CHAPTER V 



TRIUMPHANT ARRIVAL AT JALO 



WE crossed the wadi at 12.30, our faces stinging 

 and burning in the cruel wind. The air was full 

 of sand and the heat was excessive. The body 

 of the long winding oasis is composed merely of palm 

 gardens, each with its separate well or wells, known as 

 Sawani, but the village of Aujela lies in the farthest 

 western curl. In Sawani there are only a few broken- 

 down buildings with crumbling walls, where perhaps a 

 tattered blue tobh shows for an instant beside huge 

 feathery foliaged trees with coarse-grained bark, some- 

 thing between a spruce and a mimosa, but, of course, 

 nameless. 



For three hours we plodded south-west along the line 

 of Sawani's palms. An ancient square tower appeared 

 on a sand-hill to our left — ^the morabit of Sidi Saleh — 

 but we left it behind us before the top of another long 

 swelling rise brought the longed-for Aujela into view. 

 The sun was blurred behind the flying sand, but we gazed 

 eagerly at the mass of palms broken only by the low white 

 dunes which stretched south for nearly a mile. At the 

 farther end lay the clustered mud houses, all heaped 

 together under the shadow of the palms, with here and 

 there a square of small clay cupolas on the roof of a 

 mosque. It was very different from the isolated houses 

 of Jedabia, widely scattered over a white sandstone 

 plain. Aujela gives a first impression of a ruined town, 

 because of its small roofless mud courts, its irregular 



