IV South Cairo -

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    THERE is, after Herodotus, little i by the Western world towards the desert for hundreds of years. From  B.C. to the beginning of the tweh tury there is aing of eyes. Silehe eenth tury was an age of river seekers.

    And then ihere is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like rad’s sailors, are not too fortable with the etiquette of taxis, the quick, flat wit of bus ductors.

    Wheravel by local trains from the suburbs towards Knightsbridge on their way to Society meetings, they are often lost, tickets misplaced, ging only to their old maps and carrying their lecture notes—which were sloainfully written—in their ever present knapsacks which will always be a part of their bodies. These men of all nations travel at that early evening hour, six o’clock, when there is the light of the solitary. It is an anonymous time, most of the city is going home.

    The explorers arrive too early at Kensington Gore, eat at the Lyons er House and theer the Geographical Society, where they sit in the upstairs hall o the large Maori oe, going over their notes. At eight o’clock the talks begin.

    Every other week there is a lecture. Someone will introduce the talk and someone will give thanks. The cluding speaker usually argues or tests the lecture for hard currency, is pertily critical but never imperti. The main speakers, everyone assumes, stay close to the facts, and even obsessive assumptions are presented modestly.

    My jourhrough the Libya from Sokum on the Mediterrao El Obeid in the Sudan was made over one of the few tracks of the earth’s surface which present a number and variety of iing geographical problems....

    The years of preparation and researd fund-raising are never mentioned in these oak rooms. The previous week’s lecturer recorded the loss of thirty people in i Antarctica. Similar losses ireme heat or windstorm are announced with minimal eulogy. All human and financial behaviour lies on the far side of the issue being discussed—which is the earth’s surfad its “iing geographical problems.”   other depressions in this region, besides the much-discussed Wadi Rayan, be sidered possible of utilization in e with irrigation or drainage of the Nile Delta? Are the artesian water supplies of the oases grad<cite></cite>ually diminishing?

    Where shall we look for the mysterious “Zerzura”? Are there any other “lost” oases remaining to be discovered? Where are the tortoise marshes of Ptolemy?

    John Bell, director of Desert Surveys i, asked these questions in

    By the  the papers grew even more modest. “/ should like to add a few remarks on some of the points raised ieresting discussion on the ‘Prehisteography of Kharga Oasis.’ “ By the mid- the lost oasis of Zerzura was found by Ladislaus de Almasy and his panions.

    In  the great decade of Libya expeditions came to an end, and this vast and silent pocket of the earth became one of the theatres of war.

    In the arboured bedroom the burned patient views great distahe way that dead knight in Ravenna, whose marble body seems alive, almost liquid, has his head raised upon a stone pillow, so it  gaze beyond his feet into vista. Farther than the desired rain of Africa. Towards all their lives in Cairo. Their works and days.

    Hana sits by his bed, and she travels like a squire beside him during these journeys.

    In  we had begun mapping the greater part of the Gilf Kebir Plateau, looking for the lost oasis that was called Zerzura.

    The City of Acacias.

    We were desert Europeans. John Bell had sighted the Gilf in

    Then Kemal el Din. Then Bagnold, who found his way south into the Sand Sea. Madox, ole of Desert Surveys, His Excellency Wasfi Bey, Casparius the photographer, Dr.

    Kadar the geologist and Bermann. And the Gilf Kebir— that large plateau resting in the Libya, the size of Switzerland, as Madox liked to say—was our heart, its escarpments precipitous to the east a, the plateau sloping gradually to the north. It rose out of the desert four hundred miles west of the Nile.

    For the early Egyptians there was supposedly no water west of the oasis towns. The world ended out there. The interior was waterless. But in the emptiness of deserts you are always surrounded by lost history. Tebu and Senussi tribes had roamed there possessing wells that they guarded with great secrecy. There were rumours of fertile lands that led within the desert’s interior. Arab writers ihirteenth tury spoke of Zerzura. “The Oasis of Little Birds.” “The City of Acacias.” In The Book of Hidden Treasures, the Kitab al Kanuz, Zerzura is depicted as a white city, “white as a dove.” Look at a map of the Libya and you will see names. Kemal el Din in , who, almost solitary, carried out the first great modern expedition. Bagnold -. Almasy-Madox -. Just north of the Tropic of cer.

    We were a small clutch of a natioween the wars, mapping and re-expl. We gathered at Dakhla and Kufra as if they were bars or cafes. An oasis society, Bagnold called it. We knew each other’s intimacies, each other’s skills and weaknesses.

    We fave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. “The grooves and the cated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.” That was the real Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.

    Our first journey, moving south from Jaghbub into the desert among the preserve of Zwaya and Majabra’s tribes. A seven-day jouro El Taj. Madox and Bermann, four others. Some camels a horse and a dog. As we left they told us the old joke. “To start a journey in a sandstorm is good luck.” ed the first night twenty miles south. The  m we woke and came out of our tents at five. Too cold to sleep. We stepped towards the fires and sat in their light in the larger darkness. Above us were the last stars. There would be no sunrise for awo hours. We passed around hot glasses of tea. The camels were being fed, half asleep, chewing the dates along with the date stones. We ate breakfast and then drank three mlasses of tea.

    Hours later we were in the sandstorm that hit us out of clear m, ing from nowhere. The breeze that had been refreshing had gradually strengthened. Eventually we looked down, and the surface of the desert was ged. Pass me the book... here. This is Hassanein Bey’s wonderful at of such storms— “It is as though the surface were underlaid with steam-pipes, with thousands of orifices through which tis of steam are puffing out. The sand leaps in little spurts and whirls. Inch by inch the disturbance rises as the wind increases its force. It seems as though the whole surface of the desert were rising in obedieo some upthrusting force beh. Larger pebbles strike against the shins, the khe thighs. The sand-grains climb the body till it strikes the fad goes over the head. The sky is shut out, all but the  objects fade from view, the universe is filled.” We had to keep moving. If you pause sand builds up as it would around anything stationary, and locks you in. You are lost forever. A sandstorm  last five hours. Even when we were in trucks in later years we would have to keep driving with no vision. The worst terrors came at night. Onorth of Kufra, we were hit by a storm in the darkness. Three a.m. The gale swept the tents from their ms and we rolled with them, taking in sand like a sinking boat takes in water, weighed down, suffog, till we were cut free by a camel driver.

    We travelled through three storms during nine days. We missed small desert towns where we expected to locate more supplies. The horse vahree of the camels died. For the last two days there was no food, only tea. The last link with any other world was the k of the fire-black tea urn and the long spoon and the glass which came towards us in the darkness of the ms. After the third night we gave up talking. All that mattered was the fire and the minimal brown liquid.

    Only by luck did we stumble on the desert town of El Taj. I walked through the souk, the alley of clocks chiming, into the street of barometers, past the rifle-cartridge stalls, stands of Italian tomato saud other tinned food from Benghazi, calico from Egypt, ostrich-tail decorations, street dentists, book merts. We were still mute, each of us dispersing along our own paths. We received this new world slowly, as if ing out of a drowning. In the tral square of El Ta<cite></cite>j we sat and ate lamb, rice, badawi cakes, and drank milk with almond pulp beaten into it. All this after the long wait for three ceremonial glasses of tea flavoured with amber and mint.

    Sometime in  I joined a Bedouin caravan and was told there was another one of us there. Fenelon-Barnes, it turned out.

    I went to his tent. He was out for the day on some small expedition, cataloguing fossil trees. I looked around his tent, the sheaf of th the wrong pany. I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate. I was fetting she was youhan I.

    She was studying me. Such a simple thing. And I was watg for one wrong move iatue-like gaze, something that would give her away.

    Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. I could wake and raise my eyes to the map of old settlements along the Mediterranean coast—Gazala, Tobruk, Mersa Matruh—and south of that the hand-painted wadis, and surrounding those the shades of yellowhat we iried to lose ourselves in. “My task is to describe briefly the several expeditions which have attacked the Gilf Kebir. Dr. Bermann will later take us back to the desert as it existed thousands of years ago...” That is the way Madox spoke to eographers at Kensington Gore. But you do not find adultery in the minutes of the Geographical Society. Our room never appears iailed reports which chartered every knoll and every i of history.

    Ireet of imported parrots in Cairo one is hectored by almost articulate birds. The birds bark and whistle in rows, like a plumed avenue. I knew which tribe had travelled which silk or camel road carrying them in their petite palanquins across the deserts. Forty-day journeys, after the birds were caught by slaves or picked like flowers iorial gardens and then placed in bamboo cages to ehe river that is trade. They appeared like brides in a mediaeval courtship.

    We stood among them. I was showing her a city that was o her.

    Her hand touched me at the wrist.

    “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?” I didn’t say anything.

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