For a hundred miles we passed through broken hills, many of them swamped by sand. Driving conditions for the first twenty-five miles were not too bad. We soon found ourselves in a sea of sand, and at night we turned off the engine and ran to a standstill where it was clean and hard packed. The wind dropped. The stillness was complete. We slept.

We had been warned that over the area we were now about to tackle the quicksands were extensive. So we were up before dawn to make an early start before the intense heat loosened the texture of the sand.

 

The dry quicksands of the desert must not be confused with what we know of quicksands on a sea beach. The sand grains are infinitesimally small and cover the rocks to a great depth. At night in the cold they become more or less compact near the surface, but under the heat of the sun, as the grains expand, the surface becomes more fluffy and the resistance is reduced. Any object put on them will soon sink out of sight through their fine light grains. Ordinary car tyres are useless and rolls of wire netting are carried and laid in front of a car. It is a laborious way of progressing and the person who has to unroll the coil of wire sinks ankle-deep into the sand. In this part of the desert one finds many wrecks of abandoned cars.

The terrific heat adds to the discomfort of scraping sand away from sunken wheels, and bleeding finger-nails are worn down to the quicks by the sharp sand. If on top of all this you have engine trouble or the car is capsized, which is very easy, the traveler is in a desperate plight.

We had been warned! So I breathed a prayer and drove faster, determined to stop for nothing. At first we glided over smooth flat stretches of fairly hard sand, always heading south. Though it was impossible to steer, the lightest touch on the wheel was sufficient to keep a general direction; if one attempted to do more, the car skidded dangerously. Fifty miles an hour was the best speed for this part.

Suddenly, without warning, we plunged into the quicksands and I had to grip the wheel and apply skidding tactics. After traveling at full speed on hard sand and then suddenly striking soft, the wheels turn suddenly, with the result that the car may somersault. Tyres will burst too, and that may be the end of man and machine. Luck was on our side and I gripped the wheel in time and made ever widening curves, watching intently to diagnose the surface ahead so as to avoid calamity.

It was in the middle of this dangerous stretch that we sighted a solitary tree in the distance. It was incredible! Apart from the oasis we had not seen a tree for four hundred miles. I drove straight towards it over the quicksands, while our botanist filmed it through the windscreen. We dared not stop to identify it. It was a thorn of sorts; when the film was developed we found we had a perfect record. How that tree got there and how it survives will never be known. The chances are one in a million that anyone will come upon it again.

The capacity and performance of our engine and its remarkable staying power enabled us to keep going at high speed in grueling temperature without overheating the radiator, and with little loss of water; not once did we have to replenish it on the whole of this stretch. We left the quicksands behind us, which we must have passed in record time, a tribute to our engine, our tyres and our good fortune.

At last we came to the isolated oasis of In Guezzam. Huge tamarisks shelter the shallow well of precious water. The rest-house keeper lives by this well and travelers have no choice but to pay the price he asks, sometimes half as much as petrol, which at this place is eighteen shillings a gallon! We found it expedient to make friends with him and we each had a bath in a basin, which cost us nothing though our money vanished when we filled our petrol tank.

We had another dawn start and made a line for ourselves across firm soft sand in a wide flat plain, until scattered tufts of grass gave place to a more varied vegetation. Herds of wild camel were grazing, sometimes we surprised a delicate gazelle, and there were birds too of various kinds. How quickly this land had deteriorated; what a contrast to the description of it by Barth, in his Travels, where he tells us that Air has tropical vegetation, that there are fertile valleys with good water, that ostriches, lions, giraffes and birds were seen by him and that near Agades he saw monkeys and butterflies.

Jean, in Les Touareg du Sud-Est d’Air, tells how in 1909 he saw lions, foxes, hyenas, cats, antelopes and monkeys, but that giraffes did not exist any longer in this country and that the ostrich was not found north of Damergu.

During the afternoon we looked with surprise and astonishment at a golden haze that covered the desert. Stretches of grass that had followed the rain had grown to their full height and had gone to seed within three weeks; they had become the colour of corn and the seed had long golden yellow beards. It was as extraordinary sight. After some miles of traveling over this golden plain we came upon huge patches of Brassica, a cabbage-like plant with grey-green leaves. But still, for the main part, we traveled over hard parched sand.

It was in this region we saw a great caravan crossing our front from west to east. We counted four hundred camels and brought them into our film. This was the largest number we saw on the march. We should have liked to know what they were carrying but prudence prevented us from attempting to communicate with them. One cannot hold up the progress of a great moving caravan and curiosity in the desert can be given short shrift.

Towards the evening we suddenly came upon a great solid trunk of a fallen tree, much larger than any we had seen for a thousand miles. We switched off the engine and let the car run to a standstill on the sand, as one doesn’t brake for fear of digging in. This tree was still over a hundred miles from the nearest forest. It was of great significance to find it here, particularly as it was in a state of perfect preservation. It could not have been there so very many years, possibly fifty or sixty, but much more likely to be less. The importance of this find lay in the suggestion that the forest had receded from this point within the century. Here was another link in our chain of evidence.