“You have audacity, you Egyptians,” he said. “For your bey to come twice to our country, which no stranger has visited before in my time, that is boldness. Why does he come here and leave all God’s bounty back there in Egypt, if not for some secret purpose? He comes to our unknown country to measure and map it, and, by God, not once but twice.”
IN THE OPEN DESERT
Study of shadows cast by the camels
Even my good friend Bu Helega was suspicious of my intentions in penetrating into his country.
I finally discovered the real basis of the antagonism of those who live in the desert to the coming of persons from the outside world. It is not religious fanaticism; it is merely the instinct of self-preservation. If a single stranger penetrated to Kufra, the cherished center of the life of their tribe, it would be, as the Bedouins say, “the camel’s nose inside the flap of the tent.” After him would come others, and the final outcome would be foreign domination. That would mean the loss of their independence and the paying of taxes. They can hardly be blamed for dreading either of those results.
The changes produced by time in the desert, which we are accustomed to think of as eternally the same, are interesting. When Rohlfs passed to the westward of Zieghen on his way to Kufra in 1879 he reported a broad stretch of green vegetation here. To-day there is no extent of greenness, merely a great deal of hatab, dead brushwood. Rohlfs’s statement, however, is confirmed by Bu Helega, who says that when he was a child his father used to take him to Kufra when he went to get dates, because the Bedouins believe that the waters of Shekherra, the headquarters of the Zwayas near Jalo, are bad for children in the summer. Bu Helega used to be carried on his father’s back most of the way. It was in those days that the trip was made in three days and five nights, without halts. They gave the camels but one meal between Jalo and Zieghen; when they reached the latter place the beasts were fed on the green stuff that was growing there then. What has seemed like an error on Rohlfs’s part in describing so much vegetation at Zieghen is thus demonstrated to be merely the result of a difference in conditions after forty-five years. It is probably a variation in the water conditions in the soil which has turned the living shrubs into fire-wood.
Our trek from Buttafal to Zieghen illustrated the uncertainties of desert travel. In spite of all the precautions that we could possibly think of, our fuel ran out, one camel died, and two others were so exhausted that they were to fail us soon. The food for the camels was used up also, and from Zieghen to Kufra they were fed on date-tree leaves, gathered at the former place, which was very poor food for them indeed.
I picked up from a Bedouin a proverb with a cynical slant to it: “Your friend is like your female camel; one day she gives you milk, and the next she fails you.”
On the two evenings at Zieghen I took observations of Polaris with the theodolite. When the observations were worked out I found that Zieghen was about a hundred kilometers farther to the east-northeast than Rohlfs had placed it. He did not visit the place and therefore could make no observations on the spot but relied on what he was told by the Bedouins. I found also that Zieghen is 310 meters above sea-level.