in the villa above the bay. In the summer quantities of “Mex Lilies” (Amaryllis) grow on the hills and scent the air with their heavy perfume. A short time before the war an American archæologist made some valuable finds among the foundations of Cleopatra’s villa, and on several occasions coins have been unearthed in the neighbourhood.
The present-day Greek colonists of Matruh are not very attractive people. They are very clever at their trade and seem to become prosperous in a remarkably short time. They make their money by squeezing the Arabs, who are forced to deal with them, as there is nobody else from whom they can buy necessities such as tea, sugar, rice, etc. The Greeks have the monopoly of trade and sell their goods at a prohibitive price, quite out of proportion to their worth, even considering the cost of transport. Their favourite system is to buy whole crops of barley from the Arabs before it is ripe, when the owner is particularly hard up. The Administration, to a certain extent, is able to check excessive profiteering, but there are innumerable ways in which the Greek is able to “do” the Arab. It seems a pity, because, in my estimation, the Arab is a much better man than the Greek trader. Not unnaturally, Greeks are very unpopular. Farther along the coast, in Tunis and Algeria, their place is taken by the Jews, but on the Western Desert there are no Jews—so the Greeks have it all their own way.
There are generally two or three English officials at Matruh, and possibly their wives, so there is usually more going on there than at any other place on the coast; in fact, Matruh is a sort of metropolis of the desert, but at the same time it is very much a desert station. Lately, when I was staying there, there arrived one evening an enormous new American car containing two English officers on leave, and a very smartly dressed lady, wife of one of them. By amazing good luck they had managed to get through from Alexandria without mishap, stopping a night en route. On arrival at Matruh they asked to be directed to the “Hotel,” which they had heard was “small, but very clean and comfortable.” They looked exceedingly blank when we told them there was no hotel—and never had been—but they were conducted to the rest house, where they settled down. Next day they complained that the rest house was neither clean nor comfortable. The greatest disadvantage, to my mind, in all the rest houses on the Western Desert is the multitude of fleas which nothing that one can do is able to destroy or even keep under. This car was not the kind used by the Administration on the desert; the party had brought no spare parts for it, no servant, no provisions except some biscuits and a tin or two of peaches, only a few glass bottles of water, which were naturally almost boiling after some hours in the heat of an August day, and none of them could speak any Arabic. At dinner that night they all appeared in full evening dress which they had brought with them, and, to everybody’s horror, they announced their intention of “running down to Siwa” on the next day. We explained carefully that to reach Siwa they would have to cross 200 miles of waterless desert, and no car ever attempted the trip alone. But nothing seemed to daunt them. Finally, however, the Governor heard of their plan and forbade it forthwith; they started off to Alexandria on the following day, with an escort of two cars, and as they went they murmured indignantly about “red tape and absurd restrictions.” It is amazing what a strange idea of the desert some people seem to have.
Matruh is the centre of the sponge fishing industry which is carried on during certain months of the year along the coast. The sponge fishers are mostly Italians, and a fine-looking lot of men. They have a little fleet of sailing-boats, and one steam-tug. The boats put out for several days at a time, working up and down the coast. They use no diving-bells, but when a man dives he holds on to a heavy stone, which sinks rapidly; he makes a jab at the sponges, cutting off one, and then lets go of the stone and rises to the surface. Sometimes the men seem to bound out of the water when they rise to the top. They are able to remain submerged for several minutes. But the work tells on their health; they are highly paid, but they say themselves that they usually die at about forty, and there is always the horrid possibility of being attacked by sharks, which are more plentiful in the Mediterranean than they used to be before the war. At Sollum there are several graves of sponge fishers who were killed in this way. I never bought a single sponge myself during the whole time I was on the Western Desert. When I was at Sollum I used to ride out along the shore with a syce carrying a bag after every heavy storm and we would usually pick up about a dozen first-class sponges worth about half a guinea each at home. Fortunately, the Arabs had no use for such things as sponges. One found pumice stone lying about the shore also. During the war an enormous amount of wreckage was swept ashore and collected by patrols of Camel Corps for building purposes and firewood. Sometimes the whole coast would be littered with cotton from a wrecked ship carrying cotton to Europe; another time we collected stacks of good brown paper, which is still being used on the Western Desert, and another time a number of casks of wine and rum were picked up.
Between Matruh and Sollum there is a little place called Sidi Barrani, which consists of a police barracks and a high gaunt building which is a rest house and office, and about half a dozen white bungalows belonging to Greek traders. Each of these places has either a British officer or, if it is not sufficiently important, an Egyptian mamur who is responsible for keeping order, etc. Barrani is a desolate place, but very beautiful in springtime when the country is ablaze with flowers and green budding corn. Rest houses in Egypt and the Sudan correspond to the Dak Bungalows in India. Those on the Western Desert are quite comfortably furnished and well provided with plate and linen. An old Sudanese soldier looks after each rest house. It is a relief after trekking along the coast by car or camel to arrive at a place where everything is ready and, in winter-time, to get a roof over one’s head, though probably a leaky one.
Two roads run from Barrani to Sollum; one goes along the coast among the strangely white sand-hills which are a feature of the district, and the other, which is less liable to be flooded in winter, is higher and farther inland. The country that one passes on the upper road between Barrani and Sollum, between the blue Mediterranean and the high rocky Scarp that runs parallel to the sea, is very attractive, especially in the soft evening light. In the heat of the day it looks dry and parched, except during a month or two immediately after the rains. One meets very few travellers on the narrow road that winds up and down, round low hills which are covered with heathery undergrowth, and often topped with rough stone cairns. Some places are very like a Scotch moor, or a stretch of Dartmoor. There is a certain plant which is the colour of purple heather, and another that looks from a distance like withered bracken. In summer-time, especially on the lower road, one is constantly deceived by the vivid mirage that hovers above some salt swamps close to the white sand-hills on the shore.
Occasionally, one passes a party of Arabs, with their skirts tucked high above the knees, stalking along behind their woolly shuffling camels, or perhaps one meets a patrol of Camel Corps, black Sudanese, in khaki uniforms, trotting briskly along on fast riding camels; then an old bedouin sheikh, wrapped in his long silk shawl, ambles past on his Arab pony. Farther on, one smells the sharp sweet scent of burning brushwood that comes from the fires outside the low black tents where some Arabs are camping, and one can see them squatting round the flame in the tent doors, with their white woollen cloaks pulled over them, while in the distance a boy drives the camels and sheep close up to the camp for the night. On the lower road, near the shore, between Barrani and Sollum, there is a lonely little hill crowned by a rough block-house where there used to be a detachment of the Camel Corps. This place is called Bagbag and was used as a frontier post before the war in Tripoli between the Italians and the Turks. As one approaches Sollum the escarpment on the left comes nearer, the foot-hills cease, and the road runs across a mile or two of flat country within sound and sight of the sea right at the foot of the towering cliffs. Before arriving at the camp the road crosses several deep water-courses which come “from thymy hills down to the sea-beat shore” through rocky ravines in the Scarp; they are dry and sandy in summer, but during the rains they become rushing torrents, quite impossible to cross in a car. Riding home in the evening, one sees a number of twinkling fires in the bedouin camp, and above them, sharply outlined against the primrose-coloured sky, is the top of the great rocky Scarp, like a dark wall that one has to ascend before reaching the desert.
Sollum consists of about a score of little buildings, and a large bedouin encampment, situated on the shore of a bay in an angle made by the sea and the Scarp which rises to a height of over 600 feet immediately behind the camp, and juts out into the sea in a rocky promontory. There are several wells at Sollum and one little orchard of fig-trees which breaks the monotony of the brown-coloured soil. Most of the buildings, including a large Camel Corps barracks, were erected since the war. There are one or two little shops, owned by Greeks, and a rough native café presided over by an evil-looking, one-eyed Egyptian, who is also the barber of the place. For a long time there was a British garrison, but this was recently withdrawn, leaving a force of Camel Corps and a small detachment of Light Cars in the old Turkish fort on the top of the cliffs above the bay. At one time there were about a dozen officers quartered here, and five or six of them had their wives with them. Sollum became quite like an Indian hill station—perhaps even worse, and when a certain elderly general, well known as a misogynist, inspected the place, he stated in his report that there were six officers’ wives and six different sets, the result being that they were very shortly moved and replaced by unmarried officers.
One gets to feel hemmed in at Sollum. On the north lies the sea, and on the south and west rise the rocky cliffs of the Scarp. The only open country is along the coast towards the east. A steep twisting motor road, like a Swiss mountain pass, leads up the face of the cliff on the track of an old Roman road, and several very precipitous paths ascend the Scarp behind the camp to the high table-land above. But once one has climbed the Scarp and reached the top there is a great flat plain stretching out into the distance, which is good country for riding, and full of hares and gazelle. This is the bedouins’ grazing ground, and every few miles one comes across great herds of camel and sheep, and large camps of Arabs. There are a few rock cisterns on the northern edge of the plateau and from these the Arabs get their water. They often camp 10 or 15 miles away from a well and send in a party of women and boys to fill the water-skins every other day. Arabs seldom bathe, even when they are camped close to the sea, but fortunately the sun is a wonderful purifier.
The nomad Arabs of the Western Desert are a hardy, picturesque race, very different from the fellahin of Egypt. Their active open-air life makes them strong and healthy. Patriarchalism is a dominant system among them; they are divided into a number of tribes and sub-tribes, each under its own sheikh who is responsible to the Government for the good behaviour of his people.