The Kufra, sometimes spelt “Kufara,” group of oases lie south-west of Siwa, but owing to its distance from all civilization Kufra was never of any importance historically or politically, though comparatively lately it has become a convenient retreat for some of the Senussi sheikhs. Quite a number of natives who had recently been in Kufra visited Siwa during the time that I was there, and when I questioned them, and various Siwans who knew Kufra well, they all described it as being very thinly populated, less fertile and very inferior to the Siwa oasis—from their point of view. When I discussed the possibilities of visiting it they were exceedingly surprised at the idea of anybody wishing to see Kufra, which they described as being “muskeen”—wretched—but at the same time they said that the people in Kufra would certainly not object to anybody going there, as it was in no way a sacred place like Jerabub used to be at one time. At Kufra there is no strange metropolis like that of Siwa, and as recently as 1854 an English traveller who visited Jalow and Augila stated that Kufra was practically uninhabited, except during a certain month of the year when natives from the other oases went there in order to gather the dates. There is a great fascination in travelling over unexplored desert; somehow I always had the feeling that perhaps beyond the rocky skyline, or perhaps over the next ridge of sand-hills, there might possibly appear the languidly swaying palm trees of some unknown oasis. Nobody has penetrated into the heart of this desert, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are oases, either inhabited like the lost land of Atlantis or like the mysterious desert cities that the story-tellers describe to their evening audience in the market-place, hidden away among those unmapped plains of the Sahara.