Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World

Preface

As other people collect their poems and finally republish them, I have collected my travels.

Travels among the ruins of desert kingdoms and the crocks and querns of prehistoric tribes; beyond them among creeping dunes, petrified forests and in places where nothing exists, no sprouting grass blade nor worm of decay; where perhaps, in certain spots, nothing ever did exist; travels shared, companions changing but ideas preserved; and over all a sense of what travel is, and how it can be done with little pomp, little money, much love of it and very much preparation.

R. A. B.

Hongkong 1934

The road from India to Persia through Baluchistan

A patch of soft sand

Meeting with the Italian party at Sarra Well

Shaw, Sandford, Bagnold, Lorenzini, Craig, Paterson, Boustead, Prendergast, Harding-Newman

CHAPTER 1

Travel Infants

I feel that on three accounts I am at a disadvantage in the writing of this story. In the first place, the old question of truth crops up: nearly thirty others besides myself took part in our travels at various times, and were eyewitnesses of what I shall try to describe; most of them kept diaries, they all will read this book critically; some, I know, will go as far as checking dates and times. I can see one or two of the more meticulous of them throwing down the book in disgust were they to find even some innocent change of sequence, some elision of little happenings to make the account run better. How easy, in contrast, must be the literary task of the single traveller, with his unreading Arab retinue and his string of discreet camels. Not that I would for one moment hint that any of those illustrious solitaries has departed from the strict ungarnished truth by one sentence, say, of a native dialogue or by one phrase of the moon’s light in the description of that indescribable thing, a desert night. But what a temptation! Then, again, on all of the twenty thousand miles of journeyings each one of my companions looked out with different eyes and remembers with particular pleasure different scenes and incidents. They will all be disappointed that their pets have been left unmentioned.

The second difficulty is that we made a serious omission. We never had a thrilling disaster. We never lost our way, or broke down, with only a dried date to live on, till rescued by a harassed Authority after an exciting hunt with trackers and aeroplanes. We never went where we were not wanted, got shot up by angry tribesmen and provoked a reluctant government into sending out police and troops. In short, we had no news value whatever; a most discouraging state of affairs from which to extract material for a Book of Travel, where tragedy or averted tragedy is so great an asset.

Lastly, we travelled by motor car. People condemn the motor car as unromantic. I am afraid this is natural, for no one can become fond of a thing he does not really understand, and the ordinary person understands a camel, if in concept only, because it is an animal like himself. But there is another prejudice against the motor car, especially on the part of the elder men who have done all their travelling before its advent. There is here a sense of sacrilege; the old difficulties and limitations that make the memories of their journeys so pleasant to them have been cheapened, the old thrill of achievement at the crossing of an Immensity is now, they feel, almost destroyed. But to us, who know not the old way, our memories are just as cherished. We have our own difficulties to surmount and we have our thrills. Even when we increased the scale of the possible far beyond camel range the desert is still big enough to remain Immensity.

The transition from camel to car is under way; it cannot be checked. But the passing of a romantic tradition is certainly sad. We can but console ourselves with the thought that it has all happened before – that Roman travellers must have felt the same sense of sacrilege when the hideous camel was introduced to penetrate the sanctity of mysterious desert fastnesses, destroying all the romance of donkey journeys.

The history of the desert motor car in Egypt is oddly discontinuous. Introduced into the country early in the Great War by the British Army, it was found that the Ford car, even the Model T of twenty years ago, was capable of supplanting the camel in certain areas, notably in the Western Desert, and in 1916 a tiny force of light-car patrols, armed with machine guns, guarded the whole eight hundred-mile frontier against a possible recrudescence of the Senussi menace. These patrols covered great distances of unknown waterless and lifeless country as a normal routine, they took part in the final capture of Siwa Oasis from the Senussi, and among other things they succeeded in mapping, with the aid of speedometer readings and compass bearings, a great part of the northern desert, with its ranges of sand-dunes, between the Nile and Sewa. Their exploits, with the crude vehicles they had, were astonishing. The old tracks made by their unsuitable narrow tyres can be seen to this day, very faintly, far out even beyond the oases several hundred miles from the Nile. Sometimes one can see even their troubles; deeper ruts surrounded by vague old footmarks in the soft gravelly sand, where the cars stuck and had to be pushed out by hand. All this was a new thing, quite unknown in the history of deserts, or, indeed, of machinery. They evolved a lore of their own, so that their little patrols moved confidently about without much fear of disaster.

Libyan Desert with outline of India superimposed

In shape the Libyan Desert resembles the Indian peninsula, and, a fact which may be surprising but at the same time helpful, it compares with India in size.

Then came demobilisation. The light-car patrols were gradually disbanded, their personnel scattered to the ends of the world. Many of them appear, from the names they give to features on the map, to have been Australians. A few remaining cars were finally transferred to the newly-formed Frontier Districts Administration, or FDA, who used them largely for routine work along certain well-defined tracks which had been opened up during the war.

Official interest in the desert, away from these new car tracks, ceased with the war. The FDA’s job was to administer the outlying human settlements on the very minimum allowance of public money, and no longer to patrol against marauding Senussi bands. The Senussi menace was over, and with it went the spirit of the light-car patrols, and most of the lore they had accumulated. All that remains are a few of the names of the pioneers perpetuated on the map in the names of certain of the nearer ranges of sand-dunes; even they are disappearing as the old native names are being discovered. As far as I can trace, no one has ever written up the history of the light-car patrols. It is a pity, for there was nothing like them before.

With the disappearance of the wartime army and the general reaction which followed the war, the opening up of desert tracks ceased completely. It was not until six years later that King Fouad revived the idea. Even in 1925, when I went out to Egypt for the first time, there was still no road to Suez. The old ‘Overland Route’ built sixty years before, with its caravanseries and watchtowers, was in ruins. A Ford could just do it if there were enough people to push, and the eighty-mile journey took six hours or more. The famous Wire Road across the sands of Northern Sinai, by which the army had invaded Palestine, had disappeared. Even the method of its construction was forgotten. No one had driven a car all the way between Egypt and Palestine since the war ended, and when one car did get through in 1925 it was looked upon as a wonderful feat. So it was – of enterprise in a country still tired of wartime over-enterprise – on the part of the salesman who did it. All this but seven or eight years after a great army with all its vehicles and lorries had made the journey.

The attitude of Cairo was the age-long attitude of the Egyptian towards the desert. The Nile Valley is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile Valley; there is nothing else. ‘Why,’ they said, ‘do you want to go into the desert? There is nothing there. Anyway, it is dangerous; you may get lost. Is there not ample to do in Egypt; are there not amusements enough in Cairo; do not tourists flock here every year to see the wonders of Egypt, and do they not go away satisfied?’ ‘Suez,’ they said; ‘what do you want to go there for? There are no amusements there; no one goes. Sinai! You can’t get into Sinai; the government does not allow it; you will get arrested if you try. And there is nothing but sand, you can see it from the Port Said railway – a wretched place.’

In the following pages I shall try to trace the unpremeditated steps by which a few army officers, with no initial thirst for exploration, and no desire to do anything unusual except to see the country they were in, came gradually to break away from this conventional city outlook towards things outside; and how, beginning with a sort of touring club, a technique grew up by which it became possible for ordinary mortals, without financial backing, to penetrate to places in the far interior of the Libyan Desert previously thought to be inaccessible.

There are deserts and deserts. There is the ‘wilderness’, occupied by drought-resisting scrub and occasional grass where nomads wander with their camels; or more barren and lifeless still, but dotted with wells which provide a permanent subsistence for a small settled population. By its contrast with fertile lands, its serenity, its emptiness, the idea of ageless duration it instils, it so stirs the mind of the dweller in populous rainy countries that he is moved to weave romances about it, with nomad raids and ‘sheiks’. But there is nothing terrible about the wilderness. This kind of country occupies much of the world; it exists in every continent. Of such a type is all the country east of the Nile in Egypt; it stretches away across Sinai, across Arabia to Persia and beyond.

Very different is the great lifeless desert that rolls like a sheet of blank paper westward across North Africa from the western banks of the Nile.

The first chapters of this book concern the early sightseeing trips we took into the wilderness of Sinai and Transjordan. I start with them, not because I am competent to describe the country – Major Jarvis, in Yesterday and Today in Sinai, has already done that – but because by using cars for the first time we were in those days in a sense pioneers, and it was on those trips that we came to realise what cars could do. But on all those early trips we were tourists only, seeing things from a rather more interesting angle it is true, finding our way instead of being led, but still seeing things superficially as tourists do.

The original chain of events which set us going was somewhat devious.

The officers of the Royal Engineers, Signals and Tanks belonging to the British garrison at Abbassia on the outskirts of Cairo lived together in a collection of wooden huts, sharing a common mess. None of us had served in Egypt during the Great War, and the general outlook of the mess was much as I have indicated. The Royal Tank Corps, however, was represented in Egypt by the 3rd Armoured Car Company which inherited from the Duke of Westminster’s unit of Siwa fame, and several of their officers had joined them very shortly after the war was over. One of these was Lieutenant A. J. Bather.

Bather had lived for a year or so with a last relic of the war, an isolated section of armoured cars stationed at Sollum, four hundred miles westward along the Mediterranean coast, on the frontier between Egypt and Italian territory. This little town had been a base for the wartime operations of armoured cars and light-car patrols against the northern wing of the Senussi invasion. It was also the starting-point of the old caravan routes leading inland to the Siwa and Jaghbub oases, Kufra and the still mysterious Senussi-land in the unknown interior.

Alone of all the officers in Egypt, Bather caught the attraction of the desert, and brought it with him to Cairo when he was recalled in 1924. Perhaps it was the result of a strange incident in which he had assisted Sayed Idris el Senussi himself when the latter was in trouble; perhaps it was the presence of Hassanein Bey in Sollum while that explorer was completing the preparations for his great journey southwards to the Sudan, or simply that the spirit of the light-car patrols lingered on in the outpost of Sollum after it had died of lack of funds and of official support elsewhere. It was Bather who first started the idea in our conventional post-war mess that there was fun to be got out of a holiday in the desert, if one set about it in the right way.

Not that the idea caught on. There were difficulties. The first essential was to have two Ford cars. Cairo was an expensive place, and the few cars that the mess owned were cheap but highly respectable English ones, very suitable for journeying into Cairo, and fit to be found alongside one’s colonel’s car at Gezira Club; but they refused positively to submit to the indignity of leaving the roads and being bumped about over gravel and sand.

Now the first law of the light-car patrols was that if a party went anywhere off the beaten track farther than walking distance from help, the risk of disaster must be reduced to a second-order chance; for a party out in the desert is not entitled to any outside help, and cannot expect to be searched for by a relief expedition with water and food. No single accident, therefore, however serious, must be allowed to leave the party stranded. Only a sequence of such accidents, one on top of the other, is excusable. Hence, among other precautions, one must never go far off the beaten track with fewer than two vehicles in case one of them breaks down. For long journeys there must be more than two.

That year Lieutenant V. C. Holland, Royal Signals, was persuaded to buy a second Ford, and at Christmas 1924 he and Bather set out for a week’s cruise in the neighbourhood of Partridge’s Dunes on the edge of the Western Desert. During that week Holland got thoroughly bitten with the whole idea of the thing; with the sense of freedom to go just where one liked, driving on a compass course; with the awe of a new and utterly lifeless world; with the thrill of forcing a car at obstacles that no car was designed to encounter; with the clean coolness of sand-dunes in the evening, and the dry sparkling desert air. They did the thing properly; they were away from water and so they stuck to the rules that Bather had learnt; there was a daily water ration for drinking only, there was no washing, and they went unshaved. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Then the heat of the Cairo summer came on and no more was done. Bather never pursued the idea. He had many other interests and many friends in Egypt. He went to England the following winter.

I arrived in Egypt in October 1925. I felt a hearty relief at escaping from the humdrum existence of a recruit depot in England. After all, it was a little difficult to settle down to mere routine after the war years spent in France, followed by a postponed but joyously-regained youthful freedom at Cambridge with vacations varied by unconventional trips in post-war Europe by boat and on foot – followed again by the abnormal atmosphere of Ireland during the last phase of ‘The Trouble’ and the subsequent civil-war period.

It was the first time I had ever been East. At first sight it was a little like Ireland over again. The Sirdar had been murdered not long before, so we were not allowed about unless armed with an automatic pistol – just like Ireland. But otherwise it was all new and interesting, with a vague glamour added by my father’s stories of the 1884 campaign for the relief of Gordon and of early archaeological work with Wallis Budge – exploring the interiors of pyramids and raising colossal statues from the beds of lakes.

Holland and I soon discovered a similarity of tastes. Ancient Egypt had caught Holland badly, and his enthusiasm to see all there was to be seen soon influenced me also. Not that we attempted to take up the subject more seriously than by reading the few up-to-date books available. Officialdom and the jealousy of the experts both conspire to discourage the layman from Egyptology, the former by surrounding all the more spectacular remains by a horde of ignorant parrot ‘guides’, the latter by removing everything portable, and omitting to leave behind for the normally interested person any readable description of what was found or in many cases to publish any account or reconstruction of the place and period. No. We merely felt, consciously and unashamedly, the exciting mental kick of an apparent breakdown in the flow of Time, whereby one sees and touches the buildings and belongings, perfect as of today but oddly different, of a people inconceivably old. I remember vividly my feelings on one privileged occasion at Dr Reisner’s camp when I was allowed to handle a golden basin he had just found in the tomb of Cheops’ mother, which was new before the Pyramids were built, and in which the infant Pharaoh might once have been scrubbed. But there was more than that. There was, in visiting the less accessible remains, away from guides and tourists, an excuse to get out into the desert, be it only for a mile or so, an excuse to imagine that in those unfrequented, unsurveyed expanses of sand and rock there might be something still to be discovered just a little farther out, and an excuse also to indulge in the newly-found excitement of driving a car where it was said cars could not go.

But the little English car I brought out with me which had carried me so reliably on English roads was quite useless off the beaten track, as Holland took care to prove. In a few weeks he had his way; I bought a Ford.

Now, with two cars and a few passengers to push us out of sand-drifts, we began to make rather longer excursions, out of sight of the cultivation. We bumped our way south-west from the Mena Pyramids, out into the hazy nothingness of the Western Desert, making almost the first car tracks of what afterwards became King Fouad’s road to the Faiyum. There were ruins to be seen in process of excavation by a party of American archaeologists on the edge of the Faiyum depression. You descended gradually for many miles down and down, below sea-level, over a succession of sandy beaches, bare of all life as far as one could see, left by a shrinking lake of prehistoric times. Then in the distance the queer irrigated hollow of the Faiyum spread out like an oasis. We liked the Faiyum, with its walled gardens and villages that looked and smelt so different from anything in the Nile Valley; we liked the queer sleepy music of its ancient wooden water-wheels eternally lifting water from the canal.

We visited every Pyramid of that long row which stretches for 70 miles along the Nile, climbing to their summits and creeping down the dark tomb shafts among the bats and owls. We drove north-west from the same desert gate of Mena, along the track the armoured cars had marked out, to see the old Coptic monasteries at the oasis of Wadi Natrun, and the pink lakes of soda crystals.

We made expeditions to Suez along the wreckage of the Overland Route which, built in the 1860s before the Suez Canal was dug, and disused for many years, was now washed away by floods of rain and drifted up with sand. On the way we would explore the queer ruined palace a mad khedive had built for himself forty miles from anywhere without a water supply; or stop to peer down the great empty shaft whose history no one knows, to look at the little Bedouin shrine with its offerings of bits of rag and bottlenecks whose glass had turned purple in the sun, at the Roman cistern and the ruins of railway stations on the stillborn Cairo-Suez railway which the digging of the Canal had also killed.

At other times we just played with the cars; we took them far into the Mokattam Hills, we found ways up stony cliffs, got stuck in powdery clays, dug the cars out and tried again, learned to drive fast across boulder-strewn country, threading our wheels in and out between the larger rocks. It was a new game. With proper handling it seemed the cars could be got anywhere, over any country except soft sand. There were endless possibilities, now that roads were not a necessity, and inevitably we began to look farther afield.

On the wall of our office, behind my commanding officer’s chair, there hung a map, very old and faded, like all things that hang on the walls of offices, a map that had probably hung there since the war period when the army in Egypt had a wider outlook than in 1925. My eye used to wander from Cairo to Suez, eastwards across the Canal, across Sinai, up to Jerusalem, to the Great Rift Valley of the Jordan, the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Tucked away in the mountains of Transjordan south of the Dead Sea, I discovered the words ‘Petra (ruins of)’. It was not so very far away. Why shouldn’t we go and see all that? Was it really true that Sinai couldn’t be crossed, that it was very dangerous and that the Governor was an ogre who refused to let anyone go and see his country? One might get ten days’ leave. One could go a long way in ten days. But the people to whom I mentioned the idea were not encouraging. One could never get permission, they thought. No one had done such a thing before, so presumably it couldn’t be done. I broached the subject at British Military Headquarters. They didn’t think they could allow it. There was Risk. They must consider carefully. Anyhow, they would go as far as consulting the Frontier Districts Administration and let them decide. It was clear we must get a word in first with the Frontier people, so down we went to the Egyptian Ministry of War to see Chetwynd Bey, whose acquaintance Holland, through Bather, had already made.

The Administration then contained seven British officials, the OC Camel Corps and his assistant, the Legal Adviser at Headquarters in Cairo, the Governors of Sinai and the Western Desert Province and their assistants. Major Jarvis, the Governor of Sinai, happened to be on a visit to Cairo when we arrived, and was in the office.

Sinai and surrounding countries

A Sudanese orderly in the smart uniform of the Egyptian Camel Corps brought coffee. We broached our idea. Chetwynd’s point of view as OC Camel Corps was clear. He wanted to be certain that we should not get lost or break down and give his Corps the needless bother and expense of sending out to collect us. There had been trouble in the past; people did such silly things. We had suitable cars? Good. We would take a sufficient party to push them out when stuck? We would be sure and take enough petrol, because we should not find any till we got well into Palestine. We were expert mechanics? We would have compasses and all that? Then he hadn’t any objections at all.

Jarvis’s outlook was different. A keen enthusiast about his province, he warmed instantly to anyone who showed signs of taking an interest in it, provided they were not going to be a nuisance. But the trouble was with his roads. He had to run a country half the size of England on a revenue of a few thousand pounds. They had just scraped together enough money to buy some wire netting with which to pave the worst stretches of sand-drift between Suez and the hills, so that their light Fords could get through without having literally to be carried as they had had to be in the past, and they were a little annoyed when recently a big Studebaker had pushed through over the wire on its way to Palestine. If we damaged his wire road still more Jarvis would be angry with us. However, he gave us the necessary permits so that we could cross the Canal; beyond, he said, the sand of the Mitla Pass was still very difficult even with the wire, but we could try it; and we could use his little police posts in Sinai at nights. About Transjordan they could tell us little, and we gathered that this year a visit to Petra would be impossible, as the Wadi Musa tribes near by were giving trouble. Police