Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

Qwaytin came into my tent in the evening, highly elated at having found Bu Gerara. To my disgust I discovered that he was not thinking of going on into Farafra at all, but was fairly off on a treasure hunt, and seemed to imagine that he was going to drag me all over the desert with him searching for buried riches. His book, he explained, not only described the road as far as Bu Gerara, but said that close by there was a hill to the west, standing in the same wady—Qwaytin pointed out a hill standing by itself to the west as a conclusive proof that his book was correct—and that a road ran past the foot of the hill that, if followed, led to a big hill, on the top of which was a well in which the treasures of three Sultans were buried. He said he had seen the road at the foot of the hill in the morning. He had never followed it to see where it led to; but he had seen a hill some years before in the direction of which the road was going, and had noticed a lot of pigeons alight on the top of it, and thought that perhaps it was the one the book referred to, and that they had gone there to drink from the well.

His mind was fairly obsessed with the idea of treasure, and I could get him to talk of nothing else.

I tried to get some information from him about Farafra and Iddaila—but it was of no use; he got round again to treasure at once. The last time he was in Farafra, he said, he was on his way back from Tibesti, where he said he had found a seam of diamond that stood up two feet above the ground like a wall, and ran for a long distance. He had chopped some lumps of diamond off and they cut glass. But the Senussi sheykhs had apropriated them for the benefit of the Senussia. He was clearly very sore on the subject.

I tried to switch him off on to the Bedayat country—but it was almost equally useless. He said he knew of a number of places there where there were ruins that probably contained treasure and asked to see my map.

He studied it for some time, asking me to read out the names and then declared that it was all wrong, and asked for a pencil and piece of paper, saying that he would draw me a better one. He laid the paper on the ground, sucked the end of the pencil and began to draw the roads joining the places he was going to tell about, now and then consulting a cheap bar compass to make sure that he had got them running in the right direction. This framework, when completed, looked more like a broken spider’s web than anything else.

He next proceeded to place on his “map” a number of enormous dots, to represent the positions of the places he wished to insert in it, and began to reel out a lot of names that are not found on any printed map. The conversation commenced to become interesting, and a good deal more in my line than fables relating to buried treasure.

But the names given to places by Arabs, Tibbus and Sudanese are not easily remembered, or even grasped, the first time they are heard. I allowed him to run on until he had completed his list, and then took the pencil from him and began to write opposite his dots the names of the places they stood for, and their distances and bearings from each other. Qwaytin at once became impatient, as I found he always did whenever I questioned him as to his statements, or he saw me writing them down, and I was not able to get more than two or three of the names before he took himself off in a huff.

He was a most exasperating man to get information from. If I questioned him about some part of the world that he had visited, he would very often give me no information at all. Sometimes a suggestion on my part that perhaps he did not know anything about it, would put him on his mettle and cause him to divulge some of his knowledge; but as often as not it only had the effect of making him reel out a lot of lying statements that probably appealed to his yokelish mind as being facetious, but which subsequent questioning showed to be incorrect—every statement that he made I had to check in order to guard against this peculiar sense of humour that he possessed.

I usually verified his information by getting him to repeat what he had said after an interval of a week or more, by which time I calculated that, if he had lied, he would have forgotten what he had said.

The first time I caught him misleading me, I pulled him up. But this proved to be quite the wrong line to take, and nearly had the effect of making him withhold his information altogether. He was greatly incensed, and for many days he would tell me nothing at all. Then late one night, while I was sitting up, waiting for a star to come on to the meridian in order to get a latitude, just when it had almost got there and I was going to take the observation, Qwaytin came quietly up and said that he would tell me about the country of the Bedayat. I had to give up the observation and go and sit down in the tent, where under a coat thrown over my knees, under pretence of feeling cold, so that he should not see me doing so, I took down all he said in writing.