To Siwa then came kings and wise men of the East, merchants and pilgrims, all bringing offerings to the temple of the god and soliciting the advice of the Oracle on their mundane affairs. For a thousand years and more these treasures were accumulating, but where are they now? As Egyptian research has yielded up unexpected buried treasure, may not the ancient god still have something in reserve for the archæologist and treasure-seeker who is bold enough to undertake excavation work in the little village of Aghourmi, some two miles east of Siwa, where the ruins of the Temple of Ammon still exist? Your interesting account of these ruins and the legends you have so sedulously culled from the Siwans, cannot fail again to create interest in the hidden treasures of the desert. One who has had some terrible experiences at the hands of the Senussi Arabs during the war—I refer to the gallant and gifted author of that thrilling story, Prisoners of the Red Desert, Captain Gwatkin-Williams, R.N.—writes, “It may be that this twentieth century of ours, this era of fish and bird men, may see lifted the mystery which shrouds the hidden treasure of Ammon, the ‘Unrevealed,’ for, so far as our limited modern information goes, those treasures have never yet been discovered.”
Your interesting account of the visit of Alexander the Great (331 B.C.) to the Oracle, when, marching along the coast to Matruh, he turned south and underwent great hardships before reaching his destination, recalls a very different journey I made to Sollum in 1917. Leaving Alexandria by train for Behig, I there found a fleet of armoured motorcars awaiting me, and the journey to and from Sollum, then garrisoned by British troops, was comfortably accomplished in four days. To my great regret I was too pressed for time to be able to visit Siwa, where, “on all hands springs of water gushed forth . . . that human ants’ nest, fabricated for the most part of rock-salt, mud and palm trunks . . . to which the Great War surging round the world had brought the drone of aeroplanes, the hum of armoured cars and rattle of machine guns.”
Your reference in Chapter V to the wonderful work carried on by Miss Nina Baird amongst the bedouin women and children rendered destitute in consequence of the Senussi invasion, recalls several visits Lady Wingate and I made to Amria—the village in the desert west of Alexandria and not far from Lake Mariut, where, as you say, this courageous lady worked practically singlehanded in teaching these desert waifs and strays to make carpets—thus starting an industry and giving the women and children a means of livelihood and a form of protection which for ever will be remembered with gratitude by the Western Arabs. A daughter of that well-known and greatly respected Scotsman, Sir Alexander Baird, an excellent horsewoman, a good Arabic scholar, and one who performed important services in the Egyptian troubles in the spring of 1919, Miss Baird’s energetic efforts throughout the war utterly exhausted her strength, and she fell an easy victim to typhoid soon after—to be followed a few months later by her talented father, and thus was the British community in Egypt deprived of two valuable lives who had endeared themselves to Europeans and natives alike and whose loss is deplored by all. On my last visit the carpet-making industry was about to be removed from Amria to an imposing structure built by Captain Jennings Bramley at Behig, the headquarters of the Eastern District of the Western Desert. Here this energetic official had also constructed, out of the ruins of an old building, a mediæval-looking stronghold, where we spent a few days and visited the ruined church of St. Menas, to which you make a passing reference in Chapter I. This buried Christian city is locally known as Abu Menas, and for long defied discovery, as it had not occurred to those in search of it to connect it with the Arab name of Abumna, until the German explorer, Kauffmann, and his companion lighted on the historic spot, which lies from fifty to fifty-five miles south-west of Alexandria. Your readers may be interested to know that Menas was an Egyptian in the Roman army who became a Christian and took the opportunity of a great public function to make an avowal of his faith which was proscribed under the Emperor Diocletian. He was tortured and eventually beheaded. His friends begged or stole his body, tied it on a camel and determined to found a settlement wherever the camel should lie down. Menas before death had expressed a wish to be buried near Lake Mariut, and here surely enough the camel insisted on lying down, and could not be induced to go further—so his followers buried the body on the spot. Many miracles were reported of his tomb, the settlement became a large Christian city with a magnificent cathedral built of granite from Assuan and marble from Italy. For some centuries the place became a resort for pilgrimage from all parts of the near East, but soon after the Arab conquest it was despoiled to provide material for the mosques in Alexandria and Cairo. Gradually the ruins were silted up with the ever-shifting sand, becoming mere mounds, and it was the chance discovery of a small terra-cotta plaque imprinted with the figure of Menas, standing erect with arms outstretched between two kneeling camels and a rough inscription, that led Herr Kauffmann and his friend to unearth the great basilica which had contained the tomb. The walls of the cathedral appear to have been lined with marble, whilst small pieces of mosaic on the floor give the impression that the dome was probably adorned in the same way. Some of the bases and capitals of the pillars are decorated after the Greek style with acanthus leaf ornaments, others in the stricter Roman method of straight panels. The dwelling-houses are small and constructed in blocks separated by narrow streets. Not far distant, on the coast, stand the ruins of Abusir (the Taposiris Magna of the Romans) which was evidently used as a port of arrival and departure by the thousands of pilgrims who came across the sea to pay their vows in this hallowed sanctuary. When I visited this place it was garrisoned by the very efficient Indian Camel Corps which the Maharajah of Bikaner had sent as his contribution to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.
Your interesting sketch of the rise of the great Senussi, the establishment of his now widespread confraternity and his invasion, at the instigation of German and Turkish officers and officials, of Egypt in 1915; his hostile occupation of the oases and the successful campaign so ably directed by General Sir W. Peyton, which finally drove his forces across the frontier and re-established Egyptian domination in the Western Desert, merits careful perusal if the reader wishes to understand the last of that series of invasions from the West which began in the days of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, nearly three thousand five hundred years ago, and which, given favourable conditions, may yet be repeated.
All you so interestingly describe recalls my long connection with the doings of the Confraternity when Sayed Mohammed el Mahdi, the son of Sayed Ben Ali, the virtual founder of the order, was its titular head. To him, in 1883, the Sudan Mahdi wrote, offering the position of third Khalifa in his new hierarchy. Had Sayed Mohammed accepted, it is possible that, in addition to the Sudan revolt, the whole of North Africa might have been ablaze; but the Senussi Mahdi aimed at peaceful penetration rather than military occupation: his zawias (religious rest-houses) had gradually been extended to Central and West Africa, they “were neutral meeting-places where difficulties, tribal, commercial, legal or religious, could be settled by an unbiassed authority. His akhwan were judges as well as missionaries. They defined tribal areas, settled water and grazing rights as well as meting out the justice of the Koran to those who infringed the code of Islam.”
The interest of the Turkish Government in this great movement dates back many years, and I well remember when the late Ghazi Mukhtar Pasha (then Turkish High Commissioner in Egypt) procured the original manuscript Senussi prayer-book, had one thousand copies lithographed in a private printing press in Cairo, and dispatched them as a present to the Senussi with a request in the title-page for the great religious leader’s “help in prayer.”
Sayed Mohammed died on the 1st June, 1902. I had full knowledge of the dispatch to Kufara—the then headquarters of the Order—of his tombstone which had been secretly cut and engraved in Cairo by an expert native stonemason; but if I digress in this manner I shall soon exceed the limits of a “Foreword,” and so must rapidly pass over these early experiences which, nevertheless, proved useful when the Great War let loose all the hidden forces of hostility and revealed the immense influence of Islamic teaching for good or ill as applied in the interests of the various opponents. That, on the one hand, Sayed Ahmed, the uncle and successor of Sayed Mohammed, should have espoused the Turco-German cause and harboured Enver Pasha and other notable Turkish officers who had crossed to the north coast of Africa in submarines, to organize the Senussi campaigns against Egypt and the Sudan; whilst, on the other hand, British influence and British officers were enabled to assist the Sherif of Mecca—the Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam—in his successful revolt against Turkish rule in Arabia, are interesting and little-understood features in the history of the great world upheaval from which we have but recently emerged, and no doubt they will be chronicled in due course by those concerned in these “side-shows,” as they are somewhat inadequately described. It must not, however, be forgotten that—insignificant as they may appear in comparison with the terrific clash of arms in Western Europe—they have resulted in giving Egypt tranquillity on its western frontier, in restoring to the Sudan the great lost province of Darfur, and in freeing the Arabian Peninsula—results which in pre-war days would have been characterized as epoch-making events, but which have passed almost unnoticed in the great changes which have taken place in the territorial redistributions of the Treaty of Versailles.
To touch on but one little-known detail, you refer to the Talbot Mission. This has not attracted the attention it deserves, but I venture to think history will credit Colonel Milo Talbot with no mean achievement when it is realized that his mission effected the triangular treaties between Great Britain, Italy and the present head of the Senussi Confraternity, Sayed Mohammed el Idrisi, whereby both Egypt and Tripoli have secured, let us hope, a trusted ally.
Incidentally—through the good offices of Colonel Talbot’s able Egyptian coadjutor, Hassanein Bey— that intrepid lady, Rosita Forbes, accompanied by the Bey, was enabled to penetrate to the Oasis of Kufara in 1921. Another member of the Talbot Mission—Mr. Francis Rodd—is also utilizing his experiences of the Senussi Confraternity and the Western Desert by making a prolonged and important journey with Mr. Buchanan from West Africa, which should throw much new and interesting light on many still obscure localities.
In these days of improved communications—when the two ends of the great iron road destined to connect South with North Africa are gradually approaching one another, and when other railways are either under construction or projected to connect the Atlantic with the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea—the time may not be far distant when the great Sahara and Libyan Deserts, too, will be traversed from north to south and east to west, and the undoubted mineral wealth and raw products of Central Africa will be brought to the nearest ports for shipment to all parts of the world. Your remarks, therefore, on mining, industries, trade and the means of communication southwards from the Mediterranean through the oases which you and others have visited, will doubtless prove of value and merit careful consideration.