Great Sand Sea and the “Lost Oasis”
Zerzura: The “Lost Oasis” Zerzura: The “Lost Oasis”
With the “discovery” by motorized explorers of
Selima, Merga and the Forty Day Road’s water holes, the number of
unlocated oases diminished until only the “Lost Oasis” of Zerzura
remained. First mentioned in 1246 as an abandoned village in the
desert southwest of the Fayoum, it reappeared as a fabulous city in
the fifteenth-century treasure-hunters’ Book of Hidden Pearls: This
city is white like a pigeon, and on the door of it is carved a
bird. Enter, and there you will find great riches, also the king
and queen sleeping in their castle. Do not approach them, but take
the treasure. Citing native sources, the first European reference
to Zerzura (1835) placed the oasis “five days west of the road from
El-Hayiz to Farafra”, or “two or three days due west from Dakhleh”.
Murray’s Handbook (1891) reported an “Oasis of the Blacks also
called Wady Zerzura” to the west of Farafra, and described it quite
matter-of-factly. But Zerzura was still unlocated, and the stories
placing it west of Dakhla gained credibility after Europeans
“discovered” Kufra Oasis in Libya, which the same tales had
mentioned. However, both the Rohlfs and Harding-King expeditions
heard accounts of black men who periodically raided Dakhla from an
oasis seven or eight days’ journey to the southwest. Having weighed
the evidence for various speculative locations in the last chapter
of Libyan Sands, Bagnold demarcated three zones. The “northern” one
– encompassing the whole Sand Sea, but rating the areas west of
Dakhla and Farafra as likeliest – was propounded by de Lancey
Forth, citing the story of a town with iron gates, seven days’
camel journey to the south, in the Siwan Manuscript; plus tales of
Bedouin chancing upon unknown oases while pursuing missing camels.
Unfortunately, similar yarns also pointed towards the far south –
that vast wilderness between Dakhla and the Selima and Merga oases
in Sudan. Dr Ball and Newbold favoured this area, largely free of
dunes and often low enough to approach the subterranean water
table; in addition, Newbold thought he glimpsed an oasis during a
flight over the desert (one of several by the Hungarian aviator
Count Läszlö Almassy). The third,
“central” zone extended southwest from Dakhla as far as Jebel
Uwaynat. Championed by Harding-King, it rested largely on native
accounts of incursions by “strange cows”, Tibbu raiders and a
“black giantess”. When Ball discovered a cache of Tibbu water jars
200km southwest of Dakhla in 1917, it supported the stories but
argued against an oasis; if a water source existed, why bother to
maintain a depot in the middle of nowhere? Accepting Ball’s theory
of a consistent water level beneath the Libyan Desert, Bagnold
argued that Zerzura could only exist in low-lying areas or deep,
wind-eroded hollows. As the desert was surveyed, the possibility of
such sites escaping notice diminished, and Bagnold doubted that an
undiscovered oasis existed. Perhaps Zerzura might once have been a
water hole or an area favoured with periodic rainfall, but the
fabled oasis of palms and ruins must be a figment of wishful
thinking: a Bedouin Shangri-la that tantalized foreign
explorers.
Great Sand Sea and the “Lost Oasis”
The Great Sand Sea that laps Siwa and floods
the Libyan–Egyptian border still has areas beyond the “limits of
reliable relief information” on Tactical Pilotage Charts, but its
overall configuration is known. From thick “whalebacks” and a mass
of transverse dunes near Siwa, it washes south in parallel ridges
(oriented north–south, with a slight northwest–southeast incline)
as far as the eye can see. Although its general existence was known
at the time of Herodotus, the extent to which it stretched
southwards wasn’t realized until the Rohlfs expedition of 1874
headed west from Dakhla into the unknown. With seventeen camels
bearing water and supplies, they soon met the erg’s outermost
ranges: “an ocean” of sand-waves over 100m high, ranked 2–4km
apart. Rohlfs estimated that their camels could scale six dunes and
advance 20km westwards on the first and second days, but that their
endurance would rapidly diminish thereafter, so with no prospect of
water or an end to the dunes they were forced to turn
north-northwest and follow the dune lanes towards Siwa. Their
isolation was intense: If one stayed behind a moment and let the
caravan out of one’s sight, a loneliness could be felt in the
boundless expanse such as brought fear even in the stoutest heart …
Nothing but sand and sky! At sea the surface of the water is moved,
unless there is a dead calm. Here in the sand ocean there is
nothing to remind one of the great common life of the earth but the
stiffened ripples of the last storm; all else is dead. By the
eighteenth day the expedition could no longer water every camel and
the animals began dying, yet it wasn’t until the thirty-sixth day
that the party reached Siwa. They had trekked 675km, 480 of them
across the waterless dunes. The feat wasn’t repeated until 1921–24,
when Colonel de Lancey Forth entered the Sand Sea twice by camel
from Dakhla and Siwa. Beneath a layer of sand he found campfires,
charred ostrich eggs, flint knives and grinders from Neolithic
times, when the desert was lush savannah. Meanwhile, Ball and Moore
had managed to round the Sand Sea’s southeastern tip (near latitude
24) by car in 1917. However, it was an Egyptian, Hassanein Bey, who
circumvented the Sand Sea’s western edge (1923) as part of an
extraordinary 3550-kilometre camel journey from Sollum on the
Mediterranean to El-Fasher in Sudan’s Darfur Province. He also
confirmed the existence of the hitherto legendary massif, Jebel
Uwaynat, whose water source encouraged motorized explorers of the
1920s to seek new routes to the southwest. For Prince Kemal al-Din
in his fleet of caterpillar-tracked Citroens, and Ralph Bagnold and
Co. – who found customized Model-T Fords more effective – the next
obstacle was the Gilf Kebir: a vast limestone plateau south of the
Sand Sea, which barred the way to remoter Libyan oases.
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