The lost oases

by Ahmad Muhammad Hasanayn

At the midday halt the men fell asleep immediately and snored heavily. This kind of travel is grueling, tedious work. But we were getting on.

Monday, April 23. We started at 2.30 A.M., halted at 9:15 A.M., second start at 3:45 P.M., halt at 9 P.M., making forty-six kilometers. This was the most exhausting trek that I had yet known. For eight days we had had only four hours of sleep a day. We had hardly started before the men with one accord fell back to snatch a half-hour’s sleep, leaving the camels to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of the guide’s lantern. I could not avail myself of this privilege, because of my anxiety for my instruments. The loading, done in the dark, was insecure, and a slipped fastening may mean a broken instrument or camera.

At intervals one or another camel would halt and kneel and refuse to get up. Then a Tebu would come and press his thumb on a certain big vein in the camel’s forehead and manipulate it. It seemed to give the beast relief.

We were having a hard time of it crossing the high steep sand-dunes when suddenly mountains rose before us like medieval castles half hidden in the mist. A few minutes later the sun was on them, turning the cold gray into warm rose and pink.

I let the caravan go on, and for half an hour I sat on the sand-dune and let the sight of these legendary mountains do its will with my mind and heart. I had found what I came to seek. These were the mountains of Arkenu.

It was the outstanding moment of the whole journey. Any hardships I might have endured, any hardships that might still await me, were as nothing compared with the joy that filled me at the mere sight of these hills. It was not like going to seek a hidden treasure that had to be dug out of the ground. There they were standing right up high before me so that I might feast my eyes upon them. Up and down, up and down we had plodded across the sand-dunes in the chilly grayness of the hours before dawn, until suddenly at the last dune it was as though somebody had rung up a curtain upon these magical hills of which I have not seen the like in the whole Libyan Desert. From the time I left Sollum until I reached this spot, there had been nothing like the mountains of Arkenu. The sight of them so gripped me that for a while I dreamed that I was not in the desert any more.

Tuesday, April 24, was the one hundred and eleventh day from Sollum and the one hundred and fortieth from Cairo. We covered broken country, sand covered with stones, undulating. At 5 A.M. heavy sand-dunes. After the dunes the country became stony again, and later there was hard sand covered with gravel. North of Arkenu Mountain and only a hundred meters from it was a big sandstone hill about two kilometers long and a hundred meters or so high.

There was a glorious sunrise, with shades of red and gold splashed on the few gray clouds in the east. The cool wind soon dropped, and it became close and warm.

Arkenu Mountain is a mass of granite, its gray surface weathered to a ruddy brown, rising uniformly along its length some five hundred meters from the desert surface. It is made up of a series of conical masses which run together at their feet, without intervals between them. We approached it at its most western point. As we came toward it, we could not tell how far it extended to the east. At the farthest point which we could see in that direction it rose into a peak. We marched around the northwestern corner of the mountain mass and came to the entrance of a valley which runs to the eastward. There is one solitary tree of the species called by the Goran arkenu standing in the desert here. From it the oasis takes its name. We made our camp near it. This was a bad spot for camel-ticks, who lived in the shade of the tree and came literally running by the score when our camels approached. We were obliged to camp some distance from the tree, as the insects did not seem to care to forsake its shade, even to attack the camels.

I once picked up a tick that was like a piece of petrified stone. I hit it with a stick, and it just clicked like a piece of stone. I turned away and pretended to be busy with something else. It took about three or four minutes before it gave any sign of life. The tick knows instinctively that safety lies in pretending to be petrified. Then, without warning, it scooted like lightning. When there are no camels these ticks live on nothing. They absorb the camel’s blood, get inflated, and then they can live—the Bedouins say years, but certainly a few months.