At 11:30 in the forenoon the chain of the Hawayesh Hills were on our left and sand-dunes and black stone garas on our right. At 12:15 we passed on our left four kilometers away Goor El Makhzan landmark, hills of black stone ranging from fifty to one hundred and fifty meters in height. At 1:45 we passed the landmark of El Gara Wobentaha, which means “the gara and its daughter,” two sugar-loaf hills of appropriate proportions to suit the designation.
I talked with some of the Bedouins about our losing our way in 1921. They showed no surprise. To these desert dwellers it is all a part of the day’s work, losing one’s way, one’s camels, one’s water, or one’s fuel.
Thursday, March 29. The lowest temperature this day was not recorded, as the minimum thermometer was broken in the storm.
The Hawayesh Hills were on our left until mid-afternoon. At 11:30 we entered soft and very undulating sand-dunes, difficult going for men and camels. At 1:30 we passed Garet El Sherif to the right, the biggest landmark we had yet seen. It was a ridge-shaped gara, one hundred and fifty meters long and about one hundred meters high, with three smaller ones beside it, two to the south and one to the north. At three we got into heavy dunes again and two hours later passed into flat country, with harder sand and patches of black stone. At 3:30 in the morning the worst sand-storm we had encountered began. It swept the tents from the moorings, and mine collapsed on top of me, smashing a few of my instruments and also the small chronometer.
With the whole tent on top of me, weighted down with the constantly growing load of sand, I was threatened with suffocation, but fortunately I got hold of a tent-peg, with which I held the canvas away from my face. Some of the men tried to come to my assistance, but I shouted to them to put the sacks of flour and pieces of luggage on their tents and mine to keep them down. I lay in my uncomfortable position under the tent for two hours or so. The sand came hurtling through the gap in the tent like shot from a gun. The men and the camels suffered badly. Had the pole of my tent fallen a fraction of an inch to one side, it would have smashed my big chronometer, and then what a difference it would have made to the scientific results of the expedition!
To the outside world the work of an explorer is either failure or success with a distinct line between them. To the explorer himself that line is very hazy. He may have won his way through, amassed all the information that he sought, be within a score of miles of his journey’s end; then, suddenly, his camels give out. He must abandon the best part of his luggage. Water and food take precedence; the boxes containing his scientific instruments, his records, have to be left behind. Maybe his plight is still worse, and he must sacrifice everything, even his own life. To the outside world he would be a failure; generous critics might even call him a glorious failure, but in any case he has failed. Yet how much is that failure akin to success! Sometimes on those long treks the man who fails has done more, has endured more hardships, than the man who succeeds. An explorer’s sympathy is rather with the man who has struggled and failed than with the man who succeeds, for only the explorer knows how the man who failed fought to preserve the fruits of his work.
The Bedouins understood this. There is a trait in their character that surprised, even astounded me sometimes, until I grew to understand it. There was often no hilarity, no rejoicing when the day’s march came to its appointed end. “To-day we have arrived, but to-morrow—” they seem to say. Because you have succeeded to-day it is nothing to brag about. It was not by your skill; it was destiny. To-morrow you may start an easier journey and fail horribly. On my first long trip in the Libyan Desert in 1921, between the oases of Buseima (one of the Kufra group) and Kufra, a three days’ journey, we came across the remnants of a perished caravan. There was a hand still sticking out of the sands, the skin yellow like parchment. As we passed, one of the men went reverently and hid it with sand. A three days’ trip, and yet those men had lost their way and died of thirst.
THE EXPLORER’S CAMP AT OUENAT
