Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

A Street in Kharga.

The housetops are a favourite resort of the women. To ensure privacy a row of palm leaves is stuck upright into the top of the wall. ([p. 313.])

In addition to Kharga village, which is the principal centre in the oasis, a few other villages and hamlets lie scattered at intervals near the wells sunk within the oasis area.

These villages are divided into two main groups, the principal, taking them in order from north to south, are Meheriq, Kharga, Gennah and Bulaq in the northern group. South of these lies a stretch of desert for a long day’s journey, containing no village and only two or three isolated wells. After this, Jaja and Dakhakhin, the two northernmost settlements of the southern group are reached. Jaja being to the east of Dakhakhin and two or three miles away. Some ten miles farther south lies Beris—the chief village of the southern group, followed by Maks Bahry (Northern Maks), and Maks Qibly (Southern Maks); five miles to the east of the latter lies the village of Dush. This constitutes the southern group.

Kharga village, though surrounded by some fine palm plantations, is a wretched, squalid place. As is often the case in desert towns, the streets in many places run through tunnels, formed by the upper stories of the houses being built out over the roadways. In Kharga, however, this peculiarity is carried to an unusual extent—many of the tunnels being so low that it is impossible to stand upright in them, and of such a length as to be completely dark. The natives say they were constructed in this manner for defensive reasons, in order that an enemy gaining access to the town should lose his way in the darkened streets.

The houses were all, so far as I saw, constructed of the usual sun-dried mud bricks, the roofs being supported on palm-trunk rafters. They were, however, peculiar in having the parapet surrounding the flat housetop surmounted by a sort of fence of palm leaves set into the top of the wall, in order apparently to heighten it and make the housetop more private, without incurring the expense of the additional brickwork. In some of the better houses the inside of this fence was plastered with clay to form a sort of wattle and daub, through which small windows were often cut so that the inhabitants could look through without being seen themselves. When a house was built beside an open street, balconies supported by an extension of the rafters were sometimes projected over the road and walled in with the usual fence, to allow the inmates of the house to get a view up and down the road.

Here and there some attempt was made to decorate the exterior of the house by rough painting round the windows—this usually taking the form of radiating lines of whitewash. One house had a sort of trefoil arch over the doorway surmounted by a projecting window, the front of which was pierced by a number of small square holes—apparently in imitation of the meshrebia, or lattice work, of the Nile Valley towns.

A considerable amount of rushwork is manufactured in Kharga in the form of panniers for donkeys and mats for covering the floor. The latter are made on a primitive loom stretched out upon the ground. No shuttle is used, the rushes being woven across the strings that form the basis of the mat by hand.

Kharga Oasis is richer in archæological remains than any of the others. In early times the place was evidently of greater importance than it is at present, and probably supported a larger population.

It is known to have been inhabited at a very remote period, even as far back as the reign of Thothmes III (1503-1449 B.C.). In early days it seems to have been used mainly as a place of exile. This is a use to which it seems to have been frequently put, and continues to be to this day. In A.D. 435 the Bishop Nestorius was banished to Kharga on account of his revolutionary views. Here he founded a Coptic Colony. A large Christian Necropolis, at Nadura, near Kharga village, and several mud monasteries, constructed much in the form of castles, evidently as a defence against their enemies, still remain in very fair preservation as mementos of his exile.