The Senussi sect itself has a wasm of its own, consisting of the word “Allah,” to show that the beasts and slaves branded with it are consecrated to His Service. I have never seen any slaves marked with this brand, but have often seen their camels, which had been marked in this way. In each case, however, the word took the form
. This may have been due only to bad writing on the part of the man who branded the beast, but it may also be a kind of conventionalised form of the correctly written word.
Sheykh Ahmed’s two brothers arrived just before his house party broke up. So when we had gone back to the guest chamber to pack our belongings, I took the opportunity of photographing them together. I afterwards tried to induce Sheykh Ahmed to be photographed in his white praying clothes; but I made rather a faux pas there. He looked very angry for a moment, then stiffly replied that that was impossible as it was haram—forbidden by his religion. But he soon recovered his temper and was all smiles by the time we left.
CHAPTER VI
THE mamur, who was personally conducting our party, had arranged that we should look in at Gedida. On the way there we passed the village of Mushia, lying in an area of blown sand, which in some places seemed to be encroaching on the cultivation. Most of the land was planted with palms, of which there were said to be about twenty-six thousand. The village itself proved to be uninteresting, its most noticeable peculiarity being the painting of geometrical patterns which decorated the outer walls of some of the houses. The inhabitants showed more signs of progress here than in most of the villages of the oasis, as a number of sagias—waterwheels—had been erected to irrigate the cultivated land, where the partial failure of the wells had rendered this necessary.
At Gedida, however, they seemed more conservative. The water supply was failing, owing, according to the inhabitants, to the large amount of water yielded by the big modern wells at Rashida, and many of their palms were dying for want of irrigation. A few shadufs had been introduced to raise the water; but the inhabitants complained bitterly of the hard labour required to work them. When asked why they did not use sagias, they apathetically replied that no one knew how to make them, and seemed to think it would be too much trouble to import them from the Nile Valley.
At Gedida I heard another story of Zerzura. It appears that many years ago—the exact number was not stated—when the forebears of the present inhabitants all lived scattered about the district in little hamlets and ezbas some very tall black men, with long hair and long nails, came up out of the desert and stole their bread at night. In the morning the natives followed their tracks out into the desert, found the wells they had drunk from when coming into the oasis, and filled them up with salt to prevent them from being used again. They then returned to Dakhla Oasis, and, banding together, built the village of Gedida (the “new town”) for mutual protection.
We reached Mut just at sunset, passing a number of the natives driving in their cattle to be housed in the little walled enclosures that surround the town.