INTRODUCTION 



By Sib Haery Johnston 



THE OASES OF KUFAKA 



Very nearly midway between the great mountains of 

 Tibesti (which rise to over eleven thousand feet in height) ; 

 the plateaus of Fazan; the mountainous 'island' of the 

 Cyrenaica; the oases of Western Egypt, and of Dongola; 

 lies the still mysterious region of Kufara, visited and 

 described by Mrs. Rosita Forbes, the author of this book. 



She has been seemingly the second explorer of Euro- 

 pean birth to accomplish this feat ; for although the Kufara 

 district was first placed on the map with no great in- 

 correctness of location by Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs, after 

 his journey thither in 1878-9, he was — as Mrs. Forbes 

 shows — the only European of his party to reach these 

 oases, and his stay there was very short. 



Apparently he only revealed, only realised by sight 

 or information the salt lakes at Buseima and a rather 

 problematical 'Erbelma' (qy. Erbayana, Erbelna?) to 

 the south-west; and either he did not see, or he did not 

 record the more important sheets of salt or brackish water 

 in the comparatively large Kebabo oasis or collection of 

 oases. 



These lakes of Kebabo stand at an average elevation 

 of about fourteen hundred feet above sea level, an eleva- 

 tion which was di^aned or calculated hurriedly by F. G. 

 Rohlfs, but more accurately determined by Mrs. Forbes 

 and her Egyptian fellow-traveller, Hassanein Bey. By 

 these later figures the altitude above sea level of the 

 Kebabo Oases may prove to be slightly lower than in the 



