March 22

March 22, Monday

From Our Campsite

Up at 5.30. The sun wasn't over the horizon yet, but light covered the sky. I broke camp before any one else, and took advantage of the time to have another walk by myself through the dune complex. I came upon another "playa" out of sight of the camp, which hosted a little stand of art, huddled in little tufts of sand, which are called nebka. These modest beginnings can become the core of a dune; indeed, any little feature in the landscape that blocks the wind and so collects sand can so act, even a piece of paper left carelessly in the desert, an old tire, assorted trash.

After breakfast the four of us headed off to walk out as far as we could while Amgad and Hamada loaded the car. Jimmy was off like a shot, Eph behind him, then Zoe, and last of all, me. I'm a slow walker; I like an easy, loping pace, which I can keep up all day, but I'm no speed demon. It wasn't long before we were all spread out across a km or more of desert, poles of color in an immense expanse of sand. (Believe it or not, you can make out Jimmy, Eph, and Zoe, as strokes of color, in the photo to the right.) This walk was an object lesson in desert navigation, too -- we all made it as far as the road, or rather within 100 m of it -- and did not see it! It was just a bare line in the sand, virtually invisible. Jimmy realized his mistake when he got a little altitude and could look back down on it; but on ground level, unless you knew to look for it, it remained essentially invisible. We could have walked right past it and back out into the western desert, never realizing our mistake.

Long drive to Siwa today, through the same desert landscape. We stop at Bir Sutra, where the government has drilled a well that discharges, by pressure, hot water through a pipe into an artificial lake surrounded by mud flats. It is far from clear what the Egyptian state had in mind by drilling this well -- there is no settlement here, no farms, not even the core of a natural oasis. They've done little beyond creating a massive evaporation opportunity and a stunning waste of groundwater. I did wonder though, since there is a depression to hold the water, whether there may have been a Pleistocene lake here.

A ways farther on we come to An-Nawamees, "Mosquito Lake." Cassandra Vivian gives an annoyed account of camping by the lake and being besieged by mosquitoes all night long. We viewed the lake from the safety of the escarpment, imagining the hungry critters buzzing around below us, ignorant of the meals standing only a few hundred meters away, up by the sand (like me, to the left).

From the lake the road runs along the eastern edge of the Great Sand Sea. Far off we see the golden dunes, which I took at first for a range of low hills. I contemplate the immensity of sand, nothing but sand piled up in hills 100 m or more high and tens of km long, running north to south in a belt 200-400 km wide from here deep into Libya.

Our next stop is Bahrein -- the "two lakes." These are indeed two lakes, separated by a couple of kilometers of low land. The oasis is utterly beautiful -- date palms waving in the breeze, beds of reeds lining the shores, which are whitened with the deposits of salts left behind by these lakes as they evaporate. After a look at the first lake we drive on to the second for lunch. Hamada and Amgad set up the food in an abandoned and emptied rock-cut tomb; while they are busy, the four of us wander off to walk. I clamber down the lower escarpment and head off to the east, skirting the southern boundary of the lake. The edge of the Great Sand Sea, which kisses the very shore of the lake, beckons; I am possessed by a romantic notion of being the first in our group to walk on it. From a distance the boundary between sand sea and plain desert seems sharp, but as I approach I see that in fact the sea fades into the desert floor; thin ribbons of sand give way to layers that cover the roots of art but not the tops, while the dunes that seemed so close at first retreat into the distance while growing larger. I have only a little water, and lunch must soon be ready; so I stop before reaching the first dunes, but in a spot where the vegetation supported by the groundwater (which must be very close to the surface here) thins out, and tell myself that, for all practical purposes, I am on the Great Sand Sea.

The origins of these lakes strung out in the desert near Siwa, and what sustains them, remain a bit of a puzzle. I wonder whether they are remnants of much larger late Pleistocene-early Holocene lakes that dotted the desert during the much wetter phase several thousand years ago, before desiccation created the Sahara. Perhaps; but perhaps not, as such an origin would require them to have survived a very long time. The problem is evaporation -- it has been calculated that the evaporative rate is so high that these lakes ought all to have vanished long ago; they must therefore be sustained by constant infusion of ground water, of which there is plenty -- see the well at Sutra. There must be springs at the bottoms of the lakes.

While I was having my desert reverie, Zoe and Eph were spending their time as good archaeologists should -- exploring the rock-cut tombs on the upper escarpment. They discovered these tombs to be full of stuff -- including mummies (a head graces the top of this page), and, perhaps in some ways even more astonishing, extraordinarily well-preserved grave materials. There were fragments of pottery, the wooden biers on which the bodies were carried into the tombs, linen wrappings. The textiles especially, in such good condition that one could study the very weave, attested to the preservative powers of the desert heat and dryness. There were no sherds obviously diagnostic (at least to me); perhaps the very common red fabric covered with a greenish coating (too thick to be called a slip?) might be distinctive to someone familiar with the local pottery. But I have no doubt that these tombs are Roman in date, and perhaps relatively late (say 4th-6th centuries CE? -- Ahmed Fakhry, Siwa Oasis [Cairo 1973] 137, has only a sentence or two about them). This is our first encounter with mummies "in the wild;" it's astonishing to find these tombs, which in the US would be surrounded by protective fencing and blocked off from access (if not emptied into the basement storerooms of some museum), simply standing in the desert, neglected and unprotected. We will find this pattern repeated again and again, in a country so thick with antiquities that it must be an impossible task to deal with even the most spectacular; ordinary tombs of late-living Egyptians have no special claim on the attentions of the Department of Antiquities.

We have our lunch in the tomb; the fire for tea is smoky, and I sit on the edge, looking out over the oasis and the lakes, thinking about the people who lived here 2000 years ago. Bahrein Oasis has been uninhabited for a very long time now. The tombs are clear evidence that people did live here in the past. No one knows where their settlement was, but it cannot have been far from the lakes. The best bet is that it has been buried under the shifting sands of history -- rather actually the shifting sands of the Great Sand Sea, which (as I remarked above) now skirts the very shore of the lakes.

Conversation comes around to a movie called Omar Muktar in which Antony Quinn starred in some year ago, a film about the bandit and Sanusi leader of the same name. Amgad says Quinn spoke respectable Arabic. The Sanusi, who coalesced in the eastern Libyan desert in the early nineteenth century around the religious revivalist leader whose name they took, carved out for themselves a sort of mini-empire in the desert, in the interstices of Ottoman power. They came to control Siwa and a number of other oases, and as allies of the Ottomans in World War I fought the British for control of the western stretches of Egypt. (The English Fort in Bahariya attests to British efforts to "protect" the oases against them.) There's a recent book (which I haven't read yet) on their founder by Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge. Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood (Evanston 1995), who has also compiled a reader, Sources for Sanusi Studies (London 1997). E. E. Evans-Pritchart wrote many years ago a classic ethnographic study, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Cambridge 1949).

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