One man, Bashu Habun, son of the old sheikh who was hanged, caused more legal work than the whole of the rest of the population together. He spent his time appropriating the property of one of his brothers who was in prison. The brother had an agent in Siwa, a foolish old sheikh called Soud, who was too honest, or stupid, to withstand the sly cleverness of Bashu Habun. At one time there were seven cases between them, involving many hundreds of pounds. I settled the first three, but found that the latter dealt with inheritance, and so were beyond my jurisdiction, but I got heartily sick of the sharp, foxy face of Bashu Habun and the noisy, foolish obstinacy of old Sheikh Soud. Both of them tried to secure my support by sending donkey-loads of fruit to my house before the cases were tried, and on one occasion the servants met both bringing presents, and returned together with their offerings to the town. The idea of “baksheesh” is so firmly planted in the native mind that it takes a long while to die out. Still, one finds that the natives really appreciate and prefer an impartial administration of justice, in place of justice—of sorts—which depends on which of the two parties can offer the highest bribe to the judge. The Senussi were by no means above this method, but they let political considerations weigh equally with “baksheesh” on their scale of justice. In the days when a Turkish governor ruled in Siwa he made his money by accepting and extorting bribes, and if, when British Administration retires from Egypt, the oasis is ruled again by a native mamur, the same system will possibly flourish. [Illustration: IN THE WESTERN QUARTER] CHAPTER V SUBURBAN OASES “. . . tufted isles That verdant rise amid the Libyan wild.” SIWA itself is the largest, richest and most important oasis in a little group of oases which are mostly uninhabited. Similar oases, such as the Kufra group and the Augila group, are scattered at intervals, few and very far between, over the vast arid surface of the great Sahara desert. In most of them there are fresh-water springs surrounded by small patches of green, which have an appearance of almost magical beauty to those who arrive at them, weary after days of travel over the hot and barren solitudes of the desert. Ancient poets compared the yellow desert to a leopard’s tawny skin, spotted with occasional oases. Doubtless when Siwa was more thickly populated than it is to-day each of the outlying ones was inhabited, but now the ever-shrinking population is insufficient even to cultivate all the gardens in the immediate vicinity of Siwa itself.