The Hidden Oasis (71 page)

‘I’d offer to show you some of the sights,’ came his voice through the intercom. ‘Jebel Uweinat, the Cave of the Swimmers. But in the circumstances I expect you just want to get back, get cleaned up and get straight into bed.’

There was a pause, then his shoulders tensed.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

He craned round towards her, flustered suddenly, embarrassed. Freya just smiled, winked and dropped her head to the side, gazing down at the desert below.

They flew over the area where the oasis must once have been, nothing there save rock and gravel and the odd stunted bush. And, also, birds. Hundreds upon hundred of birds diving and wheeling and swooping as if searching for
something. Flin did a couple of circuits, then banked the microlight and took them towards the north-east, the Sahara rolling away all around – immense and majestic and indescribably beautiful. They flew in silence for a while, then Freya reached out and laid a hand on Flin’s shoulder.

‘Can we talk about Alex?’ she asked.

He took her hand in his.

‘I’d love to talk about Alex.’

Which is what they did, the Gilf Kebir slowly dropping away behind them, a new horizon opening up ahead.

The drone of the microlight had faded and disappeared. The birds too had moved off to the north, seeking out new homes in the other wadis further up the Gilf. The desert was wholly still and wholly silent, and wholly empty. Nothing but sun, sky, sand, rock and, down at the base of the cliffs, lounging in the shade thrown by a tumble of newly fallen boulders, a small dappled dune gecko, its eyes rolling lazily, its tongue flicking in and out. Even that scuttled away when a patch of sand in front of it began to tremble. Barely noticeable at first, the tremors swiftly built and became more forceful, the desert heaving and swirling and bulging until eventually its surface tore apart altogether, like a bursting sack. A meaty, ring-covered hand clawed upward into daylight. To the left another hand appeared, thrusting from the sands like some grotesque gleaming toadstool. There was more movement, more swirling, confused glimpses of heads and limbs and torsos and two brawny, ginger-haired figures heaved themselves
free of the ground. They staggered to their feet, sand showering everywhere.

‘You OK?’ asked one.

‘Just about,’ replied the other. ‘You?’

‘Just about.’

They brushed themselves off and looked around, taking in their surroundings.

‘Helicopters have gone.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Guess we’d better get walking.’

‘Guess we’d better.’

‘Don’t want Mama to worry.’

‘Certainly don’t.’

‘Still got the …?’

They delved into their pockets, each producing a gleaming handful of what looked like gold foil. They grinned and high-fived. Then, slipping off their jackets and throwing them over their shoulders, they linked arms and started to trudge towards the east, two tiny red dots creeping across a vast immensity of yellow, the sound of singing drifting behind them:

Of all the many myths and legends associated with the Sahara, few if any have captured the imagination in quite the same way as the mysterious lost oasis of Zerzura.

Supposedly a paradise of lush palms and bubbling springs, Zerzura is said to lie somewhere in the burning wastes of the Libyan desert. Many have argued that it is nothing but a fairy tale, a mirage, an El-Dorado of the sands. That has not stopped people looking for it, and much of the early pioneering exploration of the Sahara was carried out by those hoping to track down this curious forgotten watering hole.

The name Zerzura is almost certainly derived from the Arabic
zarzar,
meaning a starling or a small bird. It first crops up in a thirteenth-century manuscript written by Osman el-Nabulsi, the governor of the Fayyum, who talks of an abandoned oasis somewhere in the desert to the south-west of Fayyum. A more detailed and colourful account appears two centuries later in the
Kitab al-Kanuz –
the Book of Hidden Pearls. A medieval treasure-hunter’s guide, the
Kitab
lists some four hundred sites in Egypt
where hidden riches can be found, and outlines the various spells and incantations required to ward off the evil spirits who guard those riches. According to the
Kitab:
‘The city of Zerzura is white like a pigeon, and on the door of it is carved a bird. Take with your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door of the city … Enter and there you will find great riches, also the king and the queen sleeping in their castle. Do not approach them, but take the treasure.’

The first European to mention the oasis was the English traveller and Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, who in 1835 wrote of hearing about a ‘Wadee Zerzoora’ – a place of palm trees and ruins located somewhere in the Great Sand Sea. A Bedouin had apparently stumbled on it while out looking for a stray camel, although his subsequent attempts to find the oasis again had proved futile (these two elements – the accidental discovery and the inability to relocate the oasis – are common to almost every tale of Zerzura).

The nineteenth century saw growing academic interest both in the Sahara and in the idea of a lost oasis, especially after the German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs’ groundbreaking 1874 journey through the Great Sand Sea. However, it wasn’t until the early part of the twentieth century that ‘Zerzura fever’ really took hold.

This was the great age of Saharan exploration, with figures such as Hassanein Bey, Prince Kemal el Din, Ladislaus Almasy, Patrick Clayton and Ralph Alger Bagnold – to name but a few – travelling though and mapping wide tracts of what had until that point been unknown, unrecorded desert. A fascination with Zerzura formed a key element of these exploratory journeys, and while not every
expedition set out specifically to find the oasis, the possibility of doing so was never far from people’s minds. The subject was debated in depth in newspapers and learned journals, and there was even an informal Zerzura Club comprising those involved in desert exploration (founded in a bar in Wadi Halfa in 1930, the club came together for an annual meeting at London’s Royal Geographical Society followed by dinner at the Café Royal).

The work of Bagnold, Almasy et al. revolutionized desert travel, pushing forward the frontiers of geography, geology, archaeology and science. Indeed Bagnold’s
The Physics of Blown Sand –
a study of the process of dune formation and movement – remains a standard text on the subject and was used by NASA when planning its Mars landings.

Their adventures also had a significant bearing on the North African campaigns of the Second World War, with many Zerzura Club regulars putting their expert knowledge to use as members of the British Army’s legendary Long Range Desert Group (founded in 1940 by the ubiquitous Bagnold). Almasy alone threw in his lot with the Nazis, something for which his fellow explorers never forgave him.

But through all of this Zerzura itself remained frustratingly elusive. Numerous theories were advanced as to its whereabouts – in 1932 there was huge excitement when an expedition led by Almasy and Clayton made an aerial sighting of two green valleys in the northern part of the Gilf Kebir (later named Wadi Abd el-Malik and Wadi Hamra). While Almasy always maintained that one or both of these wadis were the basis of the whole Zerzura legend, others were not so sure, and the search went on, as it does to this day.

With the Sahara now thoroughly mapped and explored – from the ground, air and space – it is unlikely the search will ever prove successful, but that in no way diminishes Zerzura’s mystique. If anything it only adds to it, elevating the oasis from the realms of the earthly into something altogether more potently symbolic.

As the great Ralph Bagnold put it in his book
Libyan Sands,
the power of Zerzura lies less in its actual physical presence than in what it represents – the thrill of exploration, the magic of secret places, the lure of the unknown. In a world in which few corners of the globe remain uncharted, Zerzura gives us hope that there are still adventures to be had and mysteries to be resolved. Seen in that light, Zerzura will always be out there, even when there is nowhere left to explore, for what on one level is simply a lost desert oasis is on another something far more elemental, something that lies deep within all of us: a yearning for the wonder of discovery.

(Note: If you want to learn more about the whole Zerzura story and those involved in it, Saul Kelly’s
The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura
is by far the best overview.)

Abu Treika, Mohamed
Egyptian footballer, known as the ‘Egyptian Zinedine Zidane’. Plays for El-Ahly. Born 1978.

Abydos
Cult centre of the god Osiris and burial ground of some of Egypt’s earliest pharaohs. Also home to the spectacular mortuary temple of pharaoh Seti I. Located 90 km north of Luxor.

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Born 1956.

Aided
A climbing route in which specialist equipment such as pitons, bolts, webbing ladders etc. are used to help the climber ascend. Aid climbing is the opposite of free climbing.

Aish baladi
Coarse, pitta-type bread made from wholemeal flour.

Akhenaten
Eighteenth Dynasty (New Kingdom) pharaoh. Ruled
c.
1353-1335
BC.
Generally considered to be the father of Tutankhamun.

Al-Ahram
Literally,
The Pyramids.
Best-selling Egyptian daily newspaper.

Allez
French for ‘go’. Used by climbers to encourage each other.

Almasy, Count Ladislaus (László)
Hungarian aristocrat, pilot, motor enthusiast and desert traveller, one of the pioneers of Saharan exploration in the early twentieth century. Lived 1895-1951.

Amun-Ra
One of the state gods of the New Kingdom whose major cult centre was at Waset, modern Luxor. A conflation of the gods Ra and Amun.

Ankh
Cruciform symbol. The ancient Egyptian sign of life.

Apep
A spirit of evil and chaos. It lived in eternal darkness and took the form of an enormous snake.

ARCE
The American Research Center in Egypt. An organization that funds archaeological training, research and conservation.

Arête
A sharp ridge. In climbing terms it generally refers to a vertical feature that can be used to help the climber ascend.

Ash
Ancient Egyptian desert god, particularly associated with oases.

Ashmolean
A museum in Oxford specializing in art and archaeology. It has an extensive collection of Egyptian artefacts.

Astroman
A climbing route up Washington Column in Yosemite National Park.

Atum
Literally ‘The All’. Primal Egyptian creation deity. Often associated with the sun god Ra, giving the composite name Ra-Atum.

Badarian
A Neolithic culture that flourished in the southern part of the Nile Valley around 4500
BC.
Named after El-Badari, near Asyut, the site where the culture was first identified.

Bagnold, Brigadier Ralph Alger
One of the great pioneering figures in the exploration of the Sahara in the late 1920s and early 1930s (among other epic journeys he made the first east-west crossing of the Great Sand Sea in 1932). During the Second World War he founded the legendary Long Range Desert Group. He was also a world-renowned scientist whose book on dune movements,
The Physics of Blown Sand,
remains a standard reference work to this day. Lived 1896-1990.

Ball, Dr John
One of the earliest European explorers of the western desert. Discovered Abu Ballas, or Pottery Hill, in 1916. Wrote numerous articles on the desert and the lost oasis of Zerzura. Lived 1872-1941.

Banu Sulaim
A North African Bedouin tribe.

Beato, Antonio
Anglo-Italian photographer who produced numerous images of the monuments and people of Egypt. Lived
c.
1825-1906.

Bedja
A type of bell-shaped pot used by the ancient Egyptians to mould bread.

Beirut Barracks bombing
A double suicide-bombing in Lebanon on 23 October 1983, targeting the International Peacekeeping Force that had been deployed during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1991). Explosives-laden trucks were driven into the US Marine Headquarters at Beirut international airport and the nearby French Army barracks, killing 241 American servicemen, 58 French paratroopers and five Lebanese nationals. It is generally accepted that the bombings were the work of Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants.

Beirut Embassy bombing
A suicide bombing in Lebanon on 18 April 1983 in which an explosives-laden truck was
rammed into the US Embassy building, killing 63 people. A group calling itself Islamic Jihad Organization claimed responsibility, although most analysts believe the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement was behind the atrocity.