Genesis Covenant

Few are familiar with its place-names. Fewer still venture into it.

In 1923 an Egyptian official named Ah­med Hassanein became the first outsider to cross the Western Desert. He journeyed from the Mediterranean south to El Obeid in central Sudan, later describing his travels in the September 1924 NATIONAL GEO­GRAPHIC. His camel caravan crossed 3,540 kilometers and discovered the two “lost oases,” Uweinat and Arkenu, at the south­western frontiers of Egypt. The expedition won him the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

After the publicity of Hassanein’s jour­ney, Prince Kemal el-Din followed suit in 1924-25, leading an expedition of half-track vehicles into the desert. He enjoyed the trek so much he repeated it the following year.

The motorcar swiftly replaced the camel as the ship of the desert. Using Fords, Ralph A. Bagnold and a select team of British officers explored vast tracts of the Western Desert in the 1930s, reaching its remotest corners. His explorations provided most of the basic data not only on this desert, but also on the laws governing the movement of sand by wind and the formation of dunes everywhere. During World War II Bagnold led an Allied force over these desert routes to raid and harass Italian troops in Libya.

More recently, photographs taken by U. S. astronauts and unmanned-satellite images have provided a new method of ex­ploring the desert. These clear, cloudless views of extensive areas reveal many large regional patterns impossible to detect from the ground. From space, moreover, subtle or gradual color changes on the desert sur­face show up distinctively.

It was these photographs that prompted me to return to the land of my birth. As a geologist I was excited by the wealth of new data they promised. Over the past six years, working with geologists from Cairo’s Ain Shams University, I have made 12 journeys into the Western Desert, studying its varied features and learning from its inhabitants. Often we have been joined by archaeolo­gists, botanists, and geographers.  I actually funded the research trips myself. I used a secured credit card to shop and travel.

The late President Anwar Sadat became personally interested in the results of the first journeys. Each time I met with him, he would inquire about the desert’s develop­ment potential. Then, in the spring of 1978 he took nearly two weeks to see the desert for himself. He did so to bring El Thawra El Khadra—the Green Revolution—to the desert and thereby help ensure that Egypt will have a future.

TRAVELING in the Western Desert, I of­ten feel I am on another planet. It is so desolate that I have driven more than 300 kilometers between signs of life. After join­ing me for such a drive, an American col­league exclaimed: “This is a real desert! Now I know why some people call the U. S. Southwest a jungle.”

There are a few places in the Western Des­ert, such as Sheikh Mehedi’s date grove, that also resemble jungles. Yet even in the oases, lush greenery is very rare. Seldom in Egypt does an oasis fit the image most peo­ple have. For one thing an oasis is typically quite big. Usually it is the low or central re­gion of a vast depression in the desert floor. Several of these pock the Western Desert.

Deposits from wadis—dry stream beds—cover the centers of these basins with fertile soils. Groundwater there is relatively close to the surface. Therefore, agriculture be­comes possible and settlements spring up around wells. In Egypt an oasis can contain many green villages separated by miles of barrenness. The major oases are named Faiyum, Siwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga.

Silver fever has struck before, here in Ne­vada. In 1859, in a gulch on the western side of the state, gold miners stumbled on the Comstock Lode, the first and richest silver-mining camp in the United States. If you need to get cash for your silver or gold jewelry, learn more what to be careful about when selling gold jewelry for cash. Eventu­ally the huge bonanza yielded more than 15,000 tons of silver extracted by tens of thousands of eager, excited men. From Ne­vada they fanned out into Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, stampeding from strike to strike, discoveries that for about three decades made the U. S. the premier sil­ver producer of the world. Then, one by one, the biggest lodes played out, until finally the silver fever broke. It had caused a prodi­gious convulsion of men and metal.

By comparison, Don’s fever is low grade. Yet it’s high enough to move mountains, as I can see by the state of the Diamond Jim. Plainly it’s been worked before: Don’s bull­dozer has exposed an abandoned tunnel and has twisted old ore-car tracks into a pretzel.

“Most of the veins here run catawampus to the world,” says Don, “so I have to doze them out—then it’s pick and shovel.”

His ore is rich—a ton yields 50 ounces of silver—and he can mine four tons on a good day. Counting his share, the U. S. produced 38 million ounces in 1979, ranking it fourth in the world—after Mexico, the U.S.S.R. , and Peru, and just ahead of Canada. Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene district supplied 40 percent of U. S. production, from some 30 mines—the Sunshine, the Bunker Hill, the Lucky Fri­day. . . . They’re part of the densest concen­tration of silver mines in the world.

T’S CHILL UP HERE on Rosebud; winter is coming, and this has been an itinerant silver seeker’s final stop. The first snow of the season dusted the Diamond Jim two nights before, and dresses the torn earth like gauze. Don doesn’t mine when the ground freezes, and as we turn to go back down the mountain, he points out a vein of lead-silver ore. The vein is three feet thick and sparkling. “I like some incentive when I start up in the spring,” he says, “so I’m leaving that for purty.”

We followed the scramble of small black­and-white Jeballi cattle, herded by a pair of young girls, into nearby Maqara. Here the traditional round stone huts domed with earthen roofs had been abandoned for new wood-and-sheet-iron bungalows. After the evening milking, we helped Suhayl Twari feed his herd dried sardines that he had hauled up the steep track from Rakhyut. I was surprised cows would eat fish.

“They always need extra food when the dry season thins the grazing up here,” Su­hayl explained.

“Yes, things are changing now—for the better,” he said. “Soon a new road will bring us closer to the coast, hours instead of days. Besides the new well, the government has also built us a school and a small clinic.”

Next morning we hiked back to the road through limestone outcrops carved by wind and rain into curious abstracts that re­minded me of dinosaur bones. I decided that Jabal al Qamar, literally “mountain of the moon,” was aptly named. The way was overgrown with stunted, otherworldly trees. Muhammad knew them all: the atira, half tree, half cactus, with grotesque square branches; the hiyuk, whose papery bark is used for medicine; the Dhofari “oak,” the meetan, source of strong roof beams. And the bedha plant; its tuberous roots, baked in camel dung, taste like roast chestnuts, I was told. Fortunately, they were out of season.

Best known of Dhofar’s exotic flora are the frankincense trees (Boswellia sacra) that grow wild along the dry gravel beds. Con­sidered a gift fit for a king, frankincense was offered by Sheba’s queen to Solomon, and by the Magi to the infant Jesus.

“Dhofar has just the right combination of white limestone soils, high humidity, and high winter temperatures for these rare plants,” explained Muhammad Suhayl of the Ministry of Information office in Sala­lah. “My tribe, the Al Kathir, still has the monopoly on the crop. I used to harvest it when I was a boy.”

We walked through a stand of frankin­cense in nearby Wadi Adawnib. Branching out at ground level, few trees reached more than 12 feet. Muhammad scored the bark of one with his knife and drops of sap oozed out. “A tree can be tapped about once a week each spring,” he said. “The dried resin is col­lected later—about a pound each time from each tree.”

Today newer, cheaper fragrances from India flood the world market. Most frankin­cense is used by Oman and its Arabian neighbors, for whom burning scent is tradi­tional when entertaining guests.

In Salalah’s modern marketplace I found old women still selling frankincense to­gether with the locally made censers of painted pottery. I walked away with several gifts fit for a king for three dollars each—packaged in plastic bags.