Aswan was our port of exit from civ- 

 ilization. The High Dam Project had 

 transformed this once sleepy village into 

 a bustling town, and on the architects' 

 drawing boards it was already a city 

 with a university. Behind the new ave- 

 nue and modern buildings along the 

 river, the heart of Aswan remained — 

 narrow, dirty streets lined with tiny shops 

 jammed one upon the other where piles 

 of cheap trinkets, cooking ware, fruits, 

 vegetables, sweets and bolts of brightly 

 colored cloth collected dust and flies. 

 Crowds of Nubians and fellahin in flow- 

 ing galibeyas, dapper engineers, grimy 

 laborers and sturdy Russians pushed 

 their way past honking trucks and taxis, 

 donkeys, carts, and wagons. We joined 

 the shoppers and bought food, tea and 

 sugar for our expedition. 



During the hours that it took to pur- 

 chase supplies and obtain desert passes, 

 the men who stayed to guard the vehi- 

 cles were treated to glasses of tea and 

 "informed" by friendly passers-by about 

 VVadi AUaqi. Our men were told it 

 was a verdant valley full of gazelles, 

 wild sheep, ostriches, ibexes, jackals, 

 oryxes, and wild asses. A geodetic sur- 

 vey party, it was rumored, had killed 

 up to 12 hyenas near the mouth of Wad i 

 Allaqi. Another less encouraging story 

 from the townspeople, many of whom 

 fear the desert, was that Wadi Allaqi 

 was full of dangerous animals and thieves 

 who waited beside wells and water holes 

 to pounce on unsuspecting travelers. A 

 soldier told of a French expedition that 

 had gone into Wadi Allaqi a few months 

 before and had not been heard from. 

 I surmised that that expedition, if there 

 were one, had been en route to Sudan. 

 But strangely enough, we were never 

 told about the legendary good spirit 

 who presided over Wadi Allaqi and to 

 whonl the desert Arabs ceremoniously 

 sprinkled an offering of dhurra (sorghum) 

 on the ground upon entering the wadi. 



After obtaining a guide named Ab- 

 dullah Ali Hamid, who claimed to know 

 the most direct route into Wadi Allaqi 

 and the location of a dependable source 

 of good water, we were ready and eager 

 to enter the desert. Before the sun rose 

 on March 1, we were moving along in 

 the deep dust of a truck road east of the 

 Aswan-High Dam Highway. Here and 

 there were open areas between the low 

 hills of granite where waste from the 

 dam project had been dumped — acres 

 of trucks, machinery, tires, scrap metal 

 and wood. 



As the sjieedometer indicated 1 05 miles 

 from Aswan, we coasted down a soft 

 slope into Wadi Allaqi. There was no 

 green grass to satisfy our expectations; 

 only the desiccated stubs of senna bushes, 

 long dead. I recalled the record that 

 the last great flood to reach the Nile 

 flowed past here in 1 830. As we looked 

 across this broad, desolate streambed 

 and scanned the low cliffs on the far 

 side, a grayish haze moved over and 

 beyond us. Thus warned of an ap- 

 proaching sand storm, we proceeded 

 immediately on up the wadi. South- 



The route of the expedition. 

 Asthe waters of Lake Nasser 

 slowly back up behind the 

 High Dam at Aswan, much 

 of this country will be in- 

 undated. In years to come, 

 Wadi Allaqi will be flooded 

 as far back as Umm Qa- 

 reiyat. 



Beyond this lay about 30 miles of 

 open desert, and then we followed a 

 narrow pass that wound for 12 miles 

 through precipitous mountains of gneiss. 

 Beyond the pass our route was south- 

 ward through a type of landscape we 

 had not seen before, the Nubian Des- 

 ert — broad sandy plains and clusters of 

 steep pyramidal and flat-topped hills 

 of reddish sandstone. Once the cry of 

 "dubbah" rang out, and we stopped to 

 examine the huge dog-lLke tracks of a 

 hyena that zig-zagged over the sand. 



eastward for the next 20 miles we raced 

 over hard gravel terraces and plowed 

 through wide, shallow channels of soft 

 sand and silt. After a few miles, sculp- 

 tured sandstones had been replaced by 

 round, dark hills of granite and schist. 

 Patches of annual plants grew here and 

 there where months before local showers 

 had wetted the mud flows. There were 

 eight or ten acacia trees in this grim, 20- 

 mile piece of Wadi Allaqi. 



Abdullah bade us stop beside a pile 

 of stones on a gravel delta that emerged 



MARCH Pages 



