Three or four men came to meet us as we approached the plantation, and greeted Qwaytin with enthusiasm. The oasis was a very small one, extending to only a few acres. The cultivation consisted of only a few palms and fruit trees and a field or two of grain. Among the palms were hidden two or three houses, which I, however, inspected only from a distance. One of them, I was told, was a Senussi zawia.
CHAPTER XXIV
WE started the next morning at dawn. Soon after leaving ’Ain Sheykh Murzuk, Qwaytin showed me a pass ascending the scarp of a small plateau, the Guss abu Said, on our right, over which, he said, passed a road to Iddaila. From Iddaila, he said, a road ran direct through Nesla and Bu Mungar to Dakhla Oasis.
Two hours after our start we reached a very small oasis, only an acre or two in extent, known as ’Ain el Agwa. It contained a few palms and evidently a well, though the place was so covered with drifted sand that the palms in some cases were buried nearly to their crowns, and the well was completely invisible.
About an hour farther on we reached a similar oasis, called ’Ain Khalif. There were no traces of inhabitants at either of these places; the dead leaves left hanging on the palms showed that they were entirely uncultivated, and at ’Ain el Agwa the trees themselves seemed to be dying.
These little places do not seem to have been previously reported, though Rohlfs’ route must have passed fairly close to where they were situated. From the size of the palms they seemed to be only about twenty years old, so possibly the wells were sunk since the time of his visit.
Though the sand had to some extent encroached on the oasis at ’Ain el Agwa, it had not done so to anything like the same extent as at ’Ain Khalif, and the feeble well, discharging into a tiny pool a few yards across, was still quite clear of sand.
As the water proved to be good, we stopped here for half an hour, while we refilled the gurba and examined the oasis.
Shortly before sunset we reached a place where the road forked. A line of small stones had been laid across the right-hand track—a common sign among the Arabs that the road was not to be followed. Qwaytin took the left-hand branch and soon afterwards we came to the top of the descent into Bu Mungar. The path at this point was a narrow cleft, a few yards long and not more than a foot or two wide, that proved as difficult to negotiate as the very similar one leading from the ’Ain Amur plateau down towards Dakhla. Below it lay a sandy slope that extended to the bottom of the cliff and presented little difficulty.