The lost oases

by Ahmad Muhammad Hasanayn

This is a great catastrophe, as his load has to be thrown away

That was our commissary list, except for salt and some spices, especially pepper for the asida, a pudding of boiled flour and oil, made pepper hot. There was little variety; but variety is the one thing one has to give up when one’s supplies are to be carried by animals who must themselves live chiefly on what they can carry. There were no luxuries, no matter how pleasant they might have been to relieve the monotony of rice, unleavened bread, dates, and tea. If one has experience in desert travel and the wisdom to learn by it, one takes no foods of which there is not enough to feed every one in the caravan. On the trek in the desert there is no distinction of rank or class, high or low.

The sole exception to the rule of no luxuries was tobacco. Since only one of the men who were with me at any time on the trip smoked, however, this was no real violation of the rule. A stock of Egyptian cigarettes and tobacco afforded me constant pleasure and comfort throughout the journey.

Next comes water, the one great and unceasing problem of desert travel. Men have lived for an unbelievable number of days without food, whether from necessity or from curiosity. But the man who could go for four days without water would be a miracle. A desert is a desert just because it lacks water. The desert traveler must think first of his drinking supply.

We carried water in two ways. The regular supply was held in twenty-five girbas, the traditional sheepskin water-carrier of the desert. Each holds from four to six gallons—and is easily burst if two camels carrying girbas bump together in the dark on a rocky road! So the reserve water-supply for emergencies is carried in fantasses. They are long tin containers, oblong or oval shaped in cross-section to hang easily along the camel’s side. We had four fantasses holding four gallons each and four others holding twelve gallons each. Our full supply, therefore, was something like two hundred gallons, enough to last our caravan, when it was finally organized, on the longest trek from well to well that we were likely to encounter. We carried only our reserve supply in fantasses, although they were less liable to injury, because the girbas, when empty, took up so little space. All twenty-five of them could be carried on one camel, while only two fantasses went to a camel, full or empty. We had no camels to spare.

There were also some individual water-bottles, but most of them were soon discarded because the men hated the nuisance of carrying them. A few were kept for cooling water later on in the journey when the weather became hot. The evaporation of the moisture through the canvas sides of the bottles or bags kept the water within at a pleasant temperature.

Four tents, two bell-shaped and two rectangular, and numerous cooking-utensils, of which the chief was a huge brass halla or bowl for boiling rice, made up the tale of our equipment. For emergencies there was a medicine-chest, with quinine, iodine, cotton and bandages, bismuth salicylate for dysentery, morphine tablets and a hypodermic syringe, anti-scorpion serum—which was to plunge me into an apparently serious predicament and rescue me from it—zinc ointment for eczema, indigestion tablets, and Epsom salts. I had a primitive surgical kit and a few dental instruments and remedies which a dentist friend had given me. I was equipped to take care of the simple every-day ills; if anything more serious befell, I should have to say, “Recovery comes from God.”

For hunting and possible defense I took three rifles, three automatic pistols, and a shot-gun. By the time of our return the shot-gun had been given as a present, and the rest of the arsenal had been increased by six rifles and one pistol. When the rifles arrived at Sollum in their characteristically shaped boxes, it was immediately rumored through the town that I was carrying a machine-gun, for some mysterious purpose which gossip elaborated to suit itself.

In order to make the report of what I found and saw as vivid and truthful as possible I took five cameras. Three of them were Kodaks, which functioned perfectly to the end; one a more elaborate instrument with a focal-plane shutter, which was ruined by the penetrating sand; and the last a cinema machine. For all the cameras I carried Eastman Kodak films, which were packed with elaborate care, first in air-tight tins, then in tin cases, sawdust filled, and finally in wooden boxes. These precautions in packing proved to be none too great, in view of the intense heat of the first part of the route and the rain and dampness which we encountered later on in the Sudan. For the cinema camera I took nine thousand feet of film. Fortune was with me in all the photographic work. The films were not developed until my return eight months later to Egypt, but the percentage of failures was gratifyingly low. For clothing I took the usual Bedouin garb of white shirts and long drawers, both made of calico, and a woolen jerd, the voluminous Bedouin wrap; also silk jackets and waistcoats and cloth drawers like riding-breeches, but reaching to the ankles; the latter were used only on ceremonious occasions, such as entering or leaving an oasis; there were naturally a few changes of each. I did not wish to put on the desert dress until the end of the first stage of the journey, so I left Sollum in old khaki coat and riding-breeches, which had already seen their best days. With yellow Bedouin slippers on my feet, the only possible wear in desert travel, and a Jaeger woolen night-cap on my head, for the weather was keenly cold, I must have been an amusing figure when we made our start.