CHAPTER VII

“FANTASIAS”

Social life in Siwa — Games — “Lubki” drinkers — Giving alms to the poor — Sheikhs in fiction and in fact — “Beit el Mal” — Ramadan, the Mohammedan Lent — The Mulid of Sidi Suliman — Paying calls — Etiquette of eating — The religious dance of the Medinia — The “Zikr” — Bacchanalian revels — Siwan music and singing — Women dancers 239

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Walls of Siwa Frontispiece

Col. The Honble. M. G. Talbot, C.B.; Sheikh Idris el Senussi; and The Idrisi of Luxor to face foreword

The Author „ page 2

A Falconer outside a Bedouin Camp „ „ 26

Silugi Hounds „ „ 30

Camel Corps „ „ 44

Camel Corps trekking to Siwa, near Megahiz Pass „ „ 58

Sheikh Mahdi Abdel Nebi, of Aghourmi, with his Daughter and Cousin „ „ 70

Ruins of “Omm Beyda,” The Temple of Jupiter Ammon „ „ 86

The Citadel and Mosque of El Atik „ „ 98

Gate into the Western Quarter „ „ 112

“Kasr Hassuna,” The District Officer’s House „ „ 120

Sheikh Mohammed Idris, the Chief of the Senussi „ „ 132

The Western Quarter from an Eastern Roof „ „ 144

Cleaning Tamousy Spring „ „ 160

In the Western Quarter „ „ 176

The Spring of Zeitoun „ „ 178

Siwa Town from the South „ „ 200

A Bride — The Daughter of Bashu Habun before her Wedding „ „ 214

The Town-Crier’s Daughter „ „ 222

A Little Siwan Girl „ „ 238

A “Fantasia” at the tomb of Sidi Suliman „ „ 252

Map.

[Illustration: COL. THE HONBLE. M. G. TALBOT, C.B.; SHEIKH IDRIS EL SENUSSI; AND THE IDRISI OF LUXOR]

FOREWORD

KNOCKENHAIR, DUNBAR, _2nd November_, 1922.

DEAR MR. BELGRAVE,

When you begged me to write a “Foreword” for your first book on Siwa, you asked me if I remembered you as a Junior Officer in the British Camel Company at Khartoum in the early days of the Great War—and later in the Camel Corps of the Frontier Districts Administration of Egypt. My answer is that I remember you well in both capacities, and I have a very happy recollection of the excellent services rendered by both the units in which you served. The appearance of British soldiers patrolling on camels up the White and Blue Niles had the best possible effect in cementing and consolidating the good relations existing between the Sudanese populations and our troops and confirming that spirit of loyalty and goodwill which, throughout the war, characterized the once fanatical Dervishes of Mahdist times—a truly marvellous transformation which had changed them from a fierce and ruthless enemy into loyal and brave soldiers and peaceful inhabitants, who were enabled to render the British cause wholehearted and ready support at a most critical period of our history.

Your transfer to the Frontier Districts Administration of Egypt also interests me, for it may not be known to you that one of the first reforms I instituted on my own transfer from the Governor-Generalship of the Sudan to the High Commissionership of Egypt at the end of 1916 was the organization of the new Administration to which you were appointed.

Before our reconquest of the Sudan I had, as Director of Military Intelligence in Egypt, some connection with the oases of the Libyan Desert and the activities of the Senussi, as well as with the government of the Sinai Peninsula. In those early days of the British occupation of Egypt, Turkish rule prevailed in Tripoli, and the actual frontier between that province and Egypt was often in dispute—whilst a somewhat similar condition existed on Egypt’s eastern frontier in Sinai. It was thought politically desirable at that time to maintain the _status quo_ and to avoid trouble with the Turkish authorities to whom Egypt still owed a nominal Suzerainty—that this was not always feasible is evidenced by the celebrated “Akaba incident” which at one time threatened to disturb the peace between the two countries. The preservation of the _status quo_ to which I refer, meant the maintenance on the extreme eastern and western frontiers of Egypt of the purely Egyptian administrative control which, owing to the almost total absence of supervision, was of the lightest and could hardly be designated as efficient. The necessity of inaugurating some improvement in both directions had frequently been mooted, but it was not until the advent of the Great War and the military operations against the Turks in Sinai, on the one hand, and against the Senussi invasion of Egypt, on the other, that the long-postponed reorganization became possible. By that time Italian had given place to Turkish control in Tripoli, whilst it was also evident that Palestine and Arabia were no longer to remain an integral portion of the Turkish Empire.

These facts made it very desirable to establish a closer Administrative Control in both directions, and it is to me a matter of great satisfaction that an organization known as the Frontiers District Administration materialized, under the able direction of Colonel G. G. Hunter and his efficient staff of British and Egyptian officers and officials, with its well-equipped Camel Corps, its patrolling system, and its more intimate and sympathetic government of the oases and of the somewhat unruly nomad tribes on both western and eastern frontiers.

The mere fact that you, as one of these District Officers, have been resident for nearly two years in the important, though remote and little-known, Oasis of Siwa, and have been able to write a very interesting and useful account of your experiences—together with an admirable survey of its ancient, mediæval and recent history—its customs, superstitions and its social life, is but one proof amongst many others of the value of this new organization which, in spite of the various political changes in Egypt, has, I hope, come to stay.

As an ex-officer and one who was lately in Egypt, you are wise to avoid in your book all reference to recent political events and the complicated situations to which they have given rise. In this letter I shall observe a similar reticence, and the more so having regard to the positions I have held in Egypt and the Sudan. Remarks on so controversial a subject must be complete and detailed if they are to assist the general public in forming a true estimate of the “tangled skein” which the political situation now represents—a situation in which truth and fiction are almost inextricably involved.

The perusal of the proof sheets you have sent me, together with your excellent series of illustrations (and here may I congratulate you on the artistic skill of the charming sketches displayed in the coloured reproductions?), recall that “lure of the desert” which is so fascinating to all of us whose lot has been cast in those countries bordering on the Great Nile waterway and the illimitable stretches of sandy desert beyond. Your apt quotations at the beginning of each chapter show that the “lure” has seized you also, and I can well understand your desire to undertake further service in those regions which so evidently attract you, and in which you have won the sympathy and respect of the nomad Arab and sedentary Berber tribes of the Western Desert.

The title of your book is well explained in Part I, Chapter III, and you are wise to add a bibliography of the various works you have consulted, for there is no subject more debatable than the origin of the Berber tribes of whom you write. “This crossing to Africa by the Northern Mediterranean peoples,” says Professor Breasted in his _History of Egypt_, “is but one of the many such ventures which in prehistoric ages brought over the white race whom we know as Libyans.” His remarks refer to events in the thirteenth century B.C., when people known as the Tehenu lived on the western borders of the Delta of Egypt, beyond them were the Libyans, and still further to the west were the Meshwesh or Maxyes of Herodotus—all of them doubtless ancestors of the great Berber tribes of North Africa.

In the reign of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, the successor of Rameses the Great, it appears that one Meryey, King of the Libyans, forced the Tehenu to join him, and supported by roving bands of maritime adventurers from the coast (the Sherden or Sardinians, the Sikeli, natives of early Sicily, the Lysians and the Etruscans), invaded Egypt. It is with these wandering marauders that the peoples of Europe emerge for the first time upon the arena of history.

It is probable that not long before this invasion a great Canaanite migration into Libya had taken place, for it is recorded by the historian Procopius, a native of Cæsarea (565 B.C.), how the Hebrews, after quitting Egypt, attacked Palestine from beyond Jordan under Joshua. After the capture of Jericho they advanced westwards, drove out the Gergazites, Jebusites and other tribes inhabiting the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and forced them to flee into Egypt, where they were not allowed to settle, but were obliged to move westwards along the North African coast and into the oases. There is also evidence that some of these emigrants, under Roman pressure, were forced further westwards to Morocco and were called Moors. Later on they, in their turn, were followed by a similar migration of Jews from Palestine.

Thus it would appear that as far back as the thirteenth century B.C. the original Libyans, a warlike race, became co-mingled with maritime adventurers from Southern Europe, with Canaanites, Jews and Egyptians—a truly wonderful admixture of Asiatics, Africans and Europeans, and it is with the ancestors of this international potpourri that you deal so interestingly when you trace onwards, through the ages down to the present day, the history of those desert nomads and those sedentary dwellers of the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon. Surely your story will stimulate interest not only in the archæologist, but in all who desire to trace the manners, customs and characteristics of present-day peoples to their original sources. Those Siwans of whom you make a special study are of all people perhaps the most interesting, for, living, as it were, on an island, in a sea of desert, they—like the Abyssinians on the east—have been less affected by the world-changes than those who inhabit the main highways of the great African continent. The cult of Ammon and the seat of the Great Oracle, it is true, brought countless hordes of strangers to that mystic depression lying some seventy feet below the level of the Mediterranean, but the leading characteristics of the inhabitants have probably altered little, and religion—from Ammon worship to Islam, with an occasional admixture of Christian, Jewish and Pagan rites (the last brought by countless slaves from Central Africa)—has remained the all-absorbing interest of these oases dwellers.

As you truly say, the origin of the branching-horned ram as the fleshly symbol of the great God Ammon, “the King of the Gods,” “the unrevealed,” “the hidden one,” still remains a mystery. We know that the solar god Ra, whose supremacy in the “Old Kingdom” was so marked, from the Fifth Dynasty onwards and was at its zenith in the Twelfth Dynasty, became linked in the religion of the “Middle Kingdom” with Ammon, hitherto an obscure local god of Thebes who attained some prominence in the political rise of the city and was called by the priests Ammon-Ra. His cult gradually spread over the civilized world, and in the Roman period he was worshipped as Jupiter Ammon. He was essentially the god of Oracles, but how he came to have his special sanctuary in the Western Desert is still a mystery, though your account of this in the legends of the Arabic history of Siwa (Chapter III) throws an interesting light on the subject. Herodotus, we know, gave to Siwa the name of Oasis (probably derived from the Coptic word Ouahe, to dwell, from which the Arabic Wa is derived)—that is to say a fertile spot surrounded by desert, and thus from Siwa all other oases have derived their names.

To Siwa then came kings and wise men of the East, merchants and pilgrims, all bringing offerings to the temple of the god and soliciting the advice of the Oracle on their mundane affairs. For a thousand years and more these treasures were accumulating, but where are they now? As Egyptian research has yielded up unexpected buried treasure, may not the ancient god still have something in reserve for the archæologist and treasure-seeker who is bold enough to undertake excavation work in the little village of Aghourmi, some two miles east of Siwa, where the ruins of the Temple of Ammon still exist? Your interesting account of these ruins and the legends you have so sedulously culled from the Siwans, cannot fail again to create interest in the hidden treasures of the desert. One who has had some terrible experiences at the hands of the Senussi Arabs during the war—I refer to the gallant and gifted author of that thrilling story, _Prisoners of the Red Desert_, Captain Gwatkin-Williams, R.N.—writes, “It may be that this twentieth century of ours, this era of fish and bird men, may see lifted the mystery which shrouds the hidden treasure of Ammon, the ‘Unrevealed,’ for, so far as our limited modern information goes, those treasures have never yet been discovered.”

Your interesting account of the visit of Alexander the Great (331 B.C.) to the Oracle, when, marching along the coast to Matruh, he turned south and underwent great hardships before reaching his destination, recalls a very different journey I made to Sollum in 1917. Leaving Alexandria by train for Behig, I there found a fleet of armoured motorcars awaiting me, and the journey to and from Sollum, then garrisoned by British troops, was comfortably accomplished in four days. To my great regret I was too pressed for time to be able to visit Siwa, where, “on all hands springs of water gushed forth . . . that human ants’ nest, fabricated for the most part of rock-salt, mud and palm trunks . . . to which the Great War surging round the world had brought the drone of aeroplanes, the hum of armoured cars and rattle of machine guns.”

Your reference in Chapter V to the wonderful work carried on by Miss Nina Baird amongst the bedouin women and children rendered destitute in consequence of the Senussi invasion, recalls several visits Lady Wingate and I made to Amria—the village in the desert west of Alexandria and not far from Lake Mariut, where, as you say, this courageous lady worked practically singlehanded in teaching these desert waifs and strays to make carpets—thus starting an industry and giving the women and children a means of livelihood and a form of protection which for ever will be remembered with gratitude by the Western Arabs. A daughter of that well-known and greatly respected Scotsman, Sir Alexander Baird, an excellent horsewoman, a good Arabic scholar, and one who performed important services in the Egyptian troubles in the spring of 1919, Miss Baird’s energetic efforts throughout the war utterly exhausted her strength, and she fell an easy victim to typhoid soon after—to be followed a few months later by her talented father, and thus was the British community in Egypt deprived of two valuable lives who had endeared themselves to Europeans and natives alike and whose loss is deplored by all. On my last visit the carpet-making industry was about to be removed from Amria to an imposing structure built by Captain Jennings Bramley at Behig, the headquarters of the Eastern District of the Western Desert. Here this energetic official had also constructed, out of the ruins of an old building, a mediæval-looking stronghold, where we spent a few days and visited the ruined church of St. Menas, to which you make a passing reference in Chapter I. This buried Christian city is locally known as Abu Menas, and for long defied discovery, as it had not occurred to those in search of it to connect it with the Arab name of Abumna, until the German explorer, Kauffmann, and his companion lighted on the historic spot, which lies from fifty to fifty-five miles south-west of Alexandria. Your readers may be interested to know that Menas was an Egyptian in the Roman army who became a Christian and took the opportunity of a great public function to make an avowal of his faith which was proscribed under the Emperor Diocletian. He was tortured and eventually beheaded. His friends begged or stole his body, tied it on a camel and determined to found a settlement wherever the camel should lie down. Menas before death had expressed a wish to be buried near Lake Mariut, and here surely enough the camel insisted on lying down, and could not be induced to go further—so his followers buried the body on the spot. Many miracles were reported of his tomb, the settlement became a large Christian city with a magnificent cathedral built of granite from Assuan and marble from Italy. For some centuries the place became a resort for pilgrimage from all parts of the near East, but soon after the Arab conquest it was despoiled to provide material for the mosques in Alexandria and Cairo. Gradually the ruins were silted up with the ever-shifting sand, becoming mere mounds, and it was the chance discovery of a small terra-cotta plaque imprinted with the figure of Menas, standing erect with arms outstretched between two kneeling camels and a rough inscription, that led Herr Kauffmann and his friend to unearth the great basilica which had contained the tomb. The walls of the cathedral appear to have been lined with marble, whilst small pieces of mosaic on the floor give the impression that the dome was probably adorned in the same way. Some of the bases and capitals of the pillars are decorated after the Greek style with acanthus leaf ornaments, others in the stricter Roman method of straight panels. The dwelling-houses are small and constructed in blocks separated by narrow streets. Not far distant, on the coast, stand the ruins of Abusir (the Taposiris Magna of the Romans) which was evidently used as a port of arrival and departure by the thousands of pilgrims who came across the sea to pay their vows in this hallowed sanctuary. When I visited this place it was garrisoned by the very efficient Indian Camel Corps which the Maharajah of Bikaner had sent as his contribution to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force.

Your interesting sketch of the rise of the great Senussi, the establishment of his now widespread confraternity and his invasion, at the instigation of German and Turkish officers and officials, of Egypt in 1915; his hostile occupation of the oases and the successful campaign so ably directed by General Sir W. Peyton, which finally drove his forces across the frontier and re-established Egyptian domination in the Western Desert, merits careful perusal if the reader wishes to understand the last of that series of invasions from the West which began in the days of the Pharaoh Mereneptah, nearly three thousand five hundred years ago, and which, given favourable conditions, may yet be repeated.

All you so interestingly describe recalls my long connection with the doings of the Confraternity when Sayed Mohammed el Mahdi, the son of Sayed Ben Ali, the virtual founder of the order, was its titular head. To him, in 1883, the Sudan Mahdi wrote, offering the position of third Khalifa in his new hierarchy. Had Sayed Mohammed accepted, it is possible that, in addition to the Sudan revolt, the whole of North Africa might have been ablaze; but the Senussi Mahdi aimed at peaceful penetration rather than military occupation: his zawias (religious rest-houses) had gradually been extended to Central and West Africa, they “were neutral meeting-places where difficulties, tribal, commercial, legal or religious, could be settled by an unbiassed authority. His akhwan were judges as well as missionaries. They defined tribal areas, settled water and grazing rights as well as meting out the justice of the Koran to those who infringed the code of Islam.”

The interest of the Turkish Government in this great movement dates back many years, and I well remember when the late Ghazi Mukhtar Pasha (then Turkish High Commissioner in Egypt) procured the original manuscript Senussi prayer-book, had one thousand copies lithographed in a private printing press in Cairo, and dispatched them as a present to the Senussi with a request in the title-page for the great religious leader’s “help in prayer.”

Sayed Mohammed died on the 1st June, 1902. I had full knowledge of the dispatch to Kufara—the then headquarters of the Order—of his tombstone which had been secretly cut and engraved in Cairo by an expert native stonemason; but if I digress in this manner I shall soon exceed the limits of a “Foreword,” and so must rapidly pass over these early experiences which, nevertheless, proved useful when the Great War let loose all the hidden forces of hostility and revealed the immense influence of Islamic teaching for good or ill as applied in the interests of the various opponents. That, on the one hand, Sayed Ahmed, the uncle and successor of Sayed Mohammed, should have espoused the Turco-German cause and harboured Enver Pasha and other notable Turkish officers who had crossed to the north coast of Africa in submarines, to organize the Senussi campaigns against Egypt and the Sudan; whilst, on the other hand, British influence and British officers were enabled to assist the Sherif of Mecca—the Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam—in his successful revolt against Turkish rule in Arabia, are interesting and little-understood features in the history of the great world upheaval from which we have but recently emerged, and no doubt they will be chronicled in due course by those concerned in these “side-shows,” as they are somewhat inadequately described. It must not, however, be forgotten that—insignificant as they may appear in comparison with the terrific clash of arms in Western Europe—they have resulted in giving Egypt tranquillity on its western frontier, in restoring to the Sudan the great lost province of Darfur, and in freeing the Arabian Peninsula—results which in pre-war days would have been characterized as epoch-making events, but which have passed almost unnoticed in the great changes which have taken place in the territorial redistributions of the Treaty of Versailles.

To touch on but one little-known detail, you refer to the Talbot Mission. This has not attracted the attention it deserves, but I venture to think history will credit Colonel Milo Talbot with no mean achievement when it is realized that his mission effected the triangular treaties between Great Britain, Italy and the present head of the Senussi Confraternity, Sayed Mohammed el Idrisi, whereby both Egypt and Tripoli have secured, let us hope, a trusted ally.

Incidentally—through the good offices of Colonel Talbot’s able Egyptian coadjutor, Hassanein Bey— that intrepid lady, Rosita Forbes, accompanied by the Bey, was enabled to penetrate to the Oasis of Kufara in 1921. Another member of the Talbot Mission—Mr. Francis Rodd—is also utilizing his experiences of the Senussi Confraternity and the Western Desert by making a prolonged and important journey with Mr. Buchanan from West Africa, which should throw much new and interesting light on many still obscure localities.

In these days of improved communications—when the two ends of the great iron road destined to connect South with North Africa are gradually approaching one another, and when other railways are either under construction or projected to connect the Atlantic with the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea—the time may not be far distant when the great Sahara and Libyan Deserts, too, will be traversed from north to south and east to west, and the undoubted mineral wealth and raw products of Central Africa will be brought to the nearest ports for shipment to all parts of the world. Your remarks, therefore, on mining, industries, trade and the means of communication southwards from the Mediterranean through the oases which you and others have visited, will doubtless prove of value and merit careful consideration.

Meanwhile, much good work remains to be done by officers and officials like yourself who take a keen interest in the welfare of the sparse nomad and sedentary populations of these still remote districts, fostering amongst them those feelings of confidence and goodwill which will go far towards preparing them for the advent of the amenities of civilization which must come with the inevitable development of the no longer Dark Continent. Now, however, that the clash of arms is past and, let us hope, a new era of peaceful development set in, I might well have prefaced my remarks with this quotation:

“God’s benison go with you, and with those

That would make good of bad and friends of foes.”

The immortal poet’s words seem to me not only to synchronize with the pleasantly conversational style of your own narrative which has induced the somewhat novel method I have adopted of writing you a letter by way of an introduction—but they also express the spirit which will, I trust, animate us in our present and future relations with those nations and peoples of the Near East who unfortunately for themselves espoused our enemies’ cause in the Great War, but whose best interests lie—now and henceforth—in the friendship and goodwill of the Allies.

Your chapters on the customs, superstitions and “fantasias” of the Siwans recall much that is similar amongst the Sudan tribes and peoples—especially those of the Moslem Faith—and your account of the “zikr” is particularly interesting. In the words of an Islamic writer, by means of this religious exercise “the whole world and all its attractions disappears from the vision of the faithful worshipper, and he is enabled to behold the excellence of the Most High. Nothing must be allowed to distract his attention from its performance, and ultimately he attains by its medium a proper conception of the Tauhid, or unity of God. . . . To enter Paradise one must say after every prayer ‘God is Holy’ ten times, ‘Praised be God’ ten times, and ‘God is great’ ten times.”

If the age of miracles has not gone for ever then these Moslem devotees—the descendants of the ancient warriors of the Libyan Desert, side by side with their courageous and resourceful British helpers—may yet cause the great Oracle of Jupiter Ammon to reveal the secrets of that old-time sanctuary with which your book deals so interestingly.

[Signature: Yours sincerely

Reginald Wingate.]

“On grassy slopes the twining vine boughs grew

And hoary olives ’twixt far mountains blue,

And many a green-necked bird sung to his mate

Within the slim-leaved thorny pomegranate

That flung its unstrung rubies on the grass.”

“But a desert stretched and stricken left and right, left and right,

Where the piled mirages thicken under white-hot light—

A skull beneath a sandhill and a viper coiled inside—

And a red wind out of Libya roaring ‘Run and hide.’”

SIWA

SIWA THE OASIS OF JUPITER AMMON