This sounded most promising news, and I was anxious to go off at once and have a look at the “wady esh shabur,” or “Valley of the Mist,” as Khalil poetically called it, so I took Qway off to look at our water-tanks.
But the inspection was not too encouraging. We were distinctly short of water. Qway thought we should have just enough to take us out to his “Valley of the Mist,” and back again to Dakhla, if all went well, but he pointed out that we had one lame camel and another limping slightly, and that at that season it was quite possible that we might get some hot days with a simum blowing, and he consequently thought that it would be far better to be on the safe side and go straight back to Dakhla, rest the camels, and then come out and go on to the valley on the next journey.
As this was obviously sound advice, we struck camp, packed up and prepared to set off at once towards Dakhla, leaving several sacks of grain behind us, which greatly eased the burden of the camels and allowed us to leave the two limping beasts unloaded.
The wady in which the camp had been pitched evidently lay on the southern fringe of the plateau, and opened out on its eastern side down a sandy slope on to the lower ground beyond. The plateau, I knew, did not extend much farther to the east, so with two damaged camels in the caravan, I thought it best to avoid a return over the very rough road we had followed on our outward journey, and to strike instead in an easterly direction, round the south-east corner of the tableland, over the smooth sandy desert lying at the foot of the scarp of the plateau.
This road, though somewhat longer than the one we had followed on our outward journey, proved to be excellent going; it lay almost entirely over smooth hard sand. We continued to follow an easterly course till the middle of the next morning, when, on reaching the edge of the dune belt that runs along the western boundary of Dakhla, we turned up north towards Mut, and coasted along it.
The road was almost featureless. A few low rocky hills were seen on the lower ground for a while after leaving the “Valley of the Rat,” but even these soon ceased. From this point onwards we saw nothing of interest, with the exception of some pieces of petrified wood, lying on a greenish clay, until we reached our destination at Mut, in Dakhla Oasis. In the desert round about Kharga and Dakhla we several times came across the petrified remains of trees, though they never occurred in large patches.
Qway proved to be right in his forebodings of hot weather, and we had two days of fairly warm simum wind. We, however, managed to get in without suffering unduly from thirst—but I felt rather glad that we had not tried to reach that valley.
The state of my caravan necessitated my giving them some days’ rest, to enable them to recover their condition, and to allow their feet to get right again after the hard usage they had received on the sharp rocks of the plateau, before setting out again into the desert.
In the meantime I conducted an experiment to try and locate the position of the place from which the palm doves—the kimri sifi—were said to come. Their migration was just at its height, and several times, while on the plateau, we put them up from the rocks on which they had alighted to rest during their flight.
The kimri sifi always arrived in the oasis just before sunset, and as they generally made for a particular well to the south-west of Mut, I went there one evening with a compass and gun to wait for them. I took the bearing with my compass to the direction in which a number of them came. These bearings tallied very closely, the average of them being 217° mag.