I walked smiling to the worst old man, grasped his hand, and wished him a happy day. He started back, wrenched away his hand, waving me away, though Hassan tried to make him shake hands. The soldiers rushed forward, and I sat on a rock laughing at him, and saying I wanted to look at them. They all seated themselves close by. Captain Smyth, who had gone around making a reconnaissance, now arrived, his servant Hamid having galloped back on a camel to fetch him. He thought I was the only survivor. I told him the story before them, and imitated the old gentleman, pointing him out, and they all laughed when I asked how we could be afraid of them when they were so much afraid of me.
They all shouted 'Peace! peace!' (salaam! salaam!) 'aman! aman!' (mercy!)—and subsequently came in a body to our tent to impress upon me that I need fear no longer—we were friends.
The real truth was that we were now very near, if not quite in, the territory of that branch of the Kilab tribe which owns allegiance to the Dervishes; when Captain Smyth rode ahead next day to take observations from a hill called Darurba, Mohamed Ali Hamed, who accompanied him, made him dress up in a sheet and pretend to be an Arab woman when they came in sight of some people whom he declared to be Dervishes.
We were told of a native who had lately found a gold nugget whilst digging in the sand. The veins of quartz, particularly on the southern side of the valley, are very marked, and the chiselling by which the miners had followed up their veins could easily be seen; it would appear that the workings here had been of a very extensive character, and the output of gold in some remote period must have been very large.
We were conducted to a hill about two miles from our camp, where there are old cuttings in the quartz, some of them going a considerable depth underground, and blocks of quartz were still standing there ready to be broken up; also we saw several crushing-stones here, but there were no traces of miners' huts, so presumably the quartz was removed to the valley below.
On the rocks near the cuttings we saw many rude drawings, one of a parrot and several of gazelles, evidently done by the workmen with their chisels.
In referring to records of the ancient gold-mines of Egypt, we find that a mine existed in the Wadi Allaki, some days south of Komombo, in the Bishari district. This mine was visited and identified by MM. Linant and Bonomi; there they found an excavation 180 feet deep, handmills similar to ours, and traces of about three hundred miners' huts, also several Kufic inscriptions on a rock. The mines, Edrisi tells us, were twelve days inland from Aydab. We must therefore look elsewhere for a notice of another mine nearer the Red Sea. Edrisi makes two mentions of these mines of Allaki, in one of which he says they are in a deep valley at the foot of a mountain; in another he alludes to them as on an open plain. On turning to Abu'lfida, we find him relating 'that Allaki is a town of Bedja; the country of Bedja is in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea. One finds there pearl-fisheries which do not give much profit, but in the mountain of Allaki is a mine of gold, which covers the cost of working. The mountain of Allaki is very celebrated.' Hence it would seem that two different spots are alluded to both under the name of Allaki, from both of which gold was obtained, one inland and one near the Red Sea. Professor de Goeje, of Leyden, the greatest authority on early Arabian literature, pointed out to my husband further discrepancies in the distances from Aydab to the gold-mines of Allaki in early Arab geographers, and suggests that the mines found by MM. Bonomi and Linant and ours, though several hundred miles apart, may have belonged to the same reef, and have been known by the same name.
In M. Chabas' 'Inscriptions des Mines d'Or' we have a very interesting dissertation on an ancient Egyptian plan of a gold-mine on a papyrus in the museum of Turin, of the time of Seti I., which he thus describes: 'Unfortunately, the name of the locality, which the plan gives us under the form Ti, ou, oi, the phonetic signs of which form a confused combination, does not give us any clue. We must therefore limit ourselves to the conclusion that this map, the most ancient that exists in the world, represents to us an auriferous vein in a desert mountain situated to the east of Higher Egypt, and very near the Red Sea. The shells spread on the path leading to it are a proof that the sea is very near; we can only think of the Red Sea, the shores of which abound in coral, in sponge, and shells variegated with the most beautiful colours.'
There seems every probability that the mine discovered by my husband was the one illustrated by the most ancient plan in the world, and, curiously enough, the Greek inscription we found seems to give a combination of vowels closely resembling the name given on the plan. On Egyptian inscriptions we constantly read of the gold of Kush, and that the prince of Kush was always interfered with in his works by the want of water, and from the Arab geographers we learn that they were finally abandoned by the caliphs owing to the want of water for washing purposes, and as far back as the reign of Usertesen we get illustrations of their washing process. Diodorus gives us a vivid description of the gangs of captives and convicts employed in these mines, and the miserable cruelty with which they were goaded on to work until they died of fatigue. He also gives some interesting details as to the processes of abstracting gold, which tally well with what we saw on the spot. 'They burn the quartz and make it soft,' which will account for the quantity of burnt quartz which we saw; and again, 'they take the quarried stone and pound it in stone mortars with iron pestles.' Mr. Rudler examined the specimens of quartz we brought home, and describes it as 'vein quartz, more or less ochreous with oxide of iron suggestive of auriferous quartz,' and told us that, unless we were going to start a company, there was no necessity to get it assayed; for archæological purposes the presence of gold was sufficiently established.
Will this mine ever be available again for those in search of the precious mineral? is the first question that suggests itself. Unfortunately being no gold expert, I am absolutely unable to give an opinion as to the possibilities of the still existing quartz seams being payable or not, but there is abundance of it both in the Wadi Gabeit and in the collateral valleys, and it is improbable that the ancients with their limited knowledge of mining could have exhausted the place. Specimens of quartz that my husband picked up at haphazard have been assayed and found to be auriferous, with the gold very finely disseminated; an expert would undoubtedly have selected even more brilliant specimens than these. Against this the absence of water and labour seemed to us at the time to negative any possible favourable results; but, on the other hand, the mine is so conveniently near the sea, with comparatively easy road access, that labour might be imported; and such wonderful things are done nowadays with artesian wells that, if the experts report favourably upon it, there would be every chance of good work being done, and these desert mountains of the Soudan might again ring with the din of industry.
