Gilf Kebir has kept its secrets well. The vast sandstone massif lies in the southwestern corner of Egypt’s Western Desert, separated from the nearest pockets of population in the Western oases by the vastness of the Great Sand Sea, and from the Nile Valley by 500 kilometers of austerity known as the Selima Sand Sheet. Remote, uninhabited, virtually rainless, at times searingly hot, at others freezing cold, the Gilf was named and mapped only as recently as 1926 by Prince Kamal El-Din, one of the sons of King Fuad.

In the pre-war years the Gilf was explored by a colorful and travel-hardened collection of characters; members of the Zerzura Club seeking the lost, perhaps mythical, oasis of Zerzura in this most barren of landscapes. When war broke out, skills honed by these explorers were turned to desert warfare as this remote region became a theater for daring Allied attacks on Italian and German bases and patrols.

The Gilf might have remained unknown to all bar the most adventurous archeologists and a few students of those early expeditions but for an extraordinary book. In 1992, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, was published to great acclaim, winning that year’s prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. It is a lyrical novel woven around the intertwining lives of four characters, set in rural Italy at the end of the Second World War, where the patient of the title is nursed after terrible injuries in England and in Egypt. Fact and fiction merge as the characters’ pasts are unwound. The book caught the attention of writer and director Anthony Minghella, who wrote, “Brilliant images are scattered across its pages in a mosaic of fractured narratives, as if somebody had already seen a film and was in a hurry to remember all the best bits.” Minghella wrote the screenplay and in 1997 the film The English Patient swept the Oscars, winning nine Academy Awards. The Gilf Kebir had found a worldwide audience and the Cave of the Swimmers joined the Pyramids, Sphinx et al as a treasure of Ancient Egypt.

Of course, the Cave of the Swimmers in the film was not the real cave. All the desert scenes were filmed in Tunisia as, reportedly, the Egyptian authorities demanded too much money. But the real cave exists in the Gilf Kebir and today a whole new generation of desert travelers is enduring the rigors of desert trekking to visit it and the other extraordinary sights in this spectacular corner of the country.

These new travelers may not be in the league of the earlier explorers, but it is still not a journey for the faint-hearted. It requires a minimum of 10 days, 15 to 24 if you carry on to Gebel Uweinat. Expeditions must be entirely self-supporting, taking all fuel, food, water and spares into the desert. An experienced guide is a must. And there is the bureaucracy. Permits are required, and a police officer will accompany the expedition.

Richard Hoath Animals no longer found in Egypt hint to a wetter past for what now is desert.

Given the complexity of the arrangements, by far the best way is to organize a trip through a reliable agency, which is just what I did this January with a group of three friends. We had two vehicles, a guide, driver and excellent cook Mahmoud, his number two, Mohammed, and our officer, Saad. After a night in Bahariyya we headed southwest to Farafra and then on to the oasis of Abu Minquar. It was at Abu Minquar that we left the tarmac and headed across the desert.

Our first camp set the rhythm for the trip. Mahmoud and his team had the routine down like clockwork, and we soon realized that to interfere in what we might think of as ‘helping’ would put a massive spanner in the smoothly oiled works. While we battled ineptly with our tents, the crew would have erected in minutes a diwan using tentmakers’ cloths, complete with rugs to cover the sand floor. Tables and chairs and cups of hot tea materialized almost instantly.

While we wrote up notes, went over the maps and the small library of early explorers’ works we had brought, Mahmoud and Mohammed would be putting together a meal that always far exceeded our expectations, even by the end of the trip. Every night there was a different soup, then a substantial main course, a casserole or grilled chicken of fettah and then fruit and tea. Finally we would take ourselves outside, often sitting by the fire, to mull over the day with stronger refreshment. There I would captivate my colleagues with gripping tales of my earlier exploits.

At night it was bitterly cold, but we had been warned and were prepared, sitting around smothered in multiple layers of shirts and sweaters and draped in camel hair blankets. That first night the sky was cloudy and the moon not quite full, but with a corona, a halo of light, around it. On other nights the sky was velvet black and clear with a myriad of stars, and we would vainly try to make sense of the astronomical charts we had brought along.

Each morning after breakfast, breaking camp was completed with similar efficiency by the crew. Everything had its own specific place on the vehicles. Washing was somewhat perfunctory with ‘wet ones’ rather than water — though one of our crew did manage quite elaborate ablutions from such spartan supplies. Most of our rubbish was burnt and buried, though I was unhappy that the organic detritus was just left. The foxes would eat it, was the explanation. We never saw a fox, though did find the tracks of a Fennec at one point.

Richard Hoath The region of Gilf Kebir showcases some of the most extreme conditions found anywhere in the world.

Most of the days were spent in the car. With the vast distances traveled this is inevitable, though there was always a stop for lunch or at an interesting site or feature. Our first such stop was at Regenfeld, named by the nineteenth-century German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs. Legend has it that in 1874, Rohlfs was attempting to cross the Great Sand Sea and reach Kufra to the west. Miscalculating, he found his camel train desperately short of water and many days away from the nearest oasis, Dakhla. Miraculously there was a downpour of rain that enabled Rohlfs to replenish his supplies and reach safety. He built a cairn to commemorate his deliverance and it remains there to this day, added to by new travelers and with an empty bottle of Balvenie Single Malt whiskey filled with notes and messages from previous visitors. Rohlf’s original bottle has long since disappeared but the tradition lives on.

At Regenfeld the weather was dull and grey, overcast. As we set off, heading almost due south, we had our own little miracle. It began to rain. We had come prepared for everything from heat by day to freezing nights but the one thing that we had not anticipated was rain. And it was not an isolated shower. For the rest of the day and all the following night it rained on and off, sometimes heavily. Mahmoud had been taking expeditions to the Gilf and Uweinat since 1996 and he had never seen rain. That night we could not put up the tents but used the tent cloths slung between the two vehicles as a shelter, stashing our bags beneath the cars. We all slept in this Heath Robinson shelter that night, cheek by jowl. Only travel to the Gilf with very good friends!

Before going on the trip we had attended a timely lecture at the American Research Center in Egypt on the pre-history of the Western Desert. Given by Dr. Rudolph Kuper, a veteran of many digs in the region, it covered the plethora of Neolithic and pre-Dynastic sites so far uncovered. One of the sites he mentioned was Abu Ballas, an isolated hill to the south of the Great Sand Sea where vast numbers of giant clay pots had been discovered. We were shown two slides, one of Abu Ballas when it was first re-discovered in the 1920s, piled high with pots all along the base of the hill and one from the 1980s, where many have been taken as souvenirs or destroyed. When we visited Abu Ballas, there were even fewer and the ones that were still there were almost all in pieces. As the desert opens up, sites such as Abu Ballas are being lost before they can be properly studied.

Nowhere is this truer than with the rock art. Having arrived at the eastern side of the Gilf Kebir on the third day of the trip, we camped and then headed via Wadi Mashi towards the one breach in the massif; a narrow pass by which vehicles can cross the Gilf. This is Al Aqaba, “the Difficult,” a narrow, sand-floored wadi that runs down from the plateau to the plains below. Discovered by the Hungarian adventurer Count Almasy in 1931, the wadi was supposedly mined during the Second World War though this may have been a bluff. It is used without incident today. Once on the plains, the sheer cliffs of the western escarpment of the Gilf form a rock curtain made all the more dramatic by the absolute evenness of the scarp’s top.

Richard Hoath Rock paintings such as the famous swimmers provide a glimpse of a time now lost to memory.

A few kilometers west is an isolated gebel known as English Mountain, at the base of which is English Camp. This was one of the bases used by Ralph Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War. From here the patrols would operate raids deep into enemy territory aiming to cause as much disruption and damage as possible. Preserved by the dryness of the desert, the remains of the camp can still be seen, piles of blackened jerry cans, some still bearing the Shell emblem, opened cans of meat and biscuits, even an old car battery and tire. One becomes very conscious that this was once a theater of war.

But the main target of this leg of the trip was Wadi Sura and the caves discovered by Zerzura Club member Pat Clayton or Almasy — there are conflicting claims. Wadi Sura is site of the now famous Cave of the Swimmers and comes as something of a surprise. Readers of the novel, or viewers of the movie might expect, well, a cave. The Cave of the Swimmers is more of a hemispherical alcove than a cave and sadly now in poor repair. Kuper had explained that the first discoverers of the cave had sprinkled the rock paintings with water to bring out the colors. Today many are chipped and damaged, but the famous swimmers can still be made out, though one wonders for how much longer.

Any disappointment did not last long though. To the north of Wadi Sura, some 40 kilometers away, we camped at the base of the escarpment for two nights. The following morning we got up and after a short walk and a scramble up a talus slope we reached the Foggini-Mestikawi Cave. Like with the Cave of the Swimmers, it is more a recessed cliff wall than a cave, but covering the wall are hundreds upon hundreds of rock paintings in black and white and terracotta and yellow — and all are beautifully preserved.

Among the representations of humans in various different styles, there are repeated depictions of animals that tell of a milder, wetter climate. These are animals of the savannah, not of the desert. There are giraffes, some painted in full flight, others bizarrely trampling on humans, one seemingly eating someone. There are lions, often headless and decorated, and ostriches, as well as cattle, piebald or brown and white; clearly domestic. What is now hyper-arid and deserted was once equable and populated. Indeed, it may well be that the Nile Valley was populated from what is now the Western Desert as the climate warmed up, forcing the tribes to greener pastures as the desert spread.

The sand accumulated at the foot of the rock face was scribbled with the tracks and trails of gerbils and jerboas — a rare sign of the current desert inhabitants.

The major wadi running roughly north-south through the northern Gilf Kebir is Wadi Abd el-Malik. First explored by Clayton in 1933, the southern reaches of the wadi reportedly support acacias and other vegetation. Mahmoud confirmed this, saying he had seen Dorcas Gazelles there and even Barbary Sheep or waddan, now extremely rare.

We could not access this section of the wadi from Foggini-Mestikawi. Instead we headed due north, parallel to the Libyan border, using smugglers trails. This was barren country indeed. It was not until the end of the day, near our campsite off the northern section of Wadi Abd el-Malik, that we saw our first and only tree. When you haven’t seen one for days it’s amazing how exciting a tree can become.

We had now circumnavigated the northern section of the Gilf Kebir. Our last night before the traverse was spent in the Silica Glass Area. In this region of desert a curious, greenish opalescent stone is found in the sand. Its mystery is its origin. Some theorise it was formed from volcanic activity. Others claim it was fused during a meteorite impact. No one knows.

What lay ahead of us was serious dune bashing as we set out to recross the Great Sand Sea back towards Abu Minquar. The seif dunes — longitudinal dunes that run roughly north-south — can be tens of kilometers long and rather than driven around, have to be crossed. This was where Mahmoud really earned his money. It is not for the faint-hearted. It takes a special skill to find a potential breach in the dune and consummate driving skill to charge to the crest of the dune and then tip down the slip face. It is grueling for both drivers and cars and we had a major gearbox malfunction long before completing our crossing, fixed courtesy of a customized section of wooden tomato crate.

Thus we limped back into Abu Minqar. After a last night under canvas with the oasis in our sights we hit metalled roads once more. What I came away with, apart from feeling completely refreshed and rejuvenated, was an immense respect for the pioneers who first explored these regions. Rohlfs and Hassanein Bey had done it on foot with camel trains. At our first camp at the base of a seif dune we, all reasonably fit and able chaps, had climbed the dune. The loose sand is energy sapping, slipping back one step for every two steps made forward. To progress like that over hundreds of uncharted kilometers is mind-boggling. Bagnold, Clayton, Almasy and the others of the Zerzura Club used cars, but not the luxurious SUVs we sink back into nowadays. And in the Second World War they had the little matter of the enemy to contend with. Reading their reports and journals around the camp fire at night was humbling.

The Gilf is a special place. But it is also a very fragile place. Scholars and researchers such as Kuper are worried by the potential impact the new wave of desert travelers will have. It is incumbent upon all of us who visit to leave it just as we find it, to keep our impact to an absolute minimum. But the allure of this desolate terrain is inescapable. Perhaps Hassanein Bey put it best in his book The Lost Oases, “The desert is terrible and it is merciless, but to the desert all those who once have known it must return.” et