Spirals of tremulous smoke arise, to the purple skies,
And the hum of the camp sounds like the sea
Drifting over the desert to me.”
29th.
In the early morning, before dawn, we passed a caravan going north. I rode over to see who they were and found that it was a party of Mogabara Arabs on their way up to the coast, and thence into Egypt. One of them, Ibrahaim el Bishari, is quite a well-known merchant who travels about Egypt, Tripoli and the Sudan. He had come lately up from Darfur, via Kufra, Jalow and Jerabub, and was going down to the Sudan again after spending some time in Egypt. He talked about people I knew in Darfur and carried “chits” from a number of Englishmen. His fellows looked a fine lot of men, very different to the few Siwans who were travelling with them. I should have liked to have seen the stuff in his loads; he said he had some good carpets that he hoped to sell in Egypt. We wished each other a prosperous journey, and so parted “like ships that pass in the night.”
We camped at midday within sight of the high country above the oasis. This morning one of my men was talking about the Sudan and touched on the “Bilad el Kelab”—the Country of Dogs. All Sudanese believe that this place exists somewhere down in the south of the Sudan towards Uganda. I have seen them draw maps on the sand to show its position. In this mysterious country all the men become dogs at sunset time and roam about the gloomy forests like the werewolves of mediæval fiction. I have heard the men yarning over the camp fires and saying how their cousin’s wife’s brother—or some such distant relation—actually reached this country and returned alive. Of course it is always somebody else who saw it, but the story is firmly believed by all Sudanese, and so it is a very favourite topic of conversation. Sometimes they enlarge on it and tell how So-and-So married a wife from that country and one night a number of dogs arrived at his hut and carried the woman away with them.
This afternoon we ascended from the desert to the high limestone range that forms a rampart to the oasis on the north, and then we started crawling down into the Siwa valley. The desert plateau is about 600 feet above sea-level, and the oasis is 72 feet below it, and as the height of the hills is considerable there is a big drop down into the oasis. The track winds in and out through strange rocky passes, among weirdly shaped cliffs whose tortured shapes remind one of Gustave Doré’s illustration of the Inferno. These wild ravines are utterly desolate, even in the spring no vegetation grows among them. This is a land of broken stone where huge boulders seem to have been hurled about by giant hands. The sun sank low before we had escaped from the mountains, and the fantastically shaped crags were silhouetted with monstrous shadows against the yellow sky. Sometimes the narrow road seemed to cling to the side of a towering cliff, and at other times it twined in and out through deep, echoing valleys in the shadow of the overhanging, jagged rocks. In places the camels had to be led in single file. Once the men began to sing, but the dismal echoes among the caves sounded almost inhumanly depressing, so they gave it up, and we marched along in silence. Finally a line of far distant green appeared down below between two great cliffs, and one could see, very faintly, the masses of graceful palms nodding their crests over the murmuring oasis. To weary men after a six days’ camel ride across the desert the first glimpse of Siwa is like the sight of the sea to those ancient Greeks on the far-away shores of the Euxine.
CAMEL CORPS TREKKING TO SIWA, NEAR MEGAHIZ PASS
When all the camels had come out from the last valley among the rocks we “got mounted” and rode for about half a mile, past groups of palm trees, already heavy with clusters of yellow dates, to Ein Magahiz, which is the first spring in the oasis. Here we camped for the night, watered the camels, who simply revelled in the water, and I enjoyed a luxurious bathe in the deep cool spring which rises among a cluster of palm trees. All night we could hear the thudding of tom-toms in Siwa town, which is only a mile or so away.