to have buried theirs in the well on the top of the hill
described in Qwaytin’s book, that they could be induced to resume
their work. Then they fell to with a will and soon had the well
cleared out to the bottom.
It was about nine feet in diameter, and eight feet deep. On the side
towards the site of Bu Gerara, a ramp, cut in its side, led down to
the bottom. The part of the desert in which it had been sunk was
covered with a thin layer of rock, below which lay a bed of clay,
extending down to another layer of rock, which formed the bottom
of the well. Before we commenced to dig, the well was completely
filled with sand that had drifted into it. About half-way down our
expectations were raised by the sand becoming damp; but though
the well was cleared out to the very bottom, and the sand got
considerably damper as we descended, no water was to be seen. This
was a considerable disappointment, as a well at this point on the
long Derb et Tawil would have been of the greatest value to the
travellers using the road.
The nut of a dom palm that I dug up, and the trunks of some palm trees
that had been built into the walls, showed that, at one time, there
must have been a plentiful supply of water in the neighbourhood. The
place was probably a small fortified station built, or at all events
occupied, during Ptolemaic times, to protect the well, which from its
position on “the long road” must once have been of considerable
importance.
The existence of fossilised tree-trunks and old river-beds in the
Libyan Desert shows conclusively that, in the remote past, this
portion of the world must have been a well-watered country. But
whether this desiccation reached its limit before historical times,
or whether it is still going on is one of the most disputed points in
connection with this district. The failure of the well at Bu Gerara
may, of course, have been due to some purely local cause, which was
not apparent. But in the absence of some explanation as to its nature,
this little abandoned settlement affords a very strong argument in
favour of the view that the water supply—apart from that derived
from the artesian wells—has failed appreciably in comparatively
recent times, owing probably to a decrease in the rainfall. From
this point of view, our discovery was of some importance, though
the place itself was of no consequence at all.
But it was found by following instructions in Qwaytin’s book of
treasure. Works of this description, to put it mildly, are regarded
in Egypt with a considerable amount of incredulity. This scepticism,
I own, I fully shared—until my discovery of Bu Gerara.
Since then, however, I have taken a different view of the case, and
believe that the almost universal suspicion with which these books
are regarded, may not, after all, be entirely justified, and that
part of it at least is due to the strong prejudice that so often
exists towards any native beliefs or customs that do not admit of
a ready explanation, or that savour in any way of the occult, or of
buried riches.
These books of treasure, it is true, are mostly written by natives
of the astrologer class, who clearly expect their readers to rely
largely upon charms and various occult means to discover the hidden
riches to which they profess to give the key. Many of them lived in
the Middle Ages, but the race has not died out. There are hundreds
of the same class of men still to be found practising their arts on
the credulous natives of Egypt, and one of the principal subjects
upon which they are even now consulted is the recovery of buried
treasure. There is a _sheykh el afrit_ (ruler of spirits) in almost
every village, to whom the inhabitants resort to induce him by means
of the pool of ink, or some similar method, to foretell the future
or to guide them to where treasure has been buried. Some of them
perhaps believe in their own powers, but the majority are probably
little more than impostors. So far, so bad.
But there appears to be a very fair amount of grain among all the
chaff contained in these books, for in many cases they not only refer
to places, such as Esna, which are perfectly well known, but they
describe the roads that lead to them, when these roads are still
in use.
For this reason I think they are worth careful—or perhaps it
would be better to say cautious—consideration. It is true that
in many cases they mention places and describe roads which perhaps
were perfectly well known at the time when the books were written,
but that cannot now be identified; but this proves nothing. There
are many old sanded-up wells, little deserted oases and small
outpost stations of the Roman and other periods, such, for instance,
as Bu Gerara, scattered about in the desert, and the vestiges of
many old roads are still to be seen, whose ultimate destination is
now unknown, but which, I believe, lead to these abandoned oases,
which very probably, in the fifteenth century, when the book of
Johnson Pasha’s that has already been referred to was written,
were populous villages and oases; but which, owing to failure of the
water supply, the encroachment of the sand, or to some other cause,
have long since become deserted.
On these grounds I believe these books contain—among a great deal
that is useless except as a curiosity—some valuable information as
to old places in the desert that have long since been lost to sight,
and whose very names may now be forgotten, information that is of
a geographical character.
Why not? Is it the age of the book, or the fact that the descriptions
in it are associated with magic and hidden treasure, that presents
the difficulty? If it be the former, ask any archæologist whether he
would hesitate to look for the site of some ancient city, because the
only references to it were to be found in some old papyrus or temple
hieroglyphics; besides, did not the Royal Geographical Society have
a paper read before them on the identity of the Garden of Eden with
Mesopotamia? The description that led to the identification being
taken from the Book of Genesis, which was written long before any
of these books were thought about.
If it be the treasure that presents the difficulty, has there not been
endless discussion among geographers as to the identity of the Wakwak
Islands and other places, mentioned in the “Arabian Nights,”
a large proportion of the stories in which have no pretensions to
be anything more than fairy-tales—and certainly there is enough
buried treasure mentioned in them to satisfy the most ardent fortune
hunter in Egypt.
Are not educated Europeans, even now, continually setting out to
look for the fabulous riches hidden, a hundred or two years ago,
by some old pirate or buccaneer, usually on an island—say, in the
West Indies? Of the identity of the island there is generally no
doubt at all—but the treasure does not seem to be often found!
We stayed for a day or two more at Bu Gerara, during which time the
men found a small earthenware pot, some broken fragments of glass and
pottery and one or two more copper coins—and that was all! Then as
we had drawn a blank, so far as treasure was concerned at Bu Gerara,
the men all wanted to be taken off to the hill where the riches of
the three Sultans was buried with the least possible delay. Qwaytin
was the most insistent of them all, evidently assuming that I had
given up my plan of going to Farafra and had committed myself to a
whole season’s treasure hunting instead.
The hill where the mystical Sultans had buried their riches was
not far off, though it did not lie in the direction in which I had
intended to go; but it was in a part of the desert that had never
been mapped, so I thought it best to humour him once more and let
him take me there.
We got off early the next morning. Qwaytin led us straight towards the
hill in the wady, near the foot of which we found the promised road.
As we increased our distance from the cliff lying to the north of Bu
Gerara, the surroundings of the place could be better seen. The view
to the north was, of course, cut off by the cliff, which as soon as
we had got some distance from it, could be seen stretching away for
many miles to the east, forming the continuation of the escarpment
that bounded the Kharga depression on its northern side.
To the south-east was a considerable expanse of elevated ground,
evidently the plateau in which lay some small depressions I had found
to the north of ’Ain Amur. So far as I could see, there was no cliff
on the northern side of this tableland, the ground only sloping up to
it from the lower level. A well—’Ain Embares—that I had tried
to reach by way of the chain of small depressions, with little doubt
was situated between the foot of the scarp of the main plateau and
this high ground that lay to its south.
On the west, the scarp of the plateau was visible for a long
way. Qwaytin’s old road led us in a southerly direction, roughly
parallel to the cliff of a detached plateau. It was chiefly noticeable
for the large number of small patches of bushes, known as _roadhs_,
that were scattered along it. These seemed to be a favourite feeding
ground for gazelle, to judge from the number of tracks we saw, most
of which, however, were fairly old ones. In one place, instead of the
usual small bushes, a couple of small acacia (_sunt_) trees were seen.
We sighted the hill we were in search of in the afternoon, and,
an hour before camping, reached the top of a steep descent on to
lower ground, about two hundred and fifty feet below us, that Qwaytin
said was called in his book the “Negeb er Rumi” (descent of the
European). The road down to the valley below was obviously to some
extent an artificial one, and, though extremely steep, was negotiated
without difficulty. We pitched our camp below.
This lower ground was so covered with sand and pebbles that I
was unable to see whether we were still on the limestone. But the
ground level rose again considerably as we neared the hill, and
for the last part of the way the limestone was showing again on the
surface. Possibly a fault exists in the neighbourhood.
We reached the hill itself at noon, and camped on its southern
side. It was a small limestone-capped hill, chiefly remarkable for
the extent to which the limestone was honeycombed by the wind-driven
sand. At the foot of the hill, near the camp, was a boulder that
had evidently rolled down from the top. It was almost four feet in
diameter, and literally riddled with holes like a sponge.
As soon as the camp was pitched, the men rushed up the hill and began
minutely searching every nook and cranny for the reported well, while
Qwaytin wandered disconsolately along its base, vainly searching for
the broken glass that his book had foretold would be found there. He
thought that perhaps he had mistaken the hill, and said, if we could
not find the well or any glass, that we had better follow the road
farther, to see if there was not another hill upon it that might
be the one referred to in his book; but to waste any more time in
looking for that hill was the last thing I intended to do.
By sunset the well had not been found, though every inch of that
hill must have been most carefully examined several times.
This was a serious blow to Qwaytin’s hopes, and a distinct wet
blanket to the whole caravan with the exception of Ibrahim, who,
as he explained to me, would not have minded a little _bakhshish_,
but would not in the least know what to do with sacks of gold,
or diamonds, even if he found them.
In the evening Qwaytin, Abd er Rahman, Dahab and I held a serious
consultation. The position of the hill tallied so well with the
description of it in Qwaytin’s book that he felt sure that it was
the right one; but he was terribly worried over the failure to find
the well.
Dahab said that he thought that probably it was there all right,
but that it was hidden by enchantment, and that it would be necessary
for us to burn some incense before it would become visible.
Qwaytin cheered up rather at this idea; but said that we had no
incense with us, and added it was awkward stuff to play with, as it
was most important that we should have the right kind, and should
be quite sure that we knew how to use it.
Abd er Rahman agreed with this, and was very emphatic in saying that
we ought to be quite sure that we had enough of it, as he had heard
a story of a Maghrabi Arab, who had joined with two _fellahin_ in a
search for treasure that was buried in some tombs in the side of a
hill that had a spell over them, and so could not be opened without
proper formalities. They found the place where the tombs were hidden,
and then had gone through the necessary incantations and burnt
some incense and the tombs immediately opened. The two _fellahin_
had then gone in to collect the treasure while the Maghrabi had
remained outside to look after their camels and to keep the incense
burning. Unfortunately the incense ran short, and, as soon as the
last of it had been burnt, the tombs closed again with a bang,
burying the two unfortunate _fellahin_ alive. The Maghrabi had then
gone home with their camels, and Abd er Rahman was clearly of opinion
that that Arab had done something that was quite exceptionally clever.
He suggested that, to be on the safe side, we had better go and
fetch Sheykh Ibrahim, the _Sheykh el Afrit_ from Dakhla, to come
out and do the necessary incantations. But this did not meet with
Qwaytin’s approval at all. Sheykh Ibrahim, he said, was a member
of the Senussia and he knew all about him. He had the right books
and the proper incense and was very clever at his work. But he was
such a bad man that sometimes the spirits would not obey him; and
he pointed out that if an _afrit_ went on strike in the middle of
the performance, we might find ourselves rather badly in the soup.
After much serious discussion, we came to the conclusion that,
in the circumstances, it was no use for us to waste any more time
in examining the hill, but that at the end of the trip we would
go and get a really first-class highly certificated magician
from Cairo, or some big town, and get him to come out and do the
job. In the meantime, as Qwaytin had told me that there were some
mounds in the Kairowin _hattia_, that we should go there through
the eastern part of the Farafra depression and see if they did not
contain treasure. Qwaytin had heard that they contained buildings,
and so thought that it would be a likely place for buried riches,
though, as he said lugubriously, he did not expect that we should
find anything like what we might have done if we had discovered
the treasure of those three Sultans. The following morning a rather
crestfallen caravan set out for the eastern side of Farafra.