Mysteries of the Libyan Desert

by W. J. Harding King

As Abdulla did not come in till two days later, I began to fear that something had happened to him. He arrived with his camel in an awful state. The sores on his back, which appeared to have healed when he started, had broken out again and were very much worse than when he first reached Mut.

His camel had gone so badly, he said, that he had not been able to do half as much as he would have done if his mount had been in good condition, and he was very vexed about it indeed. He had followed Abd er Rahman’s directions and had found Jebel el Bayed without difficulty. He had climbed to the top and seen the second hill beyond. He had then gone on towards it—his camel going very badly indeed—for a day and a half over easy desert, after which he had crossed a belt of dunes that took about an hour to negotiate. Then after another half-day he managed to reach the second hill and had climbed to the top of it. To the south and south-west lay open desert with no dunes, falling towards the west, dotted with hills and stretching away as far as he could see. To the north he had been able to see the cliff on the south of the plateau—the pass down which we had descended into the “Valley of the Mist” being distinctly visible, though it must have been a good hundred and twenty miles away. After this he said he could do no more with such a wretched camel, so he had been obliged to return. He was very apologetic indeed for having done so little.

It never seemed to occur to this simple Sudani that he had made a most remarkable journey. Acting only on directions given him by Abd er Rahman, he had gone off entirely alone, into an absolutely waterless and barren desert, with which he was totally unacquainted, with a very sore-backed camel and riding only on a baggage saddle—his riding saddle had got broken before the start—but he had covered in thirteen days a distance, as the crow flies, of nearly four hundred miles, and more remarkable still had apologised for not having been able to do more! He got some bakhshish that surprised him—and greatly disgusted Qway who got none.

The fact that Abdulla saw the pass into the “Valley of the Mist” from the top of the hill he reached—Jebel Abdulla as the men called it—shows that the hill was of considerable height, for it, Jebel el Bayed and the pass, lay in practically a straight line, and the desert there was very level. The summit of the pass was about 1700 feet high—the cliff itself being about 250 feet. But it could not be seen from the top of Jebel el Bayed, which was 2150 feet, owing to a low intervening rise in the ground. A simple diagram will show that, as it was visible over this ridge from the top of Jebel Abdulla, the latter must have been at least 2700 feet high.

Qway, of course, though excellently mounted, had done practically nothing. There could be little doubt that he and the Senussi were hand in glove. He was always asking leave to go to places like Hindaw, Smint and Qalamun, where I knew the Senussi had zawias, and the Sheykh el Afrit at Smint and Sheykh Senussi, the poet in Mut, were his two intimate friends, and both of them members of the Senussia.

The Senussi had always been a nuisance to travellers wanting to go into their country. It was, however, difficult to see what they could do. They would not, I thought, dare to do anything openly in the oasis and, by getting rid of two out of their three camels I had rather tied them up for the time being, so far as the desert was concerned. So I went on with my preparations for our final journey with a fairly easy mind, making the fatal mistake of underestimating my opponents.

First I engaged the local tinsmith to patch up six tanks that had developed leaks. Then I sent Ibrahim round the town to see if he could not find some more weapons. He returned with a neat little battle axe, a spear and a six-foot gas-pipe gun with a flint-lock. All of which I bought as curiosities.

We then went out and tried the gun. It shot, it is true, a few feet to one side; but little trifles like that are nothing to a bedawi. The general opinion of the men was that it was a very good gun indeed. Abdulla said he had been in the camel corps and understood guns, and undertook to put it right. He shut one eye and looked along the barrel, then he rested the muzzle on the ground and stamped about half-way down the barrel to bend it. He repeated this process several times, then handed the gun back to Ibrahim, saying that he thought he had got it straight.

I got up a shooting match between the three Sudanese to test it. The target was a tin of bad meat at eighty yards, and Ibrahim with the flint-lock gun, with his second shot, hit the tin and won the ten piastres that I offered as a prize, beating Abd er Rahman and Abdulla armed with Martini’s.

Then I set to work to buy some more barley for our journey and difficulties at once arose. I sent Abd er Rahman and Abdulla with some camels to Belat, but the ’omda told them he had sold the whole of his grain; though they learnt in the oasis that he had not been able to sell any and still had huge stores of it left.