The lost oases

by Ahmad Muhammad Hasanayn

Note the nose-bead. Her hair is plaited when she is young, and is oiled from time to time but never combed out.

Again and again the chant was repeated until the performance ended in a sudden shout. I had been the whole audience for the little show, beating the rhythm with my whip, and when the shout went up I called out, “Farraghu barud!” “Empty gunpowder!” was the signal for a feu de joie from the rifles, after which we all took our places in the caravan and went on exhilarated.

A night march has its advantages. The time, unless one is dead tired, passes more quickly than during the day, and the stars are cheering company for any lover of nature. On the horizon ahead of us loomed the dark masses of the Ouenat Mountains. It is so much easier to march with one’s destination distinct before one than to be walking on the flat disk of a desert where every point of the compass looks like every other and the horizon keeps always at the same maddening distance. We steadily approached the mountains until the sun was rising over them, tinting and gilding their peaks and throwing out on the desert a heavy shadow whose edge marched steadily toward the mountain-foot as we approached it from another direction. Shortly after sunrise we were opposite the northwest corner of the mountains, and an hour later we made camp close under their rocky walls. At this point there was an indentation in the mountain-side, with a well in a cave at its inner end. We pitched our tents at the mouth of this little arm of the desert sea, and ten minutes later we were all sunk into sleep. This was our first full night of travel, and we had some arrears of sleep to make up.

However, we did not sleep as long as we had expected to, but roused ourselves before noon and turned our attention to food. The French saying, qui dort dîne, may be true under some conditions, but we of the desert find it more satisfactory when we are able to do both. We all found pleasant distraction in roasting parts of the lamb which was provided by Mohammed as diafa for Ouenat.

I spent the rest of the day in visiting the well, which is situated in the cave in the mountain-side, in taking observations, and in looking over our surroundings. At this point the mountain rises in a sheer cliff, with a mass of boulders, great and small, heaped against it at its foot. The stones that make up this tabre, as the geologists call it, have been carved by ages of wind and driven sand into smooth, rounded shapes that giants of the heroic days might have used in their slings to kill monsters or for some enormous game of bowls. The ain or well lies a few meters away from the camp, in a cavity walled and roofed with the great rocks. It is a pool of refreshing water kept cool by their protection from the sun. The desert knows two kinds of wells, the ain, which properly speaking is a spring, and the bir or matan, which is a place where water may be obtained by digging in the sand. We call these wells of Ouenat ains, for lack of a better word, although they are not springs but reservoirs in the rock where rain-water collects.

There are said to be seven of these ains in the Ouenat Mountains, of which I was to see four before I moved south again. I also heard rumors of one or two birs in the oasis, but I did not see them.

In the evening the camp was full of life and gaiety. The men danced and sang as though there were no tedious days of hot sand and scorching wind behind or ahead of them.

Monday, April 30. Up early and went with Zerwali, Abdullahi, Mohammed, and Malkenni, the Tebu, to the big ain up the mountain. It was a stiff climb of an hour and a half. The ain has a plentiful supply of splendid water and is picturesquely surrounded with tall, slim reeds. I took some of the reeds back with me to make pipe-stems. They give a pleasantly cool smoke.

In the early evening I set out on the hejin, with Malkenni, Senussi Bu Hassan, and Sad to explore the oasis. It was a fine moonlight night with a warm southeast breeze. For four hours we marched over serira, skirting the northwest corner of the mountain, and at midnight we entered a valley with a chain of low hills on our left and the sinister mountain with its fantastic rock formations on our right. The valley is floored with soft sand strewn with big stones, which made hard going for the camels. At the hour when men’s spirits and courage are proverbially at the lowest ebb we halted a few minutes for a draft of strong tea from my thermos flask and then pushed on. But our spirits were by no means low. There was something magical about the night and the moonlight and the mountains, to make this an experience stirring to the imagination and uplifting to the soul. I speak for myself; but the men seemed to be getting something out of it too.

At five the valley opened out on to a wide plain of flat serira, with hills ten or fifteen kilometers away to the northeast. We turned sharply to the south, around a spur of the mountain. At dawn we stopped for morning prayers.