The Grand Senussi obeyed the injunction and journeyed till he came to Aujila. There the camel stopped dead and refused to go on, and on the spot the tomb was built.
The founder of the Senussi sect and all the members of the Senussi family and even their prominent ikhwan are believed to possess occult powers and second sight. Sayed El Mahdi is credited with having particularly strong occult powers which the Bedouins call miracles. One of the ikhwan at Jaghbub told me the following story about Sayed El Mahdi. An ignorant Bedouin came to him intending to study under him at Jaghbub. Suddenly the man realized that it was the sowing season and that he had nobody to look after the sowing of his land. So he thought it best to go away till after the crop season and then return to his studies. He went to say good-by to Sayed El Mahdi. He entered the room, sat down, and, as is the custom, waited until he was spoken to. Sayed El Mahdi appeared to ignore him for a few minutes. The man felt sleepy and just dozed off for a minute or two, awaking to Sayed El Mahdi’s gentle voice saying, “Now you feel at rest, and you know that matters have been arranged for you.” In that short time the man had seen in a dream his brother plowing his land and sowing the barley crop. “Now you shall be our guest,” continued the Sayed, “and study and pray that God may guide you to the right path. All will be provided for, as you have seen, and you will have no reason to worry. God is merciful, and He looks after us all.” The man remained at Jaghbub and afterward went home just in time for the harvest. On his return to Jaghbub he told one of the ikhwan that not only had his crop been sown as he saw in the dream, but the place seen and the time of the dream were exactly corroborated by the facts.
Another incident was told me by the kaimakam of Jalo. He was traveling with a party from Benghazi to Jaghbub to visit Sayed El Mahdi. They missed a well and were in dire straits. At night a man, the least enthusiastic of the pilgrims, turned to him and said, “Now that you have brought us to visit that wonderful man Sayed El Mahdi, will you ask him to send us some water, if he be as saintly as you say he is?” That same night at Jaghbub, Sayed El Mahdi, so the story goes, ordered two of his slaves to take five camels loaded with water and food, and going out into the open he indicated the direction they should take, adding that until they met a caravan they must not stop by the way. In due course they came across the caravan in distress and rescued it.
There are some of the old ikhwan still living whom even members of the Senussi family themselves avoid displeasing because they fear their occult powers. One of these who lives at Kufra was the ikhwan of a zawia in Cyrenaica. A Bedouin once brought some sheep to water at the well, and some of them strayed into the patch of ground attached to the zawia and ate the young barley. The ikhwan warned the Bedouin to stop his sheep from doing this, and the man pretended to pay attention but was really determined that not only these sheep but the whole flock should go in and help themselves to the crop. And when the ikhwan came out again it was to see all the flock feeding on his barley. “May God curse them,” he cried, “the sheep that eat the crop of the zawia.” The story goes that not a single sheep emerged alive from the zawia garden.
Until this day the Bedouins fear the Senussi family not so much because of any temporal power but on account of the spiritual powers with which they credit them. A Bedouin cursed by one of the Senussi family lives the whole time in fear of something awful about to happen to him. His friends, even his own people, try to avoid his presence lest the curse upon him should account for a harm to them also.
There is the famous case of the chief clerk of Sayed El Mahdi who lies in Kufra now half paralyzed. I went to see him. He was quite happy and very content in spite of the fact that he could not move his body. On my second visit he was getting confidential and—half believing, half disbelieving—asked if I had any medicine for his malady. I hesitated, for I did not want the man to lose hope entirely. He saw this and, without even giving me the chance of answering him, said: “No, it is decreed that it should be thus. It was my fault. Sayed El Mahdi wanted me to journey north. I could not disobey him, but I tried to avoid the journey. I went as far as Hawari and there wrote to him pretending to be ill. The answer came by a messenger that if I were ill I should certainly be relieved of the journey. The next day I was struck with paralysis and brought back to Kufra and have been here ever since. That was twenty-five years ago.”
CAMELS CROSSING THE SAND-DUNES
The kaimakam at Jalo told me a story when we were discussing miracles. He said that on one occasion there was a very severe sand-storm which nearly covered the whole of the tomb at Aujila. So they brought the slaves to dig it out again. As it was being dug out the kaimakam came into the chamber which contained the shrine and noticed a very strong smell of incense. He called one of the slaves and asked whether he had burned any incense. The man denied it, yet till now, upon occasion, a visitor to the tomb will smell this incense, though it is known that none has been burned.
Jalo is the headquarters of the Majabra tribe of Bedouins, the merchant princes of the Libyan Desert. A few Zwayas are also found there, but the Majabras make up the great majority of the two thousand inhabitants of the two villages. The Majabras have wonderful business instinct. The Majbari boasts of his father having died in the basur—the camel-saddle—as the son of a soldier might boast that his father died on the field of battle. When I was in Jalo, the Italian authorities, who were then on unfriendly terms with Sayed Idris, had prohibited the sending of goods from Benghazi and the other ports of Cyrenaica into the interior. Consequently prices of commodities at such inland places as Jedabia went up with a leap. Majabra merchants, arriving at Jalo with caravans of goods from Egypt, heard of this abnormal situation in the north. Without a moment’s hesitation they changed their plans, trekked north instead of south, and sold their goods to splendid advantage in Jedabia. Then back they dashed—if the camel’s pace of less than three miles an hour can be so described—to Egypt or the south for another caravan-load. Arrived again at Jalo with their merchandise, they inquired carefully as to comparative conditions in the markets of Jedabia and Kufra and directed their further journey accordingly. Considering the remoteness of the desert places—Jalo five days from Jedabia, Kufra from twelve to eighteen days from Jalo—and the snail-like speed of a caravan, news travels across the desert with surprising swiftness. At least it seems so. I suppose the true explanation is that all things are relative, and while news moves at the camel’s pace, so does everything else.