Lately the Administration has installed lofts of carrier pigeons along the coast and at Siwa. On the coast they have been quite successful, but so far no pigeons have been trained to cross the desert. The hawks at Siwa are a serious menace to them, and quite a number have been killed. In former days the Libyan Desert produced ostriches. Browne, in 1792, mentions that he saw broken eggs and tracks of ostriches on his way to Siwa. But nowadays there are none. Many of the lions that were used in the arenas of Rome were brought from Libya, but these too are now extinct.
“So some fierce lion on the Libyan plain,
Rolls its red eyes, and shakes its tawny mane.”
But the Arabs who travel between the Sudan and Tripoli tell of a long wadi, with water and vegetation, north of Darfur, which takes three days to cross by camel, and this wadi, so they say, is full of wild animals—lions, tigers, giraffe, etc.—which have never been hunted.
Siwa is a bad place for snakes, scorpions and tarantulas. The cerestes, or horned viper, is very common, as well as several other poisonous species. One of the most deadly is a little light-coloured snake with a hard prong at the end of its tail like a scorpion, which lies half covered with sand. I also saw a specimen of the puff adder. My house seemed to be a favourite abode of snakes, which may possibly have been because I had a pigeon loft close to it. Several times I was awakened in the night by my dog barking in the room and found a big snake slithering along the floor, or underneath the edge of the matting. Three men were bitten by snakes while I was there and died as a result; in each case they had stepped on a snake with bare feet. Strabo relates that in these parts of Africa the workmen had to wear boots and rub garlic over their feet to protect themselves. The local cure, which seems quite ineffective, is to rub the powdered stems of a broombush on to the bite. Nothing will induce the natives to touch a snake, dead or alive, with their fingers, as they say the smell sticks to them and attracts other snakes. I was only once bitten by a scorpion, and unfortunately I was out on trek without a first-aid box. It was a large, blackish green scorpion, one of the worst kind, and it caught me on the end of one of my fingers. But my men knew what to do from previous experience. They tied my arm tightly at the elbow and the wrist with a tourniquet, and then cut several gashes with a razor blade across the finger which had been bitten. It was very painful during the night, and I had a good deal of fever, but I was none the worse for it after a couple of days. The cure for a scorpion bite is a powder made from a snake’s tail, cooked and pounded, and a few of the natives specialize in making this powder.
There are no snake charmers in Siwa, and I have seen none anywhere on the Western Desert. In Egypt one meets many, the most famous perhaps is a man at Luxor. I saw him perform a few days before I left Egypt, and I was most impressed by his exhibition. One evening, without any warning, I took him out with me to a place near Karnak, having first examined him and satisfied myself that he had no snakes hidden about his clothes. In about a quarter of an hour he discovered seven or eight snakes. He used no whistle, but walked about in a very small area muttering to himself, stopping dead every now and then in front of a stone or a bush, thrusting his hand into it and withdrawing it clasping a writhing lively snake. Several of the snakes were known to me as being venomous. He took two of these, one by one, held them to his wrist, and let them bite him so that when he pulled them off his flesh they left blood on his hand. Anybody else would have suffered severely, and would probably have died, but the snake charmer was immune. His father and his grandfather had practised the same trade before him, and according to him they had neither of them suffered in any way by their profession.
CHAPTER VI
CUSTOMS AND SUPERSTITIONS
“. . . Tell the laughing world