Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

The storm I have described was certainly unpleasant, but it had one compensation—Musa left his reed flute lying on the sand, and my hagin promptly ate it! That camel seemed to be omnivorous. Feathers, tent pegs and gun stocks all figured at various times in his bill of fare. But bones were his favourite delicacy; a camel’s skeleton or skull by the roadside invariably drew him off the track to investigate, and he seldom returned to his place without taking a mouthful. In consequence, among the numerous names by which he was known in the caravan—they were all abusive, for his habits were vile—was that of the ghul, or cannibal.

We got off at five in the morning the day following the sand storm, and, after a six hours’ march, reached the sacks of grain in the “Valley of the Rat.” As the day was rather warm, we rested the camels here for four hours and then pushed on for Qway’s “high black mountain” and the “Valley of the Mist.”

I had hoped great things from Qway’s description of them, but unfortunately I had not taken into account the want of proportion of the bedawin Arabs. The “high black mountain” was certainly black, but it was only seventy feet high!

From the top of this “mountain” we were able to look down into the “Valley of the Mist.” Here, too, great disappointment met me. The wady was there all right—it was an enormous depression, about two hundred and fifty feet lower than the plateau. But the vegetation and the huge oasis, that I had been expecting from Qway’s account of the “mist,” were only conspicuous by their absence. The wady was as bare as the plateau; and considering the porous nature of the sand that covered its floor, and the height above sea-level as compared with the other oases, it could hardly have been otherwise. It was clearly, however, of enormous size, for it stretched as far as we could see south of an east and west line, as a vast expanse of smooth sand, studded towards the south and east by a few low rocky hills, but absolutely featureless to the south-west and west.

The “mist,” upon which Qway laid such stress, I found was not due to moisture at all, but to refraction, or rather to the absence of it. The hot sun blazing down on to a flat stony desert, such as the plateau over which we had been travelling, causes a hazy appearance in the nature of a mirage on the distant horizon. But, when looking from the top of a tableland over a deep depression some distance away, this hazy appearance is absent, as the line of sight of the spectator lies the height of the cliff above the floor of the depression, instead of being only a few feet above it. Though the “Valley of the Mist” was invisible from the point where Qway had first seen his “high black mountain,” his experienced eye had seen that a depression lay beyond it, owing to the absence of this haze, which, however, is only to be seen under certain conditions.

With some difficulty we managed to get the caravan down from the plateau on to the lower ground, and then coasted along towards the west, under the cliff, in order to survey it. This scarp ran practically due east and west, without a break or indentation until we came to a belt of dunes which poured over it, forming an easy ascent on to the plateau, up which we proceeded to climb.

At the top the sand belt passed between two black sandstone hills, from the summit of one of which a very extensive view over the depression was obtainable. It was at once clear that there was no prospect of finding water—still less an oasis—for at least two days’ journey farther to the south, for there was nothing whatever to break the monotony of the sand-covered plain below us. As the water supply was insufficient to warrant any further advance from Mut, we had to return—always a depressing performance.

We found, however, one hopeful sign. The pass that led over the dune belt on to the plateau—the “Bab es Sabah,” or “gate of the morning,” as the poetical Khalil called it, because we first sighted it soon after dawn—had at its foot an ’alem. When I plotted our route on the map, I found that this ’alem lay almost exactly in line with the old road we had followed on our first journey out from Mut, showing that the pass had been the point for which it had been making. The place to which this road led would consequently be sure to lie near, or on the continuation of the bearing from the pass to the place where we had seen the two first ’alems. This was a point of considerable importance, as there seemed to be little chance of finding any remains of the road itself on the sandy soil of the depression, unless we should happen to land on another ’alem. The bearing we had been marching on before was such a short one that there was always the risk that, owing to the obstruction to the direct road of some natural feature, the short section of it, along which the bearing was taken, was not running directly towards its ultimate destination.

While hunting round about the camp, I found embedded in the sand two pieces of dried grass, much frayed and battered. So on leaving the camp next day, we followed the line of the sand belt to the north, as showing the direction of the prevailing wind, in hopes of finding the place from which the dried grass embedded in the dune had come.