In those places the most ghastly event has taken place of which it is possible to meditate: Nature has died there, and nothing remains but her dust and her skeleton, which heat dissolves to the last degree, and burning wind tosses from spot to spot.
Beyond this dead, unburied region stretches again a sea of sand, on which are seen, here and there, towering up in one and another place, pointed stacks as high as a house of one story. Each summit of such a little hill is crowned by a small bunch of gray, fine, dusty leaves, of which it is difficult to say that they are living; but it may be said that they cannot wither.
One of these strange stacks signifies that water in that place has not dried up altogether, but has hidden from drought beneath the earth, and preserves dampness in some way. On that spot a tamarind seed fell, and the plant has begun to grow with endless effort.
But Typhon, the lord of the desert, has noted this, and begun to stifle it with sand. And the more the little plant pushes upward, the higher rises the stack of sand which is choking it. That tamarind which has wandered into the desert looks like a drowning man raising his arms, in vain, heavenward.
And again the yellow boundless ocean stretches on with its sand waves and those fragments of the plant world which have not the power to perish. All at once a rocky wall is in front, and in it clefts, which serve as gateways.
The incredible is before us. Beyond one of these gateways a broad green plain appears, a multitude of palms, the blue waters of a lake. Even sheep are seen pasturing, with cattle and horses. From afar, on the sides of a cliff, towers up a town; on the summit of the cliff are the white walls of a temple.
That is an oasis, or island in the sand ocean.
In the time of the pharaohs there were many such oases, perhaps some tens of them. They formed a chain of islands in the desert, along the western boundary of Egypt. They lay at a distance of ten, fifteen, or twenty geographic miles from the Nile, and varied in size from a few to a few tens of square kilometers in area.
Celebrated by Arab poets, these oases were never really the forecourts of paradise. Their lakes are swamps for the greater part; from their underground sources flow waters which are warm, sometimes of evil odor, and disgustingly brackish; their vegetation could not compare with the Egyptian. Still, these lonely places seemed a miracle to wanderers in the desert, who found in them a little green for the eye, a trifle of coolness, dampness, and some dates also.
The population of these islands in the sand ocean varied from a few hundred persons to numbers between ten and twenty thousand, according to area. These people were all adventurers or their descendants, Europeans, Libyans, Ethiopians. To the desert fled people who had nothing to lose, convicts from the quarries, criminals pursued by police, earth-tillers escaping from tribute, or laborers who left hard work for danger. The greater part of these fugitives died on the sand ocean. Some of them, after sufferings beyond description, were able to reach the oases, where they passed a wretched life, but a free one, and they were ready at all times to fall upon Egypt for the sake of an outlaw's recompense.