Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

Close by the hill from which the millstones had been quarried the tracks of the five camels we had seen turned off towards the west. As the lane we had been following ran up north in the direction of Qasr Dakhl and the only camels in the oasis were those kept by the Senussi living there, there was little doubt that the tracks we had seen were those of a party of Senussi from the zawia on their way, probably with letters, to Kufara.

The Senussi invariably conducted their visits to and from their headquarters with the greatest secrecy, for fear that, when proceeding there, they might be followed and the road that they took might thus become known. The route followed by this party was eminently well suited to preserve their secret, as, while following the lane, they must have been entirely concealed from the inhabitants of the oasis by the intervening line of dunes that we crossed. So we had evidently stumbled upon one of their secret roads to Kufara.

About four o’clock we reached the hill we had seen on the skyline at the end of the lane between the dunes, and as it was the highest in the neighbourhood I climbed to its top with Qway and Abd er Rahman, sending the caravan round its base to wait for me on its southern side.

From the summit we could see over a wide range of country. In the far north lay Dakhla Oasis with the scarp behind it. The continuation of this cliff beyond Qasr Dakhl could be seen stretching far away to the west as a faint blue line that appeared to get lower towards the west.

The desert to the west of Dakhla was almost entirely covered by dunes, which seemed to be higher farther to the north and in the extreme west, where they were noticeably redder in colour than the cream-coloured sand hills in the neighbourhood of the oasis.

Everywhere to the south-west, in the direction in which we were going, the desert was very level, and to my great surprise entirely free from drift sand, with the exception of one or two isolated dunes that could be seen in the distance. Instead of the sand-covered desert to the south-west of Dakhla shown on the maps, the whole surface consisted of bare Nubian sandstone—there was no sign of the limestone that caps the plateau near the Nile Valley. The hill on which we stood was considerably higher than Dakhla, and from our elevated position we could see a great distance; but not a trace was there to be seen of the “great sea of impassable sand” that was shown on the maps of the south-west of the oasis. Never had an unsuspecting traveller been so hopelessly misled by an imaginative geographer. The great area covered with huge dunes that was supposed to exist here, extending to thousands upon thousands of square miles, simply did not exist at all. It was an absolute myth!

The sand belts of this desert creep forward towards the south under the influence of the prevailing north wind—not as I once saw stated in a novel at the rate of many miles in the course of a night—but with a steady advance of, say, twenty yards in a year. Long belts, like the Abu Moharik already referred to, are known to extend for hundreds of miles, and it had consequently been assumed that the dunes that Rohlfs had found ran for a similar distance.

From where we stood the reason that these belts were so curtailed was perfectly clear. The ground level rose fairly rapidly all the way from Dakhla, and the area lying to the south-west of our position constituted an elevated plateau, along the northern edge of which ran a chain of hills of considerable height. The sand belts found by Rohlfs had all banked up against these hills, except in one or two places where a line of isolated crescent dunes had crept through a gap in the range and emerged on to the plateau.

The contrast between this part of the desert, as shown on the map, entirely covered with these “impassable” dunes, to cross which was a problem that during the past few months I had been racking my brains in attempts to solve, and the desert as it existed in reality—with only one small ridge of sand about eight feet high and perhaps forty yards broad to be crossed, which had presented no difficulty at all, could hardly have been greater. I felt considerably annoyed with the compilers of those maps for causing me so much wasted scheming. The discovery, however, of the sand-free character of the desert, was of the greatest importance for the purpose of my journey, as it naturally made our road far easier to traverse.

As the “impassable sea of sand” had proved to be a myth, and the Senussi did not appear to be anything like as fanatical as I had been led to expect, I began to hope that the other unsurmountable difficulties foretold would also vanish in the same way, and that I should have no other impediments to surmount than the shortage of water and other problems that always have to be faced in every desert journey.