Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

After leaving Bu Mungar our road for the first day lay all over the dunes. Late in the afternoon we came across three sifs—dunes with an A-shaped section running up and down wind—which, since they stretched across our path, gave us some difficulty. They were all under twenty feet in height, but their sides were at such a steep angle that the camels were quite unable to climb them, and the men had to scoop paths diagonally up the face of the dunes and down again on the farther side, over which the camels one by one with difficulty were forced. Small as these sifs were they caused a considerable delay. But these three ridges proved to be the last of the dune belt, and the remainder of our road, till we reached the dunes near Dakhla, we found to be easy going.

A long cliff runs from Bu Mungar to Dakhla Oasis, the road between the two lying at its foot.

The sand dunes that form a long north and south belt to the south of the great hill—Jebel Edmondstone—that lies some fifteen miles to the west of Qasr Dakhl, gave us considerable trouble, not only on account of their height, but because of their extreme softness. The camels sank into them in places literally up to their hocks.

In the softest parts the caravan absolutely came to a standstill, being quite unable to make any progress without assistance. I had to put one man on either side of each camel, and make them take the weight of the loads on their backs, and lift them up with every step that the camels gave, in order to get them along at all. Then having got a beast through the soft places, I had to fetch the others across, one by one, in the same manner. Our rate of progress consequently fell to something like half a mile an hour.

On the evening of the fifth day after leaving Bu Mungar we arrived in Mut, having lost some of the baggage, two men and two out of our seven camels, and with the rest of the caravan pretty well foundered from over-driving.

During the journey down from Bu Mungar, my own men, as I expected, finding that, as members of the Senussia, they had to give up smoking, gradually came round and recovered from their attack of Senussism. So, before reaching Mut, we halted out of sight of the town, and I put Abd er Rahman up on a camel and sent him in to find out how the land lay in the oasis.

He returned extremely pleased with himself. He had left his camel tied up among the dunes and had then gone into Mut “like a thief,” as he expressed it, so that no one should see him and had gone to the house of a friend of his, who told him that some Tibbus had been several times into Mut, but had not been seen there recently. They had gone back to the zawia at Qasr Dakhl. Here, as I afterwards heard, they were seen and photographed by a native who happened to have come into the oasis from the Nile Valley. His friend thought it would be quite safe for us to come into the oasis, as when once we had been seen there, the Senussi would not dare to molest us. So we packed up our traps again and started.

On reaching Mut, I again put up in the old store. Having seen my baggage safely deposited there, I went round to the post office to get my mail.

I found Sheykh Senussi—the poetical clerk of the qadi—had managed to get his son appointed as postmaster in the oasis, a position that must have been of considerable use to the Senussi, on account of the thinness of the envelopes used by the natives.

Though office hours, so far as they can be said to exist in Dakhla, were long over, the door of the office itself was open, and I entered without being heard. I found the intelligence department of the Senussi in the oasis, consisting of Sheykh Senussi and his son, hard at work examining the mails. They held each letter up in turn to the light, and, if the contents were of interest, read them through the envelope. A letter lying on the top of a basin of hot water had presumably been undecipherable in this way, and so the flap of the envelope had to be steamed open. A stick of wax and a bottle of gum, lying on the counter, seemed to indicate that sometimes they experienced some difficulty in reclosing the correspondence after it had been read.