Due west of Zeitoun there is a string of “sebukha”—salt marshes—which lie at the foot of a line of cliffs, a continuation of the mountains that surround Siwa on the north. In this country, which is rarely crossed, one finds little plantations of gum trees that remind one of the Sudan, and also patches of camel thorn bushes. I have not seen these growing in any other part of the Western Desert. Possibly they may have grown from seeds dropped by caravans passing up from the Sudan. There is no fresh water in this area, but the country is very full of gazelle. South-west of Siwa there are two other uninhabited oases, El Areg and Bahrein—the two lakes. El Areg is a very surprising place. Riding along the flat rocky stretch of country on the east of the Pacho mountains, named after a European explorer who visited Siwa in the early nineteenth century, one arrives suddenly on the brink of a precipice which is the top of the cliffs that surround the oasis. There are two steep, difficult paths leading down between enormously high white rocks with bunches of straggling, overgrown palm trees at their foot. Much of the oasis is a salt marsh, but at one end there is a mass of bushes and tall palm trees, with two springs of drinkable water among them. The cliffs are very high indeed, and their whiteness makes them look strange at night. In places there are stretches of fossilized sea-shells, and I especially noticed sea-urchins and starfish. In a kind of bay in the cliff, between two enormous high rocks, there is a natural terrace, and in the centre of the terrace there are remains of a building; in the surrounding cliffs, sometimes so high up on the face that one wonders how and why they were made, there are the square entrances of rock tombs or dwellings. Some of them are quite large, but in all cases very low. All the lower ones are full of skulls and human skeletons, but many are so covered with sand-drifts that I could not get inside. The oasis is full of gazelle, which feed on the luscious vegetation round the marshes. At Bahrein there are two long, brilliantly blue salt lakes, fringed with a tangled mass of vegetation and palm trees, surrounded by yellow sand-dunes. Bahrein always reminded me of “A tideless, dolorous, midland sea; In a land of summer, and sand, and gold.”