My main object in this journey was to see if this route was still usable for caravans or, if not, whether it could not be made so by means of new wells, or by improving the road at difficult points.
A road running up from Wanjunga to Dakhla Oasis would have cut right across all the caravan routes, leading up to Kufara from the Bedayat country and the Eastern Sudan, and so might have diverted into Egypt a great deal of the traffic then going to Kufara and Tripoli. In addition some of the trade carried by the great north and south road, from the Central Sudan through Tikeru to Kufara, might also have been brought into Dakhla by reopening this old route. As the railway from the Nile Valley into Kharga could easily have been extended into Dakhla, that oasis might have supplanted Kufara as the main caravan centre of the Libyan Desert, and a comparatively large entrepôt trade might have been developed there, the merchandise being distributed by means of the railway into Egypt.
The total value of the goods carried across this district by caravan is not great; but still the trade is of sufficient importance to make it worth while to attempt to secure it, especially as, if that were done, it would give a considerable hold over the inaccessible tribes of the interior, and at the same time be a severe blow to the Senussi, who for some time had threatened to become rather a nuisance.
To meet the requirements of the long fifteen days’ journey to Owanat from Dakhla, or rather of our return in the event of our having to beat a hurried retreat on foot, I had thirty small tanks made of galvanised iron. These were placed in wooden boxes, a couple being in each box, and packed round with straw to keep the water cool and prevent them from shaking about in their cases.
Each pair of tanks contained enough water for the men and myself for one day, with a slight margin over to allow for contingencies. During the journey, one of these boxes could be left at the end of every day’s march, with sufficient food to carry us on to the next depot, in the event of our finding it necessary to retrace our steps. With a pair of tanks in each box, I felt as certain as it was possible to be that, even if one of them should leak and lose the whole of its contents, there would still be sufficient water in the second tank to last us till we reached the next depot. Even if all our zemzemias and gurbas had been lost, these tanks, even when full, were of a weight that could easily have been carried by a man during the day’s march. When empty they could be thrown away.
I went up to Assiut to get together a caravan for the journey, engaged a brother of Abd er Rahman’s, named Ibrahim, and also secured Dahab for the journey. Qway and Abd er Rahman joined me in Assiut, putting up at a picturesque old khan in the native town, and thus our party became complete. The attempts I had made to find a guide who knew the parts of the desert beyond the Senussi border had again proved fruitless.
I hesitated at first to take Ibrahim into the desert partly because—like many young Sudanese—I found him rather a handful, who required a good deal of licking into shape, but chiefly because he had not had much experience with camels, owing to his having acted for some time as a domestic servant in Kharga Oasis. What finally decided me to take him was one of those small straws that so often tell one the way of the wind when dealing with natives.
Once, while loading a camel, preparatory to moving camp, the baggage began to slip off his back and Ibrahim, as is usual with bedawin in the circumstances, immediately invoked the aid of his patron saint by singing out, “Ya! Sidi Abd es Salem.”
The saint that a native calls upon in these cases is nearly always the one that founded the dervish Order to which he belongs, and this Abd es Salem ben Mashish—to give him his full name—was the founder of the Mashishia dervishes and is perhaps still better known to Moslems as the religious instructor of Sheykh Shadhly, one of the most famous of all Mohammedan divines.
