How strange it looked when we were near enough to see some crops, between the palms, growing apparently out of the desert soil. We then caught sight of a man working a shadoof, and after that we could distinguish the chessboard patterning of the ground, so familiar in the Nile valley. The whole oasis seemed little more than three or four acres in extent; but probably a good deal more cultivable soil had been covered by the sand drifts where no walling existed to prevent this. Some half-dozen Ababdi families lived here; our guide found friends amongst them, and we heard some greetings in their dialect. The people seemed very little surprised to see us, and this not being a tourist-ridden spot, we had no beggars. A building with a many-domed roof stood here, and looked very like a deserted Coptic convent, though I was told that it was formerly built for an Arab caravanserai.
I watched a woman patching up the mud runnels to carry the water from the shadoof to the furthest squares of cultivated ground, and I tasted the water when the man first tilted it out of his leathern bucket. It was distinctly brackish—the only thing, of course, which these poor creatures had to drink. The man did not seem to mind that; but he complained that it was a thirsty soil, and that working all day at the shadoof hardly brought up a sufficiency of water to irrigate his little patch of corn. Taking me for an official, he asked me if I could not induce the government to place a small pumping station here. ‘Were it only known what a lot could be grown here if enough water could be got up, the government would not hesitate to bring the machinery.’ The poor man might genuinely have thought so; but the cost of the fuel, brought to this out-of-the-way place to raise the brackish water, had evidently not entered the man’s calculations.
Canon Tristram mentions in his book, The Great Sahara, that artesian wells were used by the Rouaras centuries before the principle of those wells was acknowledged in Europe. What a blessing they might be here! Possibly the sub-soil would not be suitable for such borings or they would have been in use.
The sun was still hot enough for us to enjoy our tea in the shade of the tamarisks which grew here. The children watched us from a distance and spoke in hushed voices. ‘Were these people dangerous who spoke in an unknown tongue and wore a strange garb?’ A smile and a hint that sugar was good brought them a little nearer. A venturesome little tot came near enough to pick up a lump, and then scampered away; by the time we had finished our tea, the juvenile population of Lakéta knew the taste of a Huntley and Palmer biscuit and a lump of sugar.
A little bird, the green willow-wren, according to our ornithologist, was less shy than the children, and picked up crumbs long before the latter ventured so near us.
Our baggage camels were only just in sight when we sat down, and at their rate of travel it would take an hour and a half before they reached us. I tried to make a sketch of the little oasis, which looked charming in the evening sunlight, but I was too stiff and tired to do much. A vague hope that it might look as well on our return journey induced me to put up my materials and lie on my back and stare at nothing in particular, till I became unconscious of my surroundings.
It was dark when I was awakened by the noise of the men driving in the tent-pegs. The four tents, including the little one which served as a cook-shop, were being erected, camp beds and bedding sorted out and fixed up, and all the other bustle was going on of pitching a camp. While I slept, Weigall had found our first graffiti: it was a fragment of stone on which we could read the name of the Emperor Tiberius Claudius.
A very good account of the archæological finds we made during our journey is given in Mr. Arthur Weigall’s Travels in the Upper Egyptian Deserts, published by Messrs. Blackwood and Sons. These have been so fully described in that handy volume, that I do not purpose to mention more than one or two.