March 20, Saturday.

Around Bawiti in the Bahariya Oasis

Today began with a visit to the chief spring of the oasis, Ain Bishmu, which flows hot. Originally it flowed spontaneously from a fissure in the cliff, but now must be pumped out. The water from the springs flows through channels about the size and rapidity of a Conneccticut brook, except that steam rises in the morning air and vanishes into a maze of date palms, banana trees, and other lush vegetation. To stroll through this landscape feels like having been transported back to the garden of Eden; you expect Eve to peek out at you from behind the fronds of a palm, Adam to be contemplating the names of creatures by the side of the water.

The date palms that dominate the oases are fast growers; they mature in 7-8 years and live to 20-25. As we saw later (and I will write about elsewhere in this report), such fast growth is well adapted to oasis conditions.

Archaeology -- needs to be sorted out.

On the west side of the oasis, along the escarpment, a mass of sand pours down over the cliffs onto the floor of the valley. It forms a series of low dunes marching east toward Bawiti. The sand comes ultimately from the Great Sand Sea, a huge mass of sand and dunes 600 km long and 200-400 km wide that straddles the Egyptian-Libyan border. (We skirted the Sea a number of times on our trip, and even walked on its very edge one day.) Eventually the sand will invade Bawiti and bury it; measurements suggest that the sand can move about 15 m a year. But here one of the attractions is that the sand spilling over the escarpment provides an escalator up to the very top, from which you can view the desert west and the oasis east. Our car appeared as a dot in a shimmering sea of sand.

Alexander the Great -- whose ghost haunts the Western Desert -- passed through Bahariya on his way back to the Nile valley after the priests at the temple of Amun in Siua warned him against returning the way he had come, along the coast. During his stay at Bahariya he ordered the construction of a temple to Amun. Alexander is depicted on the walls of the temple -- where, unfortunately, the cartouche that bore his name is no longer readable -- as a pharaoh. Recent excavations there have exposed possible evidence of storerooms and piles of pottery sherds, endlessly fascinating to the archaeologist, perhaps less so to the causal reader of this diary!

Lunch was at a lovely traditional restaurant. We sit outside on carpets under a trellis covered with a mesh of date fronds, leaning against date palm trunks. The sun beats outside, but we are cool enough in the shade. They bring us sardines, white cheese (a goat cheese but processed differently from feta, it has a softer consistency), tomatoes, cucumbers, and pita bread to hold them all. Tea follows, leaves settled on the bottom of the cups.

One of the most spectacular recent archaeological discoveries of the Western Desert is the Valley of the Golden Mummies. Just outside of Bawiti a valley of tombs revealed dozens of untouched mummies, of Roman date; archaeologists estimate the valley may contain 10,000 tombs. Some of the finds are on a kind of display in a storeroom (to call it a "museum" would be a glorification) in glass cases. We weren't permitted photographs, so you'll juts have to imagine the gold death masks staring up at us through the glass, the bodies wrapped still in their linen coverings. The tombs themselves are closed to visitors; we drove through the valley, so rich in death that skulls lie unprotected and unremarked on the sandy ground.

Not far from the irrigated fields of the oasis, through which irrigation channels wind in a complex network, stands a grove of palms buried in sand. The sand rises a good 10 m above the level of the plain. This sight represents a fate of the whole oasis -- to be swamped, if that's the right word, by a sea of sand moving relentlessly east from the Great Sand Sea. But the dunes come in waves, not as a constant, single front of invasion; behind them are more empty stretches; so the oasis that is buried tomorrow will be exposed next week. Perhaps ultimately the whole Great Sand Sea will flow east and cover Bahariya and its fellow oases for millennia; such may perhaps be the fate of the legendary oasis of Zarzora, reported in mediaeval Arabic sources (but perhaps already nothing but a legend?) that some think must lie under the Sea, or the army of Cambyses, which Herodotos tells us was swallowed by a mountain of sand, never to be seen again.

The Birket el-Marun occupies the low point of the oasis. The water used for irrigation drains down to it; nearby are the rice fields that produce the delicious, uniquely nutty rice we will eat every day of our trip. It's the best rice I've ever eaten, not excepting Basmati. (They fry the rice before they boil it, which contributes to the flavor; but I'm convinced the quality of the rice itself makes the crucial difference.) The lake shore is crusted with salts, the perennial problem of irrigation agriculture; here at least drainage through the fields seems sufficient to alleviate the difficulties where food is actually grown.

It was near the lake that we encountered a small herd of camels grazing in the dusk on the stalks of the rice plants. Local Bedouin own the camels, whose economic uses are still considerable -- they are milked (unfortunately the attempt to get some milk for us to taste failed, for we had come after the mothers had nursed their young); the wool is shorn and woven into blankets and rugs (I bought a nice camel-hair rug in Farafra Oasis); and of course they remain a basic desert mode of transportation, sometimes for tourists, but also still as load-bearers. They have a genuine dignity and presence that commands admiration; a fellow we met in Dakhla spent ten minutes praising the moral qualities of camels, their sexual chastity, loyalty, and memory for mistreatment and insult.

The last sight of the day -- and it was indeed a very long day! -- was the Museum of Oasis Traditions. Housed in a traditional Bawiti house, the museum features vignettes of traditional daily life rendered in clay -- a wedding, old men gathered talking, people at work, and a circumcision. The artist has a knack for capturing expression which doesn't come across, unfortunately, in the photos (hard to take of gray clay in dim light).

Finished at last for the day, we headed back to Peter's hotel for a good, simple meal, and a wonderful night's sleep (except for the mosquitoes).

For the previous day, click March 19; for the next day, March 21; and to return to the main page, click here.