I write in the midst of preparations for an expedition to Gilf Kebir, the great sandstone massif and escarpment in the southwestern corner of Egypt’s Western Desert. I am excited, not least because it is a region rarely visited by naturalists and therefore any observations made could be of import. Indeed, it is a region rarely visited by anyone.

The miracle of Google Earth reveals just why. Zooming in on Gilf Kebir is to zoom in on an absolute moonscape devoid of any of the trappings of modern civilization — or indeed of even the skimpiest wash of vegetation that nature might provide. When I have been asked what I will be likely to see there in the way of animal life, my reply has been a pessimistic “very little.” The scientific literature backs me up. In Goodman and Meininger’s The Birds of Egypt, there is an interesting map that divides the entire country into squares; with each square assigned a value based upon the number of bird species recorded breeding in that sector. The value given for those squares encompassing the southern Western Desert is, well, mostly around zero, rising to between one and five species in Gilf Kebir itself and its neighbor Gabal Uweinat to the south.

Reptiles are likewise sparse. In a similar cartographic exercise in Baha El-Din’s A Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Egypt, the region would appear to be host to up to 10 non-amphibious species, rising to a dozen recorded in Uweinat. To the north and west, the surrounding desert supports barely three or four reptile species. Clearly it is very, very barren country indeed.

One of the joys of preparing for such a trip is doing the background reading. In this case, much of the historical background comes from the writings of early travelers — by camel and by car — during the opening third of the twentieth century. These books include The Lost Oases by the suave Ahmed Hassanein Bey, Libyan Sands by Ralph “On-On-Baggers” Bagnold and the recent The Hunt for Zerzura by Saul Kelly. In these travelogues I have been able to turn up a better picture of the contemporary fauna of these areas and put at least a little flesh on the scientific literature’s skeletal form.

The search did not start out promisingly. Take this entry from one of Bagnold’s expeditions: “This part of the country is such a sterile wilderness that any life besides our own was unexpected. South of the Ammonite Scarp [towards the Gilf Kebir] not even a bird was to be seen. No vegetation, dead or alive, had been seen for the last 220 miles.”

This is not encouraging prose for a naturalist. But just a little further on: “Yet life there was. At our next camp [] a colony of jerboa kept us awake by hopping over our faces at night, and investigating the contents of our cooking pots. What do they live on? Surelynothing but sand!” These would be Lesser Egyptian Jerboas described in last month’s column — the original “Desert Rats.”

Most poignant is the Zerzura in the title of Kelly’s book. After Hassanein Bey had discovered the lost oases Arkenu and Uweinat, a small band of explorers including Bagnold and the caddish Count Ladislaus Almasy were keen to locate a third oasis, almost lost in the sands of time, let alone the sands of desert. This was Zerzura.

My interest lies in the name itself, for, as Bagnold states, it “is generally agreed that [it] is most probably derived from zarzar, the Arabic name for a starling or sparrow: so that Zerzura means ‘the place of the little birds’.” Now that sounds promising!

The vegetated wadi of Zerzura is now accepted to run roughly north-south in the northern Gilf Kebir. Kelly records Almasy visiting the area and finding an unknown species of bird. Employing the scientific methodology of the day, Almasy “promptly shot one of these swallow-like birds, with black and white feathers, which fitted into the palm of his hand.” In such remote country, the bird may have been one of the black and white wheatears such as the White-crowned Black Wheatear or the Hooded Wheatear perhaps. Or, as it was early May, it could well have been a migratory House Marten, a 14-centimeter relative of the swallow, with fork tailed, glossy blue-black upperparts and gleaming white rumps and underparts. Another possibility is the Desert Sparrow. This species is similar to the familiar House Sparrow but much paler in both sexes, the male pale grey rather than brown above, with a black face and throat. In Egypt it has only been recorded in the Gabal Uweinat region.

Migratory birds constitute a major, if not the only, part of the diet of some of the snakes of the extreme desert. I can remember camping once in a wadi behind Abu Ghalum in South Sinai. We had set up camp in the shade of an old acacia, when, in a moment of idleness, I scanned the tangle of angular, spiny branches just above my head. Amongst this sharp-sided chaos was slung an elegant arc that proved to be a Saharan Sand Snake, one of the Psammophis genus. It is a slender snake, generally very uniform and pale in color, with a band running from the snout tip through and behind the eye and reaching up to 150 centimeters long. We captured it, photographed it, sketched it and then returned it back to its branch (sand snakes are harmless). My companion — who, as luck would have it, was a herpetologist — told me of populations of this species in the Western Desert that rely entirely on migratory birds for food, eating at most twice a year. It scarcely seemed credible and yet, on another of Bagnold’s expeditions, “they came across a rock [] under it was a snake engaged in swallowing a small bird, and under it also we found the whole equipment of some unfortunate man.”

Clearly it is not just migratory birds that need to beware the desert.

Without doubt, the largest and most spectacular denizen of Gilf Kebir is, or perhaps was, the Barbary Sheep or Aoudad. Males are much larger than females, weighing up to 140 kilograms and standing one meter at the shoulder. They have large horns that curve out and back reaching nearly 90 centimeters in length. The pelt is orange-brown, deeper on the legs and — in the males especially — there is a thick mane of longer hair from the throat down the underside of the neck. Once found everywhere across North Africa, they have been decimated by hunting.

References to it are found in the traveler’s notes, though generally as tracks and trails, rather than the animal itself. In one instance related by Kelly, Almasy and his “explorers found the trees still green, signs of a Tibu encampment [and] fresh tracks of the rare Barbary Sheep.” In another anecdote, Penderel and Clayton, two of Bagnold’s party, come across a “large wadi containing many trees and the skeletons of some mountain sheep.” It is unclear whether the Barbary Sheep still survives in these areas, though the photograph of a desiccated corpse appeared in the local press last November [Al-Ahram Weekly, Nov 1-8 2007].

While I will find ample reward in the tracks of an Aoudad, one other species will certainly elude me — it was near mythical in Bagnold’s day, when he wrote the following: “Then something white, like a Bedouin garment, showed up far away through the shimmer of the sand. We gave chase, and finally overhauled, not a man but an Addax antelope, the most timid of all animals and one of the rarest of game [and the origin of the unicorn myth].” The Addax, a spectacular corkscrew-horned antelope, is today almost extinct in the wild. Perhaps a few still cling on in Chad or Niger, though war in the former makes that now unlikely. Gilf Kebir is indeed one of the earth’s most remote and barren destinations, but sadly for the Addax even it was just not remote enough. et