The next day we reached the Abu Moharik dune belt that took us three hours and twenty minutes to cross, which at the rate of two and a half miles an hour, was equivalent to a distance of eight and a half miles. The dunes of which it was composed were all, so far as we saw, of the crescentic type, and were probably all considerably under fifteen feet in height. Where the road crossed the belt, was a sand-free gap, the dunes in that part being rather thinly distributed, though farther to the north they appeared to lie much closer together. The whole of the road, where it ran through the belt, was entirely free from drift sand. We camped that night in the middle of the dunes.
On leaving the dunes for Bu Gerara, I sent Qwaytin and Abd er Rahman off to look for another oasis that the former had heard of, that was said to lie some distance to the west of our road, which, however, he failed to find. In the evening before his departure, he came into my tent and announced that “his book said” that on the following day we should reach the Gara bu Gerara. There, he said, the road forked, and one branch, leaving the usual road followed by caravans going to Dakhla, and keeping more to the west, led to Bu Gerara—the oasis we were in search of.
This was the first mention he had made of any “book,” so I enquired what the book was to which he referred. Qwaytin seemed rather surprised that I had not heard of it before, and said that it was his “book of treasure!”
Cautious questioning elicited the fact that he had never been to Bu Gerara before, but that he was relying entirely on the directions given in this precious volume to take me there, and evidently expected, when we reached the place that we should all fall to digging in search of the buried riches that the book said were to be found there, instead of getting on and mapping the desert.
He was clearly under the impression that he was conferring a great favour on me by taking me into the secret of the vast wealth that he expected to find. To have thrown any doubt on the reliability of his wonderful book would have mortally offended him, as natives are very sensitive on these subjects. But as following out his instructions did not seem likely to take me far from the part to which I wanted to go, and would lead me into new ground, I thought it best to humour him, trusting that, when he failed to find the place, he would be willing to come down to the more mundane occupation of mapping the desert. So, much against my inclination, I found myself at last fairly launched on a treasure-hunting expedition!
PINNACLE ROCK ON DESCENT TO BU GERARA VALLEY.
Soon after our start on the following morning one of the camels fell ill. What the particular disease was I was unable to discover; but the remedy that Mohanny applied was to bleed her from the tip of her tail—an operation that appeared to afford some relief. The bedawin veterinary methods are simple, but, on the whole, effective. They may be summed up in three words—“bleed, butter, or burn.”
Eleven miles’ march from our camp brought us to the Gara bu Gerara—a long, low, flat-topped hill with a small peak at its eastern extremity, where the road to Bu Gerara branched off from the Derb et Tawil, according to Qwaytin’s book of treasure.
Qwaytin had given minute instructions to Mohanny as to finding the place, so, on reaching the hill, he came up to me and announced that it was now necessary to leave the Derb et Tawil, which turned off towards the east, and to follow a road that led straight on.