I walked out to have a nearer look at the dunes. At close quarters they seemed to me even more formidable than when viewed from a distance. Not only were they of considerable size, but, what was infinitely worse, the sand of which they were composed was so loose and soft that the camels would have sunk in almost to their hocks. It was obvious that, if the whole dune-field was of this character, to get a caravan over many days’ journey of this soft sand was an almost hopeless task.
However, I made up my mind to give it a trial. So the evening before starting out into the desert, I sent Qway off on his hagin to find the best place for us to enter the dune belt, with the result that, instead of setting out towards the south-west, he led the caravan towards the north-west, where he had found a low point in the sand hills, but it was with a good deal of trepidation that I set foot on the first dune we came to, and realised that I had embarked on the desperate attempt to solve the riddle of the sands of the “Devil’s Country”—it was an awful prospect.
CHAPTER VII
THE first dune we had to negotiate was only about eight feet high and, as the sand at this point was crusted hard, in a minute or two, without the slightest difficulty, we were across the first sand hill of that field of “impassable dunes”—and the last!
We at once found ourselves on a sand-free patch lying between the dunes. By following a winding course across the belt we were able to reach its farther side in about an hour and a half, without having to negotiate any further sand. The sand hills were not nearly so closely packed together as they appeared to be from a distance.
We emerged into a long lane between the dunes quite free from drift sand, running parallel with the sand belt and stretching away to the south, till it ended in the distance in a hill on the skyline. On the far side of this lane was another belt of sand hills, which, being closely packed together and of considerable height, would have caused some difficulty to cross. So instead of keeping a south-westerly direction, which would have necessitated crossing these difficult dunes, I followed the sand-free lane to the south and coasted along them, hoping to find an easier place where the dunes had become lower or more scattered. An old disused road ran west from Mut into the dunes, presumably leading direct to Kufara. We found the continuation of this road where it crossed the lane and again ran under the dunes to the west of it. At that point it bore 265° mag.
We soon joined the tracks of five camels proceeding in the same direction as ourselves, and apparently only three or four days old. We followed these tracks, which ran along the lane between the dunes and presently, to everyone’s profound astonishment, came upon the unmistakable track of a two-wheeled cart. They eventually led us to a very low gritstone hill.
As wheeled conveyances are entirely unknown in the oasis the presence of the tracks was a perfect mystery. It was not till my return to the oasis that I learnt their history. At least forty years before, the father of the ’omda of Rashida had imported a cart into the oasis from the Nile Valley, in order to fetch from the gritstone hill two millstones we had seen in a mill in his village.
The permanence of tracks in certain kinds of desert is well known to anyone with any experience of desert life. The marks in this case ran over a level sandy surface thinly covered with darker pebbles. The cart must have crushed the pebbles deeply into the soft sand on which they lay, and the ruts thus formed rapidly filled up again with drift sand during the first sandstorm, showing as two conspicuous white lines, owing to the absence along the tracks of the darker pebbles, and forming marks that might easily last for a century, unless they happened to be situated in a part of the desert where the sand erosion was gradually wearing away the surface of the ground.