March 21, Sunday

 From Bahariya to Our First Campsite, Near Sutra

At 6.30 in the morning I met Zoe in the parking lot of Peter's hotel for a walk. Our destination is the English mountain. Sun had just risen as we headed up a few stairs onto the hill behind Peter's hotel. Not a plant or living thing to be seen. We trudged along through the sand and over the rocks, up toward a collection of stones arranged at the lip of the hill. They could have been Middle Helladic, but in fact were the remains of a fort built by the British in World War I, when the oases were threatened by the Sanusi, Bedouins allied with the Ottoman Empire. While we prowled around the fort Jimmy appeared below, and soon joined us in the cool air, overlooking the oasis.

At 10 we left the hotel in our car, loaded down with camping gear. We stopped in downtown Bawiti for some supplied; I bought a ski cap for camping, green, the color of the Prophet. Just out of town we passed a military checkpoint, quickly rose out of the depression that creates the oasis, and emerged into the northern desert -- a table flat plain with a pebbly floor, occasional a very low hill barely distinguishable by its relief from the background, not a plant to be seen. The desert just beyond Bahariya is the most featureless landscape I have ever seen -- not boring or monotonous (to me, anyway -- others might well feel different), but featureless, under blue sky, marked only by the tarry, damaged, sometimes undrivable asphalt leading over the next low ridge, behind which awaited -- another low ridge.

Not 500 m beyond the next checkpoint we blew a tire. The problem turned out to be a bit more complicated; something was wrong with the brake system too, and Hamada pulled out the tool box. (The consequences of this accident, probably the result of sand in the brake fluid, echoed through the next few days; eventually we had to trade the car in for another.) Clear that repairs would take some time, I grabbed a bottle of water and my hat, lathered up in sunscreen, and decamped to walk on along the road, all alone, looking for some real desert experience.

I must have walked about 2 or 3 km. Once the car vanished behind the first little ridge, I was truly and completely alone. Without the road I would have been completely lost, for there was nothing by which to orient oneself. (Another reason for the caravans to travel at night -- you can navigate by the stars.) After a while I spied a figure shimmering on the far horizon; it was Jimmy, who caught up to me just before the car appeared over the horizon. Soon we rejoined the group, headed off into the deep desert.

We stopped for lunch near a place called Sutra. Massive dunes, weird sandstone formations blasted by the wind. While Amgad and Hamada prepared lunch, I wandered off again into a little maze of dunes; brilliant blue sky, dazzling golden sand glistening in the sun, separated by flat stretches the resembled playas (but weren't) paved in coarser sand and littered with hundreds of thousands of paper-thin disks of stone. I found a little depression in which grew a few stubbles of plants, which Hamada later told me were called art, good for grazing camels and burning.

After lunch, more driving. The distances are deceptive. On the map it doesn't look that far from Bahariya to Siwa, but both times we made the drive we camped at the halfway point, and even so we spent hours and hours in the car. This is partly because the distances are longer than they seem, partly because the road sometimes decays into lumps of tar, and you have to go off road, through the sand and rocks, to make any progress. (We saw later a minibus that had driven the same road and all marveled that it had made it through in one piece.)

Finally, though, we reached our camping site. Hamada pulled off the road and headed off into endless desert sand. Eventually he chose for us a gently sloping dune above a flat plain like the pseudo-playas I mentioned above. A single acacia tree, invisible from our campsite, relieved the emptiness. I pitched my tent a good 100 m or more from the others (and the car), up the slope of the dune. I had to tug it around a bit after I had set it up to get it correctly oriented with respect to the wind, and after that manhandling it never quite stood perfectly upright, and a pole split; but it was warm and cozy all night.

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