About 20 miles east of Siwa town, at one end of a long salt lake, there is a village called Zeitoun, and close by it a cluster of rich gardens which are the finest and best cared-for in the oasis, famous for the olives which give the place its name. In the whole of Siwa there are about 40,000 fruit-bearing olive trees, and a large quantity of olive oil is manufactured locally. Rough wooden olive presses are used by the natives, which are so primitive that a large proportion of the oil is wasted. The oil is of an excellent quality and is very profitable when exported, but owing to the difficulty of obtaining suitable tins and vessels to store it in only a small amount is sent up to the coast. It is bought by the Greeks at Matruh and Sollum, who dilute it and sell it at an enormous profit to the Arabs. Along the shores of the lake there are several other groups of gardens, and at one of them the ex-Khedive proposed to start a model farm, but as usual he got no further in his scheme than erecting some huts for the labourers to live in. He also did a certain amount of excavating in this neighbourhood, and according to hearsay he carried away camel-loads of “antikas” which he dug up among some ruins at a place called Kareished. Some of the gardens slope right down to the shores of the lake, and there are several fine springs among them. I often thought that Kareished would be quite a pleasant place to live in if one built a good house and had a boat to cross the lake to Siwa. The people in these outlying villages ride into Siwa town every few days to do their shopping, across a long causeway which divides the lake and the mud swamp.