With the bedouin women it is different. During the war, especially at the close of the Senussi operations, there was great destitution among the Arabs. Numbers of men who had served with the Senussi were killed, and many others retired over the frontier and never returned. Their wives and children were left unprovided for. As usual the English, against whom they had been fighting, turned and helped these refugees. Miss Baird, the daughter of the late Sir Alexander Baird, collected a number of these women and their children at Amria, in the desert west of Alexandria, and in conjunction with the F.D.A. started a carpet-making industry. She lived amongst them herself, superintended the work, and by degrees she acquired a wonderful influence over them. She became somewhat like Lady Hester Stanhope in the Lebanon, only her influence was not due to religious superstition. I once stopped at Amria on my way from Cairo to Sollum by camel in the early days of the industry, and I shall never forget my first impression of the four or five hundred wild bedouin women working away at the carpets like girls in a factory at home, absolutely controlled by one young Englishwoman right out in the desert. Miss Baird’s death in 1919 was a very great loss, but the work that she began is still being carried on by the F.D.A., who have moved the factory from Amria and installed it in an imposing building at Behig, which is the headquarters of the Eastern District of the Western Desert. One of the things that is noticeable at Siwa is the absence of flowers. Owing to there being no rain there is no sudden burst of vegetation in the spring, as there is along the coast. At certain times there is blossom in the gardens on the various trees—apples, almonds, pomegranates, lemons, etc.—and for a month or two there are roses and a very heavily scented flowering shrub called “tamar-el-hindi.” But one does not see the riot of colour that follows on the track of the rains. There are very few wild animals, too. In the neighbouring oases one sees gazelle and a few foxes, and in Siwa itself there are quantities of jackals. According to the natives an animal which they call “Bakhr wahash”—wild ox—is to be found at a place called Gagub, an uninhabited oasis, consisting of a salt lake surrounded by sterile palm trees, between Siwa and Jerabub. But when I went there I saw no signs of the creature. It is described as being the size of a donkey, of a yellowish brown colour, with two horns like a cow’s.