When the sun shifted to where I sat, the effect changed so much that it seemed hardly worth risking sunstroke by continuing my study. My companions calling out their several discoveries tempted me to join in the hunt. So much of interest was crowded into the one day spent at Wady Fowakiyeh that the thirteenth day of November 1908 will remain as a landmark in my somewhat varied existence.
One long inscription, which Mr. Weigall interpreted, tells us of 10,000 men who were sent during the eleventh dynasty to work the quarries. Amongst this army of quarrymen there were miners, artists, draughtsmen, stone-cutters, gold-workers, and officials, and full directions were given as to the work they were sent to do. When one thought of the voices of this host of men, awakening the echoes of the cliff-bound valley, the present silence became almost oppressive. As the shades deepened with the declining sun, the impressiveness of our surroundings seemed to have got hold even of our escort. We could just hear them muttering their evening prayer, and when that was over nothing but the crackling of the fire, round which they sat, disturbed the stillness of the night.
Till this point in our journey, the road we trod is sufficiently hard and smooth to allow a motor-car to do it in three or four hours. We had now reached the highest part of the desert highway, but the incline is so imperceptible that only the aneroid could prove that we were on a greater altitude than when we left Qús. No motor-car could, however, cross the mile or two of boulders which choked up the road on which we made an early start the following morning. Most of this we did on foot, jumping from boulder to boulder, the men leading the camels a serpentine route or assisting them over the rocks which blocked the way. We followed up a narrow pass in the mountains to inspect the abandoned workings of the gold-mines. We soon came across some huts used by miners who had in quite recent years come here to glean where the early Egyptians had reaped a good harvest. The huts were already in worse repair than many we saw at the Roman Hydreuma. From what I have heard since, the modern working of these mines had soon been abandoned as a hopeless task. There are, however, other mines north of these which are now worked at a profit.
We decided to continue on this pass and join the main route to Kosseir a few miles further on, the baggage train, of course, following the usual caravan road. Our guide declared that he knew the road, so there seemed nothing to apprehend. Nevertheless we took the precaution of leaving a trail behind us, as boys do on a paperchase, for there were tracks in the sand of other camels than our own, and the road, such as it was, split up into several winding passes through the hills. As one of our party had chosen to follow the baggage, we decided to send back Selim to the main highway to tell him when and where we expected to join him, and Selim had also instructions to prepare our midday meal at that spot.
The landscape became more extraordinary than ever when we left the tuff and breccia rocks behind us. On either side of us rose sandstone cliffs worn into the most fantastic shapes. It is difficult to associate rain with such a country as the one we were in, yet rain and nothing else could have worn this stone into the shapes we now beheld. An inscription which Weigall had carefully copied described a torrential shower which descended on the quarrymen in early dynastic times, and which they considered a good omen of a successful issue to their labours. Rain descends at long intervals, but during periods as counted by geologists an immense amount of water had fashioned these sandstone rocks into their unearthly shapes, for no growth is here to impede the action of the torrential streams.
We wound amongst these hills for two or three hours, and I was delighted when we regained the highway and returned to less strange, though more beautiful scenery. But where was Selim? We fortunately could see our companion in the distance, while the baggage camels which he followed were disappearing round an angle in the range of hills. We managed to make him hear, and he rode back to meet us. He had neither seen nor heard anything of our cook, and had the latter followed the trail he should have joined the main body a couple of hours ago. Our guide went back to try to find the lost cook, and as he was born to the desert, we had little fear of losing him. After a hunt of a couple of hours the guide returned, hoping that Selim might have found his way to us by the main road. There was nothing to be done but to send the guide back to try some of the passes which he had considered too unlikely for the cook to have taken.
It was awkward to lose the man on whom depends your midday meal. But worse than a long day’s fast was the possibility that the man had completely lost his bearings, in which case, his bones and those of his mount might, at the time I am writing, be bleaching in the desert surrounded by his pans and kettles as well as by our sketching and photographic paraphernalia.
About four o’clock a clatter, clatter awoke us from a doze we had indulged in under the shade of a projecting rock. The cook had turned up at last, still trembling with the danger of being lost which he had experienced, and also expecting a blowing up for being so late with our lunch. A puff of wind had, it appeared, blown some of our paper trail over a low hillock into a pass which we had not taken, and seeing camel tracks there he followed it up and got lost in the labyrinth amongst the sandstone cliffs. Though he rode his camel well, his practice had hitherto been confined to the cultivated land where he could hardly go a quarter of a mile without meeting some one to direct his way.
We made a hasty meal, for we had a long ride before we could reach our night’s camping-place. We passed two more Roman stations, but could not give them much time. The scenery increased in grandeur and beauty, for the Hammamât mountains we had left behind us are in truth more extraordinary than beautiful. A high range of limestone mountains caught the evening light, while the meaner hills in the foreground were lost in a subtle grey-violet shade.
Twilight is of short duration, and not long after admiring the after-glow on the limestone heights, we had to trace our way in no other light than that from the starlit sky.