From here to Siwah I was six days on the road, but one day I was only able to travel five hours; in fact, I never again got a fair day’s work out of my camels, for Sheikh Othman, after making me pay so dearly for them, sent them with so small a supply of food, that they successively dropped off, one after another, exhausted from sheer hunger. I cannot, therefore, state the distance exactly, but as nearly as I can calculate, from Et-Tarfawy to Siwah is forty-eight hours. The road runs through a succession of small oases, of which the first is Faredrah, فغيدره, twelve hours from Et-Tarfawy. Among sandhills one descends very suddenly into a long basin, which is occupied by a dark brown morass, like that which I met with at Augila; it is bounded on three sides by time-worn rocks, which rise perpendicularly round it, a fringe of palm trees growing about their base. The Arabs pointed out a place in the rocks, on the other side of the morass, in which they said the ruins of a castle were to be seen. Now this, like the other spots of the same nature which I passed through, is uninhabited. The largest and prettiest of these is Caicab, twelve hours further on. Here the rocks of variegated limestone assume a bolder appearance, rising from forty to a hundred feet in fantastic masses, looking in the distance sometimes like noble cities, sometimes like extensive ruins. There is one valley where columns, with their capitals of gigantic proportions, rise from mounds of sand—half buried palaces and temples seemed in the moonlight to make the former the abode of giants. From the uniform abruptness of the sides of the rocks, though weather-worn and varied in colour by the different strata, it would seem that these morasses had been formed by a suddenly falling in of the crust; for the flat tops of all the surrounding rocks have the same level with the desert and with each other, and the wall of rock is only found on the side turned to the morass. In a Wady some twelve hours further on I found wells of a clear water, in very small quantity, but which, after the first draught had been taken from it, filled again by rapid infiltration from the sand, but this second supply had a strong sulphurous smell and taste, which were not perceptible in the first. The morass, the universal feature of these oases, was here a wide lake of a deep blue, inclosed in a ring of brown crust, overgrown with rushes, and a tall, rank grass, of which the camels eagerly plucked the flowering tops. The name of this place is El Ghazalieh, the Gazelle Ground, and though now deserted, it must in ancient times have been inhabited. Sepulchral chambers, entirely devoid of ornament, but well and regularly cut, are hollowed out in the faces of the rocks. Each opening, of about four feet square, corresponds to a cubical aperture of seven feet, in two sides of which—in that facing the door, and in that generally to the left—are cut receptacles for the dead. I counted twenty-three; but there may be many more, which, being sanded up, escaped my observation. Most of them are as empty as if they had never been occupied; but in some of these deserted abodes of death the wild bee has stored her sweets. We made a long halt in this place, for the camels had to be watered, and I had to dress as well as to breakfast, for the guide having lost his way, we had gone supperless to bed, being unprovided with either wood or water. This had twice occurred to me, and each time I had promised myself never again to be without at least one skin of water; but though my orders were no doubt attended to during the first few days, it always happened that, when the precaution would have proved useful, it had been neglected. In my luggage I had wherewithal to supply every deficiency but this; and the want of this, however little I care for the pure fluid, is fatal to all hopes of supping.
This was the last day before reaching Siwah; and, again, I was sadly delayed through the miserable condition of the camels supplied by my rascally sheikh of Augila. One after another they dropped, unable to proceed, and I was obliged to leave them, and the boxes they carried, in the sand. Unable to get further, we slept on a hill, at whose foot I beheld next morning a garden-like expanse—a real island of the blest. A stream, the first running water I had seen since quitting the Rhone, flowed down its centre; the ground on either side was green with young crops, among which rose clumps of date-trees and flowering mimosas. Some cabins dotted the extensive plain, and men and children were busily employed in irrigating the fields; the very water, perfectly sweet, after the thirst-exciting draughts to which we had been for some time condemned, seemed delicious; and, perhaps, by contrast with the barren sand we had so tediously journeyed through, this valley, towards Moragah, مراقه, seemed one of the loveliest spots I had ever visited. I welcomed the exhilarating impression which it made upon me, as a foretaste of the enjoyment reserved for me in Siwah, from which we were now only six hours distant, and I began to believe my Majabra guide might not be wrong in his daily assurances that it was a Belad Mabruk, an abode of blessedness.
After leaving Moragah, the loose sand again reappears for about an hour, leading to the lofty rocks of Kamisah, at whose base are the ruins called ’Amu-dein, which consist of two lofty masses of brick work, the façade of a temple, or perhaps of a church, for the style of building betrays a late date. One of the two salt lakes of the oasis lies at the foot of Kamisah, and I stopped for an hour at a well of sweet water which springs at its edge, to rest the last of Othman’s camels, which here threatened to drop. The hill of the mummies, Garah-el-Musabberin, and the village of Gharmy, where the principal ruins are, were visible from here, as well as the position, though not the town, of Siwah. I sent on the camels, retaining only one servant with me; soon following them, I found that one of the camels had again lagged behind the others. I therefore stopped, and spreading a carpet in the shade of a tree, I sat down, having first sent a servant into the town to Sheikh Yusuf, whom my slave-dealer acquaintance had named to me as the chief man of the place, to obtain donkeys to transport the luggage of the camel. Here I sat alone for two hours, until the sun had set, and began at length to reflect on the uncertainty of Arab accounts of distances; the town might still be two or three hours off, and with a strong determination to dine to-night, having been on short commons for the last four days, I left the camel where it was, and rode towards the town. Night closed in before I had come upon any well-marked path, and I was beginning to feel some perplexity as to the road, when I luckily came upon the servant I had dispatched to Yusuf’s, and one of the men who accompanied him turned to guide me to my tent, while he went back to bring up the remainder of the luggage.
CHAPTER XVII.
Encampment at Siwah. — Conference with the Sheikhs. — Refuse to quit Siwah. — Attack on the tents. — Detained at Siwah. — Incidents while Imprisoned. — Defensive Preparations. — A South Wind blows Good Luck. — Manners, &c., of the People. — Their Appearance and Dress. — An Industrious Race.
It was soon perfectly night; the ground seemed to be cut up with ditches, and it was only by keeping close to my guide, as he trotted along on his donkey, that I could make out the road. After about half an hour, the guide jumping off his donkey, said to me, “Now you are going up hill,” and before I knew what I was doing, unable to see an inch before me in the darkness, I found my horse clambering up what seemed to be the face of a precipice; in about five minutes more, I found myself riding among walls; presently, my guide stopping, began to call out, “Yusuf! Yusuf!” and thus I found that instead of taking me to my tent, he had brought me to the sheikh’s. After some delay a door was opened; and a longer time elapsed before a flaring palm-branch was brought to light me; and then I was conducted, through all sorts of tortuous passages to a small room, where the sheikh and two young men were seated on mats, before a blazing fire of olive wood. He received me very cordially, told me that my tents were ready, and that whatever I required I should get through him. I thanked him and accepted his offers, giving him at the same time to understand, that I would take nothing as a present, and that all I required should be paid for. He said that the servant I had sent to him had already told him this.
These preliminaries being settled, there was a pause, which he broke after looking steadily at my head for some time, by saying, “Where’s your hat?” I thought I had misunderstood, and begged he would favour me by repeating his remark. He gravely reiterated, “Where’s your hat?” After the hearty fit of laughter which so droll a question as this seemed to me produced, I told him that, for the moment, I did not keep such an elegant luxury in my establishment; but this seemed to puzzle him sorely, for a hat was evidently, in his eyes, one of the chief articles of the Christian faith. “Have you brandy, wine, rosolio, tea?” I began to think that he was making a mental inventory of the good things he meant to ask for, though I afterwards found it was mere curiosity to find out whether I was as abundantly supplied with these good things, as were my last predecessors at Siwah.
This cross-examination began to tire me, so I took leave of him; but before I retired he invited me to return in the morning, promising then to provide me with a guide to see all the curiosities of Siwah. I promised to come early, but explained that by early I did not mean early as he understood it, for, when not travelling, I do not rise till two hours after the sun. “Oh!” he answered, “drunk with araki;” meaning, that I lay in bed to sleep off the effects of the intemperance he gave me credit for; when I assured him that I had never in my life been drunk. “Do you, then, never drink wine or araki?” seemed to be the only solution for the wonder which his experience could suggest. We parted very good friends, and I proceeded to my tent. The night was still too dark for anything but the fires to be visible, and it was only the next morning that I obtained an idea of our position.
I was encamped on a very wide plain to the south of the town; to the right was an extensive palm grove with a few clumps in front of the principal plantation, the nearest about a hundred yards off; behind and to the left rose some limestone rocks, and near them a square building, the castle, in which a garrison was formerly lodged. In front, the town rose like a lofty fortress, built on a conical rock, entirely concealed by the houses, which, joining one another, seem to form a single many-storied edifice. To the west of this, another rock or gara, quarried with numerous caverns, rises to a considerable height; on one side of the rock, and in the space between it and the town proper, houses, in the ordinary style of mud architecture, are built.