Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

From places such as this there is a regular gradation through scrub-covered patches containing water, but no palms, scrub-covered areas containing no water, and mere patches of half a dozen bushes clustered together in the desert, called by the Arabs roadhs, to places that remain sufficiently damp after one of the rare desert showers to allow a few widely scattered blades of grass to grow, which the bedawin call redirs.

It is very difficult to see where to draw the line. The system adopted in Algeria of describing places like Kharga and Wad Ghirh as groups of oases—or oasis-archipelagos, as they are sometimes called—seems preferable to the Egyptian plan of alluding to them as a single oasis. It would seem advisable to confine the term oasis to a place which is actually cultivated, whether continuously inhabited or not, and to use the word hattia for “fertile spots” in the desert where no cultivation exists. The dividing-line, however, between a hattia and a deserted oasis would not be very sharply drawn.

The western oases of Egypt were known to the ancients, for some reason not very apparent, as “the Islands of the Blest”—a name that to a modern visitor has an air of being somewhat ironical.

They are usually said to lie in depressions of the plateau. So far as Baharia is concerned this is an accurate description, for it is almost entirely surrounded by cliffs; but in the case of Farafra and Kharga, the scarps of the limestone plateau only partly hem them in, and they would be more correctly said to be situated at their base. Dakhla, in the same way, lies at the southern foot of the chalk plateau that forms the floor of Farafra Oasis, and gradually rises in level as it proceeds southwards from Qasr Farafra, until it breaks down in the huge cliff that bounds Dakhla Oasis on its north and east. The little oasis of ’Ain Um Debadib, lying slightly to the west of Kharga, is also only bounded on the north by the cliff. Kharga towards the east, north and north-west is hemmed in by cliffs and hills. The cliff in places, on the eastern side, is nearly eight hundred feet in height, but is considerably lower at the northern end.

Starting from the north, on the western side of the oasis, a jumbled mass of hills, cliffs and sand dunes extend for about thirty miles towards the south to form its boundary. South of this, a long north and south belt of dunes runs parallel with the eastern scarp, and cuts off the oasis from the open desert lying to the west. At its southern end, the oasis merges into the desert without any well-defined boundary.

To anyone standing, say, on the eastern scarp and looking down on to the floor of the oasis, it would appear as flat and almost as featureless as the surface of the sea when viewed from the summit of a high cliff. Two huge flat-topped hills rise abruptly from the level oasis floor, near the eastern cliff, to the height of the plateau above it; they are known as Jebel Ghennihma and Jebel Um el Ghenneiem, and stand about thirty-five and forty miles respectively from the northern end of the oasis. Almost facing them on its western side stand Jebel Taaref and Jebel Ter. With the exception of these four hills and the smaller conical peak known as Gorn el Genna jutting up from the centre of the oasis floor, there are no conspicuous elevations to break its level monotony.

The amount of land under cultivation is extremely small compared with the total area of the oasis. Dr. Ball estimated the latter to extend to considerably over three thousand square kilometres, but states that out of this only nineteen square kilometres are under irrigation. The cultivated portions consist in some cases of patches merely an acre or two in extent. Only in the neighbourhood of Kharga village is there a really large area of continuous cultivation. Here, a long strip, some four miles from north to south, by about two-thirds of a mile from east to west, covering altogether about a thousand acres, forms a practically continuous grove of palms and cultivated land. The size of the average patch of cultivation may be taken as being some sixty-five to seventy acres. Each plot is usually known by the name of the well that irrigates it, or in cases where it contains more than one, by the name of the principal well.

The irrigation is effected entirely by means of artesian wells, some of which date back to a remote period, and are said by the native to have been the work of the Romans.

These wells and the modern native ones, which are modelled on them, are sunk by means of primitive boring appliances and lined with acacia-wood pipes. They are usually all owned by several proprietors, among whom the flow of water is distributed by methods that probably date back to a remote past. When a crop—such as rice—is being grown that requires continuous irrigation, the yield of water is divided up by means of what is known as a rice gauge. This consists of a board with a series of notches in its upper edge, through which the water flows—each proprietor being entitled to the amount that runs through a notch, whose width corresponds with the proportion of the yield from the well to which he is entitled. When intermittent irrigation is required, the owners of the well draw their water in rotation in accordance with a most complicated system. The moment at which each is to commence taking his share is ascertained by a most ingenious and intricate method of telling the time, in which one of the men converts himself into a kind of human sundial.