Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

Since this Appendix was written, Hassanein Bey has visited and fixed the positions of Arkenu and Owenat (Owanet). My information upon Owanat seems to have been fairly accurate. The well at the base of the cliff, the pass leading from it, the high-level oasis above, the vegetation and the sand dunes in the district, and even the Barbary sheep, have all been verified. The position I gave it, too, from my native information was reasonably correct, being only about twenty-one miles out, as compared with an error of about twenty-five miles in the position of Kufara as fixed by Rohlfs’ expedition by astronomical observations.

My estimate, however, of the nature of Jebel el Owanat—the high land above the well—seems to have been wrong. But this, I think, is due to misunderstanding on my part and not to any error on the part of my informant. “Jebel”—the term he used to describe the high land at Owanat, means literally mountain, but is a term used in the western desert of Egypt to signify the high flat tablelands of which the desert in that part is mainly composed. The oases in this district all lie near the foot of the precipitous scarps that bound these tablelands; so, as he mentioned a cliff in the proximity of the well at Owanat, I assumed the “Jebel” to be of the same character as in the neighbourhood of the Egyptian oases.

Hassanein Bey fixed the western limit of this elevated ground and also its northern and southern boundaries, but though he made a survey of some twenty-five miles to the east of the well, he was unable to fix its eastern extension. So far as it is possible to judge from his description and photographs, this elevated land seems to be of much the same flat-topped character as the “jebels” round the oases of Western Egypt, but so far as is at present known its limited area makes it correspond more to Colonel Tilho’s estimate of its character of a detached massif than to a tableland strictly speaking.

It is to be hoped that future travellers before long will revisit this district and fix the eastern limit of Jebel el Owanat. Similar high ground was reported to me as lying to the north of “the Egyptian Oasis,” some 130 miles to the east of Owanat, and it is possible, if this information is to be relied upon, that these two places are connected by some hill feature, of which the high land at Owanat is the western limit.

The accurate mapping of Owanat, with its permanent water supply by Hassanein Bey, should be of great assistance to future travellers, as it affords a most useful base for further exploration.

The difficulty, however, is to reach it. The old road that I surveyed to the south-west of Dakhla Oasis for some 200 miles unquestionably leads to Owanat; but it is very doubtful whether it is practicable with camels at the present time. The distance from Dakhla to Owanat in a straight line is some 375 miles, or at least fifteen days’ hard travelling by caravan. A small well-mounted party travelling light, even in the most favourable part of the year, would find this an extremely formidable journey, without the use of some sort of depot or relay system.

This road has been disused probably for centuries, as in most places all traces have been completely weathered away. But from its size in the few sheltered places where it is still visible it obviously at one time was one of the main caravan routes of the desert. Moreover, there were indications upon it that it had been largely used by the old slave traders.

It can, I think, be assumed with absolute certainty that no main road of this kind can have existed that contained a waterless stretch of 375 miles—especially one over which large numbers of slaves were forced to travel, as the water supply in these caravans was always a most serious problem.

We are consequently forced to the conclusion that an intermediate well, or oasis, once existed between Dakhla and Owanat. It may have been only a well with an ordinary vertical shaft, which has long since been sanded up and obliterated; but it may be the oasis containing olive trees, on which the palm doves I found migrating from this direction into Dakhla had been feeding. The direction from which they came, viz. 217° Mag.,[25] I discovered afterwards to be almost exactly the bearing of Jebel Abdulla from Mut and so of the old road that we followed to reach it. Justus Perthes’ map on a scale of 1/4.000.000, published in 1892, and also the 1/2.000.000 map, revised to 1899, published by the French Service géographique de l’Armée show an unnamed well, or oasis, by a high steep hill and another oasis to the east of it. The German map describes the oasis as being uninhabited, while the French states it to be inhabited. It has been suggested that Arkenu represents the well by the hill and Owanat the oasis farther east, and there can be little doubt that this Arkenu-Owanat district is the one to which they refer. But neither Arkenu nor Owanat can claim to be oases strictly speaking—they would both be more accurately described as wells: so it would appear that one of them—probably Owanat—represents the well and that the oasis has yet to be found. Very likely the failure of the water supply at this point led to the road becoming abandoned. A road running up from the Central Sudan, as this does, towards Cairo and the other wealthy towns of the northern part of Egypt, where slave traders could find the best possible market for their wares, must have been so convenient that it would not have been abandoned without very good cause. If this road could again be made serviceable by the restoration of this water supply, it might still prove to be one of great value.

From what I saw of that part of the desert, I feel certain that this intermediate oasis, or well, is not nearer Dakhla than Jebel Abdulla—my farthest point along the road—nor can it be much farther. It is certainly not in the immediate vicinity of that hill, but it cannot, I think, be more than 50 or, at the outside, 75 miles farther on. It probably lies rather to the east of the direct line joining the hill and Owanat, as the road seemed to be trending rather in that direction.