He overestimated, therefore, the danger of the struggle and redoubled every caution. To have all chances on his side he had recourse to stratagem. He sent confidential men to meet the Libyans; he commanded them to feign that they were fugitives, to enter the enemies' camp and draw from Musawasa his best forces, the disbanded Libyan soldiers.
"Tell them," said Ramses to his agents, "that I have axes for the insolent, and compassion for obedience. If in the coming battle they will throw their weapons down and leave Musawasa, I will receive them back to the army of his holiness, and command to pay all arrears, as if they had never left the service."
Patrokles and the other generals saw in this a very prudent measure; the priests were silent, Mentezufis sent a dispatch to Herhor and next day received an answer.
The neighborhood of the Soda Lakes was a valley some tens of kilometers long, enclosed between two lines of hills, extending from the southeast toward the northwest. The greatest width did not exceed ten kilometers; there were places narrower, almost ravines.
Throughout the whole length of that valley extended one after another about ten swampy lakes filled with bitter, brackish water. Wretched plants and bushes grew there ever coated with sand, ever withering, plants which no beast would take to its mouth. Along both sides were sticking up jagged limestone hills, or immense heaps of sand in which a man might sink deeply.
The white and yellow landscape had a look of dreadful torpor, which was heightened by the heat, and also by the silence. No bird was ever heard there, and if any sound was given forth it was from a stone rolling down along a hillside.
Toward the middle of the valley rose two groups of buildings a few kilometers from each other; these were a 'fortress on the east, and glass factories on the west, to which Libyan merchants brought fuel. Both these places had been deserted because of the conflict. Tehenna's corps was to occupy both these points, and secure the road to Egypt for Musawasa's army forces.
The Libyans marched slowly from the town of Glaucus southward, and on the evening of the fourteenth day of Hator, they were at the entrance to the valley of the Soda Lakes, feeling sure that they would pass through in two days unmolested. That evening at sunset the Egyptian army moved toward the desert, passed over more than forty kilometers of sand in twelve hours, and next morning was on the hills between the huts and the fortress and hid in the many ravines of that region.
If some man that night had told the Libyans that palm-trees and wheat were growing in the valley of the Soda Lakes they would have been astonished less than if he had declared that the Egyptians had barred the way to it.
After a short rest, during which the priests had discovered and cleared out a few wells of water somewhat endurable for drinking, the Egyptian army began to occupy the hills extending along the northern side of the valley.